THE DIVE · FREE
THE DIVE: PONS
Wad up grippers. Welcome to another edition of THE DIVE, a series where i break tokens down to the mechanics. No shilling, no fud. Today: $PONS from Pons.
Pons (@ponsdotfamily) is a permissionless, non-custodial token launchpad on Robinhood Chain. It's run by Pons Labs, LLC. The founder is pseudonymous, goes by Ozzy (@MEADGod), also behind RootsFi. Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev followed @MEADGod on 2026-07-21, which is a follow and not an endorsement, but in my opinion still significant.
| Name | Network | Contract | Website | Category | MC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PONS | Robinhood Chain | 0x39dBED3a2bd333467115dE45665cC57F813C4571 | ponsfamily.com | Launchpad | $284.1M |
The Product
Two launch paths. V1 mints a fixed 1B ERC-20, opens a one-sided Uniswap V3 position against WETH, and locks the position NFT in a single tx. There's a 1% pool fee and a 0.0005 ETH launch fee. Anti-snipe covers the first two blocks: on the launch block only the creator's initial buy executes, and for the rest of the window each wallet can hold at most 5% of supply and buy at most 5.5%. Selling and wallet-to-wallet transfers are never restricted. Graduation is a status flag off the locked principal (default 4.2 ETH); nothing migrates.
V2 was the current path until 2026-10-02, when Pons opened V3 mode: for new tokens the bonding curve is now optional and each creator picks whether to use it. V3 applies only to new launches, and the V1 and V2 contracts are unchanged. Under V2, full supply mints to a constant-product bonding curve that trades in the future pool's quote asset. On sell-out the launch graduates into a permanently locked full-range Uniswap V4 position behind a singleton hook. Fees are quote-denominated, never in the launched token. A 99% snipe tax decays exponentially to zero over the first 5 seconds, and a creator can exempt up to 32 addresses, fixed at creation. Custom pairs can quote against native ETH, USDG, cbBTC, or tokenized stocks and ETFs like TSLA, NVDA and SPY.
Live traction, verified on-chain 2026-10-06: the V2 factory emitted 4,163 Token Launched events in about 24 hours, while the V1 factory emitted 0 in the same window, so new launches route through V2 and, since 2026-10-02, V3. Third-party cumulative, as of 2026-08-31, was 124,016 tokens launched and 1,362 graduated, so most launches don't graduate. Looking at their analytics page we can see that every stat that's important for a launchpad has decreased significantly from their all time highs which is quite bad for the $PONS token and its buybacks.
The Tokenomics
Allocation. Fixed 1,000,000,000 PONS at TGE. No team allocation, no investor allocation, no vesting schedule, no emissions are documented. The entire 1B was minted into the launch on 2026-07-13 20:42:21 UTC, block 8,963,150, through the legacy V1 factory into a locked one-sided Uniswap V3 position. That's the whole distribution, and no allocation table exists.
Unlocks and float. There's no unlock schedule, nothing vests, and no next events. Supply only moves one way, down via burn. On-chain totalSupply() still returns 1,000,000,000 and isn't reduced by burns; circulating is supply minus the dead-address balance. As of 2026-10-06 that's 679,797,691 PONS circulating (67.98%) against 320,202,309 burned (32.02%). Float is fully liquid apart from burns.
The Team
| Name | Role | Social |
|---|---|---|
| Pons Labs, LLC | Operating entity | ponsfamily.com |
| Ozzy | Founder (pseudonymous) | @MEADGod |
| Ogle | WLFI advisor | @cryptogle |
No full real-name roster is disclosed, and no funding round, investor list, or raise was found for Pons Labs, LLC.
The Revenue
Every trade in a launched token's pool pays a standard trading fee. The split is snapshotted per token at creation and never changes: current factory 70% creator / 30% protocol (from block 8,991,118), legacy factory 90% creator / 10% protocol (from block 8,600,612). PONS itself launched through the legacy factory, so its split is 90/10. V1 also charges a 0.0005 ETH launch fee; V2 charges a launch fee (amount not stated) plus an optional capped creator tax that goes entirely to the creator.
What reaches the token: an automated buyback runs on a 7-day cycle using 80% of protocol fees, buying PONS and sending it to the dead address. Per founder Ozzy on 2026-10-03, funds are claimed every 7 days and spent over the following 7 days at about 2 ETH/hour, anyone can trigger the bot for a small reward, and a contract upgrade is moving the claim process on-chain. The amount is still "not immutable yet", and the other 20% goes to infrastructure and team. Pons publishes no revenue dollar figures. Third-party DefiLlama is the only dollar series: V1 fees all-time $30,369,738, V2 fees all-time $161,253,254, combined revenue all-time $35,018,237, combined 30-day revenue $17,053,290.
On-chain the burn is real and ongoing: 320,202,309.05 PONS at the dead address from 22,596 burn transfers and 12,753 burn txs, cross-checked by summing every Transfer log to the dead address across block 8,600,000 to 81,852,781. Recent pace is about 226,000 PONS/day, with a typical tick around 2,000 to 2,500 PONS (about 0.3 to 0.4 ETH per buy at current prices). DefiLlama-implied buyback at the current revenue run-rate is about 225,500 PONS/day.
The Risks
- Price is 56.9% below the 2026-09-05 ATH of $0.971034, at $0.418121 on 2026-10-06.
- Fee run-rate has fallen hard: V2 30-day fees $101,928,259 while the latest 24h printed $792,206, roughly 77% below the 30-day daily average of about $3.40M.
- Observed burn pace (about 226,000 PONS/day) is roughly a third of the ~721,000 PONS/day average implied between the reported 2026-09-08 milestone and 2026-10-06.
- The buyback runs automatically on a 7-day cycle at about 2 ETH/hour, but the amount is still "not immutable yet".
- DefiLlama-implied buyback is about 1.0x the observed burn; the residual gap has closed.
- Most V2 launches don't graduate: 1,362 of 124,016 as of 2026-08-31, about 1.1%.
- Anti-snipe exemption abuse: @WazzCrypto alleged a coordinated operation extracted at least $18.43M from 53 Robinhood Chain launches between 2026-07-10 and 2026-09-21. The Block independently confirmed the sniping pattern on 10 of the listed launches and one fund flow, and did not replicate the $18.43M headline. In nine launches it reviewed, creators exempted 15 to 25 wallets, a single tx one to three blocks later bought for all of them, emptied the curve into a Uniswap V4 pool, and left creator plus exempt wallets holding 82% to 86% of supply.
- Docs say "No audit has closed" and to treat V2 as unaudited; a Fortis Labs report dated 2026-08-20 (GOOD 93/100) is public but not linked from Pons docs.
- Team opacity: pseudonymous founder, no disclosed roster, LLC operator.
- Single-chain: all launches, fees and liquidity sit on Robinhood Chain.
- Brand confusion: Pons is independent of Robinhood Markets, Inc. and is not an official Robinhood product.
- Venues publish three different market-cap definitions for the same token on the same day, and a lookalike domain (ponfamilys.com) plus an unrelated token also named "pons v2" (0xf5669783ad38dfce7fec9937ea584ca128360abd) exist on the same chain.
The burn is the whole value story here: 32.02% of supply already sits at the dead address, and the 80% buyback feeding it now runs automatically on a 7-day cycle at about 2 ETH/hour, though the amount is still "not immutable yet". The fee run-rate and burn pace are both cooling.
As always stay safe stay gripping.