Pons launchpad outearns Pump.fun as Robinhood Chain gas waiver ends
Pump.fun (PUMP)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
bitcoinethereumnews.com reports that Pons, the dominant token factory on Robinhood Chain, has beaten Pump.fun in daily fees every day since August 29. On August 31, Pons generated $4.89M in fees while Pump.fun did not come close, despite Solana’s near-zero gas costs. Pons is processing $4B in cumulative volume and launching over 10,000 tokens daily, driven by a fee structure that splits 70% to creators.
This model creates a flywheel where creators earn from trading activity, incentivizing them to launch more tokens. Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum Orbit L2, offered a 90-day gas waiver from July 1 until September 29, making transactions literally free. This zero-friction environment caused Pons volume to explode, with Robinhood Chain generating $4.01M in daily revenue on September 2 compared to Solana’s $78,000.
The PONS token rose from $0.078 on August 24 to $0.43 by September 1, a 18,000% increase since July. Uniswap Labs bought PONS tokens for long-term alignment and launched pools.trade on Robinhood Chain on August 5 with lower fees. The pools.trade launch signals direct competition, as Uniswap builds a competing product on the same chain. The PONS token has a market cap around $307M with 29% of supply burned, and daily trading volume regularly exceeds $100M.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for PUMP, measured when this story was written up on 5 September 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
PUMP is trading at $0.004242 with a 1-hour buy ratio of 55.4%, indicating short-term bullish sentiment. However, the 4-hour buy ratio is 47.9% and the 24-hour ratio is 47.7%, showing that buying pressure is fading over longer timeframes. The 1-hour volume delta is positive at +$81,124, but the 4-hour delta is -$100,603 and the 24-hour delta is -$1,698,914. This means that while there is immediate buying interest, net selling has dominated the last day. The CVD for the 24-hour close is -$153,534, confirming that sellers are in control over the day. Spot volume for the period is $36,129,633 with 253,511 trades executed.
The latest daily buy ratio of 47.7% sits at the 33rd percentile of the last 281 days, against a median of 49.1% - ordinary for this coin.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for PUMP, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, the 7-day average buy ratio was 50.7%, while the latest reading is 3.0 percentage points lower. This indicates that buying interest has weakened compared to the weekly norm. Volume was 1.22x the average, showing higher activity than usual despite the lower buy ratio. The price changed -8.4% over 8 days, with a total volume delta of +$2,368,088. This suggests that despite higher volume, the coin has lost value over the week, making this an unusual day with divergent volume and price action.