~/blog/robinhood-chain-launchpads-caught-up-with-solana
Robinhood Chain's Launchpads Caught Up With Solana's
Token-launch venues on Robinhood Chain took about $33.49m in fees over the 30 days to 11 August, against Solana's $33.61m — and the free option on that chain drew almost nobody.
Six weeks is not long enough to build a fairground. It has been long enough, apparently, to pitch a second one across the road.
Per the launchpad tally published by The Defiant, token-launch venues on Robinhood Chain collected roughly $33.49 million in fees over the 30 days to 11 August, against about $33.61 million on Solana across the same window — a gap of a rounding error, on a chain the same reporting calls six weeks old. Month on month the Robinhood Chain figure is up 236%; Solana’s grew 18% over the same comparison.
The category grew underneath it. Launchpad fees across chains went from roughly $42.53 million in the month to 12 July to $75.39 million in the month to 11 August, a 77% rise in money crossing the ticket counter. Inside that total, pump.fun’s share of launchpad fees fell month on month, from 57.5% to 42.2%. The weekly readings swung harder in both directions: 26.7% in the week to 14 July, back above half to 51.7% in the week to 11 August. The desk logged its record fee week and the unlock behind it a few days ago; what has changed is that the same money now has a second address.
The new chain’s leaderboard has already turned over once. NOXA, its early leader, is reported to have peaked at $2.33 million in fees on 11 July and to have switched launches off the same day — a shutdown its deployer presented as temporary, citing what the report quotes as “the constant new token spam” and the search for “a workaround for this issue”. Pons absorbed the displaced traffic and took $19.80 million across two versions over the 30-day window. Uniswap Labs opened a launch surface of its own, Pools.trade, on 5 August with no launchpad fee at all — and collected about $806,000 across the window, its take down 86% by 11 August from the $266,668 of opening day.
Two findings sit awkwardly together. Free was on the menu and almost nobody ordered it, which suggests that neither creators nor traders pick a venue on its launch fee; they follow the crowd, and the crowd was already somewhere else. Meanwhile all of this throughput is happening inside a shrinking category. The memecoin sector was valued at about $25.15 billion on 12 August, roughly 1.11% of the total crypto market and down some 83% from its December 2024 peak of $150.6 billion, per the same tally.
A busier midway, then, pitched inside a smaller fair. Fee revenue measures footfall through the turnstile. It has never once measured what anybody carried home.
Filed as observation, not invitation: a chain posting record launch fees is a fact about the chain, never a fact about the tokens launched on it — the overwhelming majority of those still end at nothing, and nothing here is financial advice.