64-Year-Old Trader Gains 9,100% as Pons Sparks Robinhood Chain Launchpad Battle

Robinhood Chain is witnessing a launchpad platform battle, with a 64-year-old trader scoring nearly 9,100% gains on PONS. Pons, LONG, and Pools each have their own mechanism plays, while Uniswap competes and invests in rivals at the same time. Gas subsidies expire at the end of September, and whether meme momentum can continue will determine the industry's next direction.

On Sept. 3, crypto KOL Rune revealed that Bonk Guy, the top trader on social trading platform fomo's profit leaderboard, is 64 years old this year. According to positions shared by Bonk Guy, he bought PONS, the platform token of Robinhood Chain's token launchpad Pons, with only about $67,000, and his paper gains have approached 9,100%. Behind this position is a launchpad battle that has been unfolding on Robinhood Chain over the past period.

A 64-Year-Old Hunter

Three years ago, Bonk Guy (@theunipcs) went long on BONK with $16,000 in principal and 6x leverage, once achieving eight-figure unrealized gains, but was fully liquidated during last October's black swan event. This time, he reappeared at the top of the profit leaderboard, thanks to a batch of tokens on Robinhood Chain: PONS, USELESS, and Marscoin. His cumulative spot trading profits disclosed in late August exceeded $10 million, with over $5.7 million in profits in the past 30 days, and his account's total position value once surged to $15.74 million.

His 9,100% gain came from catching a self-reinforcing pricing mechanism on Robinhood Chain—PONS. How this mechanism operates determines how much he can earn and which direction this launchpad battle will head next.

Pons

Pons is operated by Pons Labs. Each new token on the platform has a fixed issuance of 1 billion tokens, with a creation cost of only 0.0005 ETH and a 1% trading fee, of which 70% goes to the token creator and 30% to the protocol. Of the protocol's share, 80% is used to buy back and burn PONS on the secondary market, while the remaining 20% is reserved for team operations. This design ties "the issuance and trading frequency of new tokens" to "PONS buyback and burn": the more new tokens are created and the more actively they are traded, the more fees are generated, and a portion of these fees is continuously converted into market buying pressure and burn volume for PONS, directly linking platform trading activity to PONS supply and demand.

With this mechanism, Pons captured the largest wave of traffic after the first-mover platform NOXA suspended token issuance in mid-July, and its market share has continued to expand since then: by early September, its token issuance volume accounted for about 66% of the entire chain, and trading volume generated by new tokens issued through Pons accounted for 78% of the chain's new token trading volume. On Sept. 3, Pons' single-day protocol fees exceeded Pump.fun, breaking $6 million, and its token PONS valuation hit a record high of about $970 million, with a weekly gain of over 200%. Currently, about 29% of the total supply has been bought back and burned. After Pons launched V2 in August, new tokens can also be paired for trading with stock tokens such as Nvidia, Apple, and Robinhood after completing the graduation phase.

LONG

If Pons' core is cash flow buybacks, LONG has bet on narrative from the start—bundling stock tokens and memes directly into a single product. LongX, launched in early September, packages Nvidia 3x leveraged positions into tokens and opens trading pairs with meme tokens. The highest market cap meme token on the LONG platform, Artificial Inu, is paired with the Nvidia stock token, with its market cap once touching over $200 million and its gains far exceeding Nvidia's spot stock price during the same period. Given that it combines leveraged stock positions with meme trading attributes, its price is clearly not simply following the underlying stock's fluctuations but is simultaneously influenced by the leverage mechanism and on-chain speculative sentiment. LONG has also designed a "community model": a portion of fees is automatically burned, and a portion is locked into the treasury, attempting to use the logic of capital accumulation to make stock-paired memes its differentiating label. Currently, on the LONG platform, besides Artificial Inu, meme coins paired with Costco, Micron, SpaceX, and other underlying assets have also reached tens of millions of dollars in market cap, competing for the second spot on the platform.

Pools

In early August, Uniswap Labs directly launched its launchpad on Robinhood Chain. On the day Pools went live, founder Hayden Adams publicly called high-fee launchpads on the market "predatory," implicitly referring to platforms like Pons with their 1% fee model. Pools took the opposite approach: trading fees are only 0.25%, creators can choose to take 0.05% of that, and the rest is automatically reinvested into permanently locked liquidity pools, with no additional launchpad fees. Tokens are integrated into Uniswap's web interface, wallet, routing API, and third-party integrations like MetaMask and Ledger upon launch, meaning a token is visible to the entire Uniswap ecosystem as soon as it is issued. On its first day, Pools leveraged official trust and distribution channels to capture 40-50% of the chain's token issuance and trading share, posing a real challenge to Pons' leading position. Pons relies on first-mover advantage and buyback mechanisms to build user stickiness, while Pools relies on the reputation of the DeFi team behind it and lower fees. The two approaches are still colliding head-on.

Besides these three, Robinhood Chain also hosts over a dozen other launchpads active in different niches, including PAIR, which focuses on stock basket pairing, CLUTCH, which focuses on community and NFTs, Pools fun, which collaborates with Sushi, and Hood Dev, which targets developers.

If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them?

In early August, Pools captured 40-50% of the chain's token issuance and trading share on its first day, coming in strong. But this advantage did not last: by early September, Pons had regained its share, with token issuance volume at about 66% and new token trading volume at about 78%. Pools' low fees and official distribution channels ultimately failed to truly shake Pons' leading position.

More interestingly, before the competition ended, Uniswap Labs' identity changed first.

On Sept. 4, Uniswap Labs announced it had bought PONS, without disclosing the specific amount or position ratio. After the announcement, PONS rose about 40% within hours.

On one hand, its own Pools is competing with Pons for the launchpad entry point on Robinhood Chain; on the other hand, Uniswap Labs has become an investor in PONS.

The market began interpreting this investment with a rather dramatic phrase: if you can't beat them, join them. However, what Uniswap Labs sees may not just be Pons as a competitor, but the complete flywheel of issuance, trading, fees, and platform token value capture that has formed on Robinhood Chain. Pools can continue to compete for the token issuance entry point, while PONS allows Uniswap Labs to simultaneously bet on the chain's most successful traffic aggregation point to date.

The Deadline Behind the Hype

The launchpad battle on Robinhood Chain is essentially a fight for traffic.

Pons uses fee buybacks to turn token issuance and trading volume into buying pressure for PONS; LONG bundles stock tokens and memes together, attempting to turn traditional asset price fluctuations into new speculative targets; Pools bets on low fees and Uniswap's distribution capabilities. The three mechanisms appear different, but they are currently competing for the same group of users.

Robinhood Chain's data already illustrates this: as of Aug. 10, about 92.9% of accounts had only interacted with meme coins, while accounts that had only used tokenized stocks accounted for only about 3.7%. Robinhood Chain aims to build on-chain finance, but what took off first is still a meme craze.

This is also the real risk for platform tokens like Pons and LONG. Their rise today is not just investors betting that a particular launchpad will win, but betting that meme trading on Robinhood Chain can continue to grow. The more tokens are issued and the more frequently they are traded, the stronger Pons' fee buybacks become; the more meme capital enters stock-paired trading, the larger LONG's narrative space becomes.

The problem is that these flywheels are currently built on the same premise: on-chain speculative heat cannot stop.

Robinhood's 90-day gas subsidies for some wallets will expire at the end of September. After the subsidies are removed, how much of today's DEX trading volume, which has surged to over a billion dollars, will remain? Will fee income for launchpads that rely on meme traffic growth quickly fall back? Will users who entered Robinhood Chain due to wealth effects from Pons, LONG, and others actually stay to use financial products such as lending and stock tokens?

This is the real watershed moment for this launchpad battle.

If meme heat fades and traffic leaves with it, then what Pons, LONG, Pools, and others are fighting for today is merely who can grab more chips in a foolish round of speculative cycles. But if these platforms can truly retain meme users and gradually guide them toward lending, stock tokens, and other on-chain financial services, then what is being contested now is not the rise and fall of a platform token, but control of the next financial entry point on Robinhood Chain.

*This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets are risky; invest with caution.