Uniswap Labs Bought Pons Token for 'Long-Term Alignment'

Uniswap Labs has bought PONS, the token of the memecoin launchpad that takes most of the launchpad fees paid on Robinhood Chain, the launchpad said on Thursday.

The purchase gives Uniswap Labs a stake in the application feeding the chain that now carries most of Uniswap V4's trading. Pons V2 routes tokens that graduate off its bonding curve into Uniswap V4 pools, and Robinhood Chain accounts for 56.3% of Uniswap V4 volume across all networks.

Pons announced the purchase at 5:24 p.m. ET, writing that Uniswap Labs "has purchased $PONS for long-term alignment" and calling it a deepening of its partnership with Uniswap. The post drew more than 200,000 views in under two hours. The Uniswap account quote-posted it with the emoji.

Neither party disclosed how many tokens changed hands, what was paid, when the buying happened, or which address holds the position. Pons did not say whether Uniswap Labs bought on the open market or received an allocation, a distinction its followers raised repeatedly in the replies. Uniswap Labs has published no statement of its own.

Pons launched on July 13 and shipped its V2 contracts on Aug. 3. Its token trades on Robinhood Chain at contract 0x39dbed3a2bd333467115de45665cc57f813c4571, according to CoinGecko.

Uniswap Labs launched Pools.trade on Robinhood Chain on Aug. 5, charging 0.25% per trade and nothing to launch a token. It out-launched Pons on its first day. By Aug. 31, Pools.trade was collecting $38,553 a day in fees against $4.89 million for Pons V2.

Pons has since pulled ahead of every launchpad in crypto. It earned $5.95 million in fees over the past 24 hours, $28.83 million over seven days and $40.84 million over 30 days, DefiLlama data shows, keeping $1.11 million of the daily total as protocol revenue. It has out-earned Solana's pump.fun on daily fees every day since Aug. 29, after leading for six days in late July and then falling behind for a month.

Uniswap V4 handled $1.6 billion in volume over 24 hours across all chains. Robinhood Chain accounted for $901.5 million of that, against $465.5 million on Ethereum, $93.9 million on BNB Chain and $52.5 million on Base, according to DefiLlama. Uniswap's deployment on Robinhood Chain holds $207 million in total value locked and took $7.72 million in fees over the past day.

The chain itself settled $1.35 billion in DEX volume over 24 hours, with total value locked at $818.6 million, up 9.1% on the day, and stablecoins at $868.5 million. It earned $4.45 million in gas fees and $4.01 million in revenue, net of Ethereum settlement costs and the 10% share owed to Arbitrum.

PONS traded at $0.5013, up 17.5% over 24 hours, for a market capitalization of $357.1 million and a rank of 118, according to CoinGecko. The token set an all-time high of $0.5242 earlier Thursday, a day after Binance added it to Binance Alpha 1.0 alongside FLORK, and traded as low as $0.3476 in the same window. Turnover was $135.2 million.

UNI traded at $6.28, up 7.9% over 24 hours and 36.1% over seven days, for a market capitalization of $3.92 billion.

Pons directs about 80% of protocol fees toward buying PONS, according to the protocol and DefiLlama's accounting of its revenue. Pons said on Thursday that 29.34% of the total supply has been burned to date. Circulating supply stands at 712.1 million against a 1 billion maximum, CoinGecko data shows.

Robinhood built the chain to trade tokenized equities and launched mainnet on July 1. Memecoin issuance arrived in week one, launch platforms began pairing memecoins with tokenized equities, and the network passed Ethereum on daily application revenue on Aug. 29. Pons listed a new set of stock-token pairs on Thursday, including UPS, SNAP, LULU, PFE and JNJ.

Onchain figures via DefiLlama and prices via CoinGecko as of 23:10 UTC on Sept. 3.

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