All on-chain metrics for Robinhood Chain are pulling back, with PONS’ market cap dropping by over 60% as chain activity cools.
Written by Nicky, Foresight News
Hype around Robinhood Chain is starting to fizzle out.
On October 1, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stated in an interview with The Rollup that Robinhood Chain will not intentionally select or support specific winning projects, will remain platform-neutral, and will keep fees as low as possible to continuously attract more users and developers. This statement has largely dashed the community's expectations for official Robinhood backing of projects on the chain.
Market Cap, Platform Revenue and Other Metrics Pull Back Sharply
Per GMGN market data, PONS’ market cap has pulled back continuously after hitting an all-time high of roughly $990 million on September 5, and currently stands at around $366 million, representing a decline of 63%!。(MISSING) Meanwhile, AI, the first token issued by LONG, an RWA liquidity and token launch platform, saw its market cap fall to approximately $86 million after hitting an all-time high of about $457 million on September 17, a drop of roughly 81%!。(MISSING)
These price declines are not isolated. According to DefiLlama data, Robinhood Chain’s DEX volume peaked at an all-time high of $3.51 billion on September 4 before starting to pull back. Its current 24-hour DEX volume stands at roughly $1.21 billion, a decrease of 65.5%!。(MISSING)
This sharp pullback corresponds with a drastic contraction in platform revenue. Per DefiLlama data, token launch platform Pons has seen its 24-hour revenue fall below $80,000, currently sitting at around $72,000. It ranks fourth in revenue among protocols in the Robinhood Chain ecosystem, trailing Lighter ($97,000), Arcus ($89,000), and Uniswap ($88,000). Pons revenue once surpassed $2 million on September 5, representing a 96%!。(MISSING) pullback to date.
The community attributes Pons’ sudden revenue drop to issues with the rhythm of its buyback-and-burn mechanism. On October 3, crypto analyst yyy noted in a post that Pons had not replenished funds to its buyback distributor for over 5 days, with a cumulative $440,000 in unclaimed funds held in a custody account. They argued that delayed fund claims have kept the recent PONS burn rate at a low level.
On the same day, Pons founder Ozzy responded that the burn rate has indeed not been adjusted yet, and the claim process is still not fully decentralized. The team is currently conducting on-chain contract upgrades, with the new buyback mechanism scheduled to execute a claim every 7 days, after which all claimed funds will be used to buy back and burn PONS over the subsequent 7 days. According to an official Pons disclosure on October 6, 32%! of the(MISSING) total PONS supply has been burned to date, and 80%! of platform revenue will(MISSING) be used to accumulate PONS tokens.
Amid the pullback in price and revenue, PONS’ exchange listing push has not slowed down. On October 8, Coinbase launched PONS spot trading; Upbit listed PONS against KRW, BTC, and USDT trading pairs; Bithumb listed PONS against KRW trading pairs. However, the liquidity improvement from these listings has not yet been reflected in PONS’ price.
Market Sentiment Plummets Amid Rug Pull Incidents and Insider Stock Sell-offs
On-chain risk events are also exacerbating the weakening market sentiment. On September 28, on-chain analyst Wazz disclosed a series of consecutive rug pulls and cash-out scams on Robinhood Chain. The same cohort was linked to 53 token launches over two months, cashing out a total of approximately $18.43 million, with the actual scale likely larger. Most of these tokens were launched via Pons V2, and after launch, the scammers snipped roughly 70%! of(MISSING) the total supply, coordinated across 70 to 200 linked wallets.
On the same day, security firm GoPlus announced it had uncovered a high-risk fraudulent meme factory on Robinhood Chain, involving hundreds of meme tokens with over $9 million in transaction volume over the past 30 days. The operation’s tactics are similar to the incidents disclosed by Wazz, with both making heavy use of Pons V2 to launch tokens.
Insider and institutional sell-offs of HOOD stock have further suppressed market confidence. According to U.S. SEC Form 4 filings, on October 5, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev sold 375,000 shares of company stock for $42.6435 million, at an average price of approximately $113.72 per share; Chief Legal Officer Daniel Martin Gallagher Jr. sold 10,000 shares for $1.1371 million. Both transactions were conducted under pre-set Rule 10b5-1 trading plans. On October 8, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest sold 151,903 shares of Robinhood stock via the ARKK ETF for $16.6 million. Per Bitget market data, HOOD stock has pulled back to its current price of $108.8 per share after hitting an all-time high of $127.42 per share on September 7, a decline of roughly 14.6%!。(MISSING)
Notably, Robinhood unveiled a suite of new products targeting active traders at its HOOD Summit on September 29, including an AI trading agent, 10x leveraged crypto perpetual contracts, and weekend trading for select U.S. stocks and ETFs. However, the event barely covered Robinhood Chain-related updates. Pons content was briefly displayed on the main stage’s large screen, which the community initially interpreted as official promotion of Pons. But the subsequent continuous pullback in chain metrics demonstrates that this screen exposure did not translate into sustained trading hype.
Despite the broad short-term pullback in metrics, Robinhood Chain’s total value locked (TVL) has not declined, and has maintained a steady upward trend. Per DefiLlama data, its current TVL stands at approximately $1.033 billion.
Future Outlook
Official narratives do not frame the current hype pullback as a strategic inflection point. On October 9, Robinhood Crypto announced it is exploring the launch of stock tokens pegged to actively managed ETFs on Robinhood Chain, in partnership with T. Rowe Price, an asset manager with $1.9 trillion in assets under management (AUM). The statement emphasized that the project is still in the exploratory phase, and the launch of any potential product will require completing legal due diligence, obtaining approval from the issuer’s board of directors, publishing final terms, and securing regulatory approval from relevant jurisdictions.
Prominent trader Bonk Guy shared a relatively positive outlook in an October 3 post. He argued that the core advantage of the Robinhood Chain ecosystem is not the technology itself, but Robinhood’s massive retail user base and the distribution capability brought by ecosystem token listings, which together have the potential to form a growth flywheel. He attributed the recent weakness to the excessive prior gains of ecosystem tokens, capital outflows driven by the recovering Solana market, and Robinhood’s slow pace of listing ecosystem projects such as PONS and AI. Nevertheless, he remains bullish on the ecosystem, noting that the ecosystem did not experience a major collapse after the HOOD Summit as a positive signal, and that chain activity is likely to recover if Robinhood ramps up the pace of ecosystem token listings going forward.
From a longer-term perspective, the short-term cooling of Robinhood Chain’s hype is not inconsistent with the official long-term roadmap. Robinhood Chain’s mainnet launched on July 1, 2026, with early transaction volume and revenue primarily driven by meme tokens and launchpad platforms. After September, chain revenue fell by over 90%! from its peak, (MISSING) and active addresses have contracted sharply from their peak.
However, recent official statements are uniformly focused on tokenizing U.S. assets and distributing them globally, rather than building another general-purpose meme chain. Next-phase evolution plans include expanding stock tokens from roughly 200 to thousands of offerings, integrating private equity and actively managed products, adding physical redemption and voting rights functionality, turning RWAs into composable financial legos using perpetual contracts and lending collateralization, and onboarding external liquidity via intent layers such as NEAR Intents.
Meanwhile, there are two structural limitations. Robinhood Chain has no native on-chain token, uses ETH for gas, and operates its own sequencer. On-chain transaction fees and meme trading do not accrue directly to a tradeable on-chain asset, and the only external asset tied to the ecosystem that investors can purchase remains HOOD stock. Official documentation also specifies that stock tokens are tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, and may not be offered to U.S. persons or within the United States, with restrictions also applying in regions including Canada, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. This means that Robinhood’s largest user base currently cannot directly trade these assets, and a regulatory barrier remains between global distribution and the platform’s domestic users.
The nearest upcoming official validation milestone is the company’s Q3 earnings release after U.S. market close on October 27. Robinhood has announced it will release its 2026 Q3 results and host a video earnings call on that date. The mainnet launch, integration of stock tokens into DeFi, the HOOD Summit, and the September trading pullback all occurred within this quarter, and the market will primarily focus on whether management separately discloses on-chain transaction volume, the scale of stock token assets, and timelines for redemption, voting rights, and actively managed ETF tokens. If the earnings call only covers App-side updates such as the AI agent, perpetual contracts, and weekend trading, the disconnect between chain hype and the company’s core narrative will persist.