What Is pons | Robinhood Chain's Token Launchpad and Its Real Fees

pons is a web service where anyone can issue a token on Robinhood Chain and trade it immediately. It is operated by Pons Labs, LLC. There is no account signup or identity verification — connecting a wallet is all it takes.

On September 7, 2026 (UTC) alone, 27,479 tokens were issued and $626.14 million changed hands. But the 1.00% trading fee shown on the issuance screen is only the floor — the contract has room for each token to add its own markup on top.

There are three things you can do: buy a token someone else created, create your own token, or withdraw the fees your own token has accumulated. These map to the Explore, Create, and Profile screens, respectively.

| Item | Detail |

| --- | --- |

| Chain | Robinhood Chain (chainId 4663) |

| Category | Token issuance/trading interface (launchpad) |

| Operator | Pons Labs, LLC. Development is led by the pseudonymous Ozzy (X: @MEADGod) |

| Stage | Live (launched July 13, 2026; v2 since August 4, 2026) |

| Token | PONS (0x39dBED3a2bd333467115dE45665cC57F813C4571) |

| Requirements | ETH on Robinhood Chain and a wallet. Must be 18 or older |

| Funding | Unconfirmed (no funding record has been disclosed) |

Note: The figures in this article were verified by our editorial team via the official API and public RPC on September 8, 2026.

pons went live 12 days after the chain itself opened. We've covered how Robinhood Chain came to be in a separate article.

Image: screenshot of the pons official homepage (captured September 8, 2026)

The only builder listed is a single pseudonymous figure. They go by Ozzy (X: @MEADGod) and have not disclosed a real name, location, or team size. Multiple outlets cite the same stated motivation: that existing launchpads "took fees without looking after their community." There is a record of this person proposing a lending protocol called RootsFi on Berachain's official forum in May 2025.

A newly issued token doesn't start out on an order book. Its supply first sits on a bonding curve, and the price rises as more of it is bought.

One thing you decide at creation is the "quote asset." According to the official documentation, the price, the graduation check, and payouts to the issuer all stay denominated in whatever asset was chosen at creation, all the way through — there's no conversion into ETH along the way.

Once the curve has collected a set amount, the token graduates automatically. The default threshold is 4.2 ETH, measured in whatever quote asset applies if it isn't ETH. For one live token our editorial team checked, the threshold was 72.2 SPCX.

Once a token graduates, the funds it raised and its remaining supply are used to create a Uniswap v4 pool, and the liquidity is locked so it can't be withdrawn. The pool itself charges no fee; instead, an attached program called a hook takes a cut on every trade.

What Changes When You Can Quote a Launch in Stock Tokens

SPCX is Robinhood's tokenized version of SpaceX stock. On pons, meme coins priced against SpaceX stock are actually trading.

pump.fun is priced in SOL, and Pools.trade — which Uniswap Labs launched on the same chain — is priced in a base currency; both fix their quote asset. Because pons lets you use a stock token as the quote asset directly, there's no need to sell it first and convert into a base currency.

On the official dashboard, funds awaiting buyback are broken out across 30 different quote assets, including stock tokens like GME, DJT, and NVDA.

Image: screenshot of the pons official analytics page (captured September 8, 2026)

Only tokens pons has approved can be used as a quote asset. Without that approval requirement, anyone could quote a launch against a worthless token they made themselves and manufacture any price they want.

Creating a token costs just 0.0005 ETH plus gas. There's no review process — fill out the form, send one transaction, and it's issued.

| What it's for | How much | Note |

| --- | --- | --- |

| Issuance | 0.0005 ETH | Returned by launchFee(). Gas is separate |

| Base trading fee | 1.00% | Charged only in the quote asset |

| Issuer markup | 0–10.00% | Fixed at creation; cannot be raised later |

| Buys right after launch | Decays from 99% | Not charged on sells. The decay window conflicts between the docs (5 seconds) and the issuance screen (3 seconds) |

| Pool after graduation | 0% | The hook takes over the base fee |

The "1.00% trading fee" that shows up in every write-up refers only to this base fee. The contract's maxCreatorTaxBps is 1000, meaning issuers can add a markup of up to 10.00%. GitHub's contract documentation states the base fee side can also be raised up to 10%, putting the combined cap at 20%.

The markup varies from token to token. What's more, the wording on the issuance screen ("Traders pay 1.00% in total, up to 10% of it yours") doesn't quite match the formula in the documentation. Since the official wording alone doesn't settle it, the reliable move before buying is to check that token's creatorTaxBps directly.

The Rewards Issuers and Holders Can Actually Collect

| Program | What you get | Conditions / deadline |

| --- | --- | --- |

| Fee rebate to the issuer | The token's quote asset (ETH, stock tokens, etc.) | Applies to tokens you issued yourself. No stated deadline |

| Holder fee sharing | The same asset, split pro rata by holdings | Holders of a token where this is enabled. Off by default |

| v2 per-token buyback | The token itself | Applies to tokens the issuer has enabled it for. Vests linearly over 5 years |

All three are mechanisms built into pons itself, not exchange-style promotional campaigns. As of September 8, 2026, pons has no airdrop or points program of its own.

Cumulative issuer rewards stand at $78.36 million. But payouts aren't automatic — you withdraw them per quote asset from the Profile screen. The documentation itself acknowledges the balance can appear to be zero until you withdraw.

The Protocol's Cut and the $PONS Buyback

The protocol takes 30% of the base fee first. For tokens with buyback enabled, 50% of what remains goes toward that. What's left, plus the entire markup, goes to the issuer.

| Item | Detail |

| --- | --- |

| Ticker | PONS (Robinhood Chain) |

| Total supply | 1 billion |

| Primary use | Target of buybacks and burns funded by 80% of protocol fees |

| Burned so far | 300,053,101 tokens (30.01% of total supply) |

$PONS itself was issued through pons's own legacy factory. There was no presale, no team allocation, no airdrop allocation — there's no allocation table at all. The protocol uses 80% of its cut for automated, split purchases, buying back PONS and sending it to a burn address.

That said, the documentation itself states this arrangement can change and that burning doesn't guarantee the price will rise. Holders have no claim on revenue, no voting rights, and are not party to any legal contract.

Image: screenshot of the $PONS token page (captured September 8, 2026)

Note that the official API's marketCapUsd is simply price multiplied by total supply — it doesn't subtract the burned amount. That makes it roughly 1.4 times larger than the market cap shown on the official homepage, so taken at face value it's overstated.

👉 Check each token's markup fee and remaining distance to graduation on the official site

The Team Itself Says to Treat v2 as Unaudited

The v2 contracts are currently being audited by three firms: SB Security, Dingbats, and Pashov Audit Group. But the documentation states plainly, "No audit has been completed. Treat v2 as unaudited until reports are published." Not a single outside review has finished yet.

The Gas Subsidy Doesn't Cover Issuing or Trading on pons

Robinhood Chain's gas subsidy ends at 11:59 PM ET on September 29, 2026, but it only ever covered swaps inside the Robinhood Wallet app. Issuing and trading on pons happens through a dapp browser, which was outside the subsidy from the start — so the numbers so far aren't a product of free gas.

Some third-party analysis points to bot involvement, citing the large volume of standardized tokens being created and traded in the same patterns. Reading issuance counts as a direct proxy for the number of participants is risky.

Fake Sites and Same-Name Tokens Are Out There

The only legitimate domains are ponsfamily.com and its docs site, docs.ponsfamily.com. ponsfamily.promo was added to PhishDestroy's blocklist on September 4, 2026, and ponsfamily.net and ponslaunchpad.com are both running as separate sites. pons.family, which CoinMarketCap's Website field points to, has no DNS registration at all — following it through an aggregator site sends you to a domain that doesn't exist.

The same problem applies to the token's name. CoinGecko lists a separate Pons Index (PONSFOLIO), and Solana has its own unrelated token with the same name. Even the documentation warns, "Names and symbols can be duplicated. Always verify the contract address."

Issuance Counts Disagree Depending on Where You Look

Only a small fraction of tokens ever reach graduation — the Graduated tab showed 925 as of this check.

| Where it's displayed | Cumulative tokens issued |

| --- | --- |

| Official analytics API | 583,523 |

| Issuance-list API header | 88,841 |

Both figures were captured while the site was displaying a site-wide banner warning that "the backend is updating and figures may lag." Using the official API as the denominator puts the graduation rate at 0.16%, but any citation of that number needs to note which denominator it's using.

Japan Simply Isn't Named on the Restricted List

Section 3 of the terms of service (effective July 16, 2026) lists Cuba, Iran, and North Korea as restricted, alongside the United Kingdom and every EU member state. Japan does not appear on that list.

That said, the same terms also require users to represent that their use is lawful under their own country's laws.

How Our Editorial Team Reads pons's Lead in Fees

Reports that pons overtook pump.fun on fees line up in order of magnitude with the official figures. The same chain also has Pools.trade, which charges just 0.25% to trade and nothing to launch, yet daily fees on August 31, 2026 were $38,553 for Pools.trade versus $4.89 million for pons. Our editorial team reads the fact that users didn't migrate to the cheaper option as evidence that letting people quote a launch in stock tokens is doing real work. Even Uniswap Labs, which put out the fixed-quote competitor, bought PONS four weeks later, calling it "long-term alignment."

Cumulative protocol revenue stands at $22.68 million, which makes it hard to doubt that fees are actually accumulating as real income. The fact that fewer than 1% of tokens reach graduation is really the flip side of how low the friction to issue one is. Nobody has yet seen whether this volume survives once the gas subsidy expires and activity across the whole chain thins out.

First, get a wallet that can connect to Robinhood Chain and some ETH for gas.

1. Add Robinhood Chain (chainId 4663) to your wallet and fund it with a small amount of ETH.

2. Open ponsfamily.com and double-check the spelling in the address bar right here.

3. To buy, pick a token from Explore and specify a quantity on the trading screen. For tokens quoted in a stock token, you'll first need to approve that ERC-20 in a separate transaction.

4. To issue a token, go to Create and enter a name, ticker, image, quote asset, and markup fee. The markup can't be raised later, so decide it here.

5. If you want to split your take among all holders, enable Holder fee sharing under Advanced on the creation screen.

6. After issuing, withdraw the fees you've accumulated per quote asset from the Profile screen.

Image: screenshot of the pons issuance form (captured September 8, 2026)

There's also a channel for transferring an abandoned token's payout destination to its community, but it requires review by the team.

👉 Check the issuance form's fields and current settings on the official site

pons is drawing volume on Robinhood Chain as a launchpad that lets you quote in stock tokens. But no external audit has been completed, and the advertised 1.00% carries a per-token markup on top of it. What's next to watch is how issuance and volume move around September 29, 2026, when the gas subsidy expires.

1. pons official site (2026)

2. pons official documentation (2026)

3. pons official docs v2 (2026)

4. pons terms of service (2026)

5. pons official API (2026)

6. Robinhood Chain RPC (2026)

7. GitHub – ponsfamily (2026)

8. The Defiant (2026)

9. crypto.news (2026)

10. crypto.news (2026)

11. PhishDestroy (2026)

12. CoinGecko (2026)