Free party ends: $PONS fell off the mountaintop and lost 60%—and if you calculate it based on buybacks, it’s actually “more expensive”
On September 5, PONS surged to $0.97, and is now at $0.39. This week, it even got listed on Coinbase and South Korea’s Upbit—Upbit opened up as much as 14%, then dropped back to where it started within the same day. What’s going on—why can’t exchanges push it up?
Pons is the “token factory” on the Robinhood chain, similar to Solana’s pump.fun. The platform takes 80% of the fees and uses them to buy back and burn PONS, so how much PONS is “worth” depends on how much the factory buys back each day.
During those peak days on the mountaintop, both the story and the business were at their highest: on September 4, Uniswap behind $UNI announced an investment in Pons, and daily buybacks surged to more than $1.3 million. After that, it fell off a cliff:
1️⃣ Competitors arrived
StonkFun, which specializes in “US stock memes” on Solana, had its daily revenue surpass Pons on September 10. Uniswap itself also has a token-launching platform with zero platform fees.
2️⃣ Trust collapsed
On September 26, analysts exposed a chain-of-rug-pull group: 53 coins were rolled out, stealing $18.43 million—using an exemption loophole in Pons V2’s anti-rug-pull features.
3️⃣ Free gas stopped
Robinhood wallet’s 90-day fee-free trading ended on September 29. Over the following week, Pons fees dropped another 40%.
Result: daily buybacks fell to only a little over 80k, and they’ve been wildly inconsistent (see chart): on September 22, it suddenly saw volume spikes and the price jumped 17% that day; on October 3, it saw another volume spike and the price dropped again. At the early-September pace, it would have taken a little over a year to buy up all PONS on the market—now it’s more like 8 years.
So who’s propping up the price? Binance contract holdings rose from 36 million coins on September 9 to 96 million, accounting for 14% of circulating supply; the long/short ratio went from 1.18→1.75. The more it drops, the more people borrowing money to buy the dip pile in.
📅 Next to watch
· Can daily buybacks stop the downward trend. Buybacks are manually executed by the team, and the ratio can be adjusted
· October 27, $HOOD earnings report: the CEO mentioned air-dropping stock tokens to meme holders—still not implemented. Without Robinhood stepping up, the factory can’t really get going
· Contract positions: as the price falls, positions drop quickly too—meaning the dip-buying longs are getting cleaned out
My take: Pons’ drop isn’t unwarranted. The free party is over, and so are the orders. When buying the dip, first see whether buybacks can stabilize—don’t only look at how far the price has fallen.
Do you think meme hype on the Robinhood chain will come back? #pons
On September 5, PONS surged to $0.97, and is now at $0.39. This week, it even got listed on Coinbase and South Korea’s Upbit—Upbit opened up as much as 14%, then dropped back to where it started within the same day. What’s going on—why can’t exchanges push it up?
Pons is the “token factory” on the Robinhood chain, similar to Solana’s pump.fun. The platform takes 80% of the fees and uses them to buy back and burn PONS, so how much PONS is “worth” depends on how much the factory buys back each day.
During those peak days on the mountaintop, both the story and the business were at their highest: on September 4, Uniswap behind $UNI announced an investment in Pons, and daily buybacks surged to more than $1.3 million. After that, it fell off a cliff:
1️⃣ Competitors arrived
StonkFun, which specializes in “US stock memes” on Solana, had its daily revenue surpass Pons on September 10. Uniswap itself also has a token-launching platform with zero platform fees.
2️⃣ Trust collapsed
On September 26, analysts exposed a chain-of-rug-pull group: 53 coins were rolled out, stealing $18.43 million—using an exemption loophole in Pons V2’s anti-rug-pull features.
3️⃣ Free gas stopped
Robinhood wallet’s 90-day fee-free trading ended on September 29. Over the following week, Pons fees dropped another 40%.
Result: daily buybacks fell to only a little over 80k, and they’ve been wildly inconsistent (see chart): on September 22, it suddenly saw volume spikes and the price jumped 17% that day; on October 3, it saw another volume spike and the price dropped again. At the early-September pace, it would have taken a little over a year to buy up all PONS on the market—now it’s more like 8 years.
So who’s propping up the price? Binance contract holdings rose from 36 million coins on September 9 to 96 million, accounting for 14% of circulating supply; the long/short ratio went from 1.18→1.75. The more it drops, the more people borrowing money to buy the dip pile in.
📅 Next to watch
· Can daily buybacks stop the downward trend. Buybacks are manually executed by the team, and the ratio can be adjusted
· October 27, $HOOD earnings report: the CEO mentioned air-dropping stock tokens to meme holders—still not implemented. Without Robinhood stepping up, the factory can’t really get going
· Contract positions: as the price falls, positions drop quickly too—meaning the dip-buying longs are getting cleaned out
My take: Pons’ drop isn’t unwarranted. The free party is over, and so are the orders. When buying the dip, first see whether buybacks can stabilize—don’t only look at how far the price has fallen.
Do you think meme hype on the Robinhood chain will come back? #pons