Pump.fun's Share Of Launchpad Fees Fell To 27% In July. Four Weeks Later It's Back Above Half

A wave of launchpads on Robinhood Chain took most of pump.fun's share of the token-launch business in the first two weeks of July. Still, pump.fun is now earning more per week than before they arrived.

The launchpad business grew faster than pump.fun lost ground in it. Weekly fees across the launchpads DefiLlama reports went from about $7 million in late June to roughly $18 million by mid-July and have stayed there, while pump.fun's own weekly take climbed to a 90-day high. Growth in the memecoin space came almost entirely from Robinhood Chain, whose mainnet opened six weeks ago, and it has since begun to reverse.

Fees Nearly Doubled

Launchpads collected $75.39 million in fees over the 30 days to Aug. 11, against $42.53 million in the 30 days before that, June 13 to July 12, a 77% increase, according to The Defiant's calculation from DefiLlama's daily fee data. The comparison covers all 125 launchpads for which DefiLlama reports fees.

Pump.fun took $31.83 million of the July 13 to Aug. 11 total, against $24.45 million in the June 13 to July 12 window, a 30% increase. Its share of the category fell to 42.2% from 57.5%.

The weekly series is sharper. In the week to June 30, pump.fun collected $5.63 million of the category's $7.10 million, or 79.4%. In the week to July 14, it collected $5 million of $18.71 million — 26.7%. In the week to Aug. 11 it collected $9.21 million of $17.83 million, or 51.7%, its largest weekly haul in 90 days.

Two products caused the July collapse in share.

The first was NOXA, a launchpad and DEX that reached Robinhood Chain before the chain reached the public. Its Robinhood Chain factory went live on June 16, two weeks before the chain's public mainnet, and earned a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a day through the end of the month. Fees crossed $99,000 on July 1, ran between $24,000 and $71,000 for the next week, then jumped to $2.22 million on July 8. They peaked at $2.33 million on July 11. NOXA charged a 1% swap fee, so that implies roughly $233 million of trading in a day on a chain then 10 days old.

That day NOXA switched its own launchpad off, and said the reason was that too many people were using it. On July 11, nine seconds after the last token launched through it, the deployer wallet dev.noxa.eth called setLaunchEnabled(false) on the launch factory, according to Robinhood Chain's Blockscout explorer. About a minute later its account posted: "you folks have been vocal about the constant new token spam, vamps, and we identified some bots spamming and copying new tokens every hour." It called the shutdown temporary. "we are finding a workaround for this issue and we have decided to temporarily disable new launches while we work."

Every launch attempted since has reverted.

The second was Pons. Ozzy, the developer who posts as @MEADGod, deployed its first factory on July 13, two days after NOXA stopped accepting launches. "I built a launchpad for Robinhood Chain because the existing ones were extracting without taking care of their communities," he wrote 10 minutes before the second deployment.

Pons charges the same 1% pool fee NOXA charged, plus a 0.0005 ETH launch fee, and splits the pool fee 70% to the creator and 30% to the protocol for tokens launched through the current factory, per its documentation. The 11 hours of launches that went through the first factory keep a 90/10 split in the creator's favor. Eighty percent of the protocol's share funds a PONS buyback and burn. Pons has produced $19.80 million in fees across its two versions in 30 days, more than every launchpad except pump.fun.

Pons Peaked In July

Pons' first version peaked at $1.54 million of fees on July 21 and took about $340,000 on Aug. 11, a decline of 78%. It has generated $18.89 million all-time and $5.03 million of protocol revenue, per DefiLlama.

Ozzy deployed a second version on Aug. 3, and it began recording fees the next day. Contract reads against the PonsV2LaunchFactory return a 1% curve fee, a 1% post-graduation fee, a 30% protocol share, an optional creator tax capped at 10%, and a 99% opening buy tax that decays over three seconds. Version two spends 50% of the creator's residual buying back the launched token rather than PONS, and vests what it buys over five years instead of burning it. It took about $148,000 in fees on Aug. 12.

Uniswap Takes No Cut

Uniswap Labs opened pools.trade on Aug. 5 on the same chain, with no launchpad fee at all. Each token opens a Uniswap v4 pool with a 0.25% LP fee that autocompounds into a position the creator cannot withdraw; creators can switch on a cut of 0.05% of those 25 basis points. Uniswap's announcement calls that "a fraction of the standard ~1% on other launchpads."

Pump.fun's own fee schedule is the standard Uniswap is pricing against: 1.25% on the bonding curve, split 0.95% to the protocol and 0.300% to the creator. Creating a coin is free; graduating one to PumpSwap costs 0.015 SOL, after which a tiered schedule takes over and the total fee falls as the token's market capitalization rises.

Pools took $266,668 in fees on launch day, its highest since. By Aug. 11 that was $36,390, down 86%. Its 30-day total is $806,000, against $19.80 million for Pons. On Aug. 11 the first version of Pons alone took $343,432, nine times what Pools did. DefiLlama has recorded fees for the Pools contracts since July 31, five days before the interface opened. The Defiant reported that Pools out-launched Pons on its first day with 10,506 tokens against 7,210, and that Pools’ flagship token FRONG was minted six days before the product opened.

PONS has risen 160% in the week since. It traded at $0.05072 at 17:20 UTC on Aug. 12, with a market capitalization of $36.9 million, up 19.3% over 24 hours and 23.6% below its July 27 record, according to CoinGecko. UNI traded at $3.52, down 14.5% on the week.

Four days before launching a competitor on Robinhood Chain, Uniswap's account replied to Pons' with "Powered by Uniswap". Neither Ozzy nor the Pons account has posted about pools.trade.

Every Solana Rival Shrank

Solana-based launchpads competing with pump.fun are smaller now than they were a month ago. Trading fees paid by users fell 65% on Bags, 56% on Meteora's Dynamic Bonding Curve, 44% on BONK.fun and 85% on EasyA Kickstart. Four.meme on BNB Chain fell 23%. Each falls by within a point of the same amount measured on protocol revenue instead, and SOL and BNB were flat between the two windows, so the declines are activity rather than price.

Their launch counts fell with them. Over the 30 days to Aug. 10, Bags created 923 tokens, down 78.5%; LetsBonk 4,039, down 34.3%; Jupiter Studio 347, down 45.5%, according to Dune data published by The Block. Pump.fun created 872,202, up 3%, and 99.3% of all tokens launched on Solana.

Growth outside pump.fun came from chains pump.fun does not operate on. Flap.sh on BNB Chain grew 209% to $5.51 million. The o1 Launchpad, which runs mostly on Base, grew from $12,698 to $982,481 after its July 3 launch. The four largest new entrants of the period — Pons, StonkBrokers, LetsCash and Uniswap Pools — all launched on Robinhood Chain.

Robinhood Chain Caught Solana

Launchpad fees on Solana and on Robinhood Chain over the 30 days to Aug. 11 were $33.61 million and $33.49 million. Solana's grew 18%; Robinhood Chain's grew 236% against a prior 30 days in which it had produced $9.97 million, its own first month. BNB Chain took $6.62 million, up 88%. Base took $1.44 million.

Robinhood Chain's weekly launchpad fees peaked at $11.95 million in the week to July 14 and were $7.07 million in the week to Aug. 11. Solana's ran to $9.59 million, its highest of the 90-day window. On the narrow measure of who is taking money from token launches, Solana is winning again.

Robinhood Chain generated $100.2 million in application fees over 30 days against Solana's $233 million and Base's $39.6 million, per DefiLlama. Over the 30 days to Aug. 12 it did $16.58 billion in DEX volume against $4.49 billion the month before. Solana did $46.41 billion over the same window, down 25%. The Defiant reported in July that Robinhood Chain overtook Base on daily active users three weeks after launch.

The Fight For The Trader

One of the fastest-growing competitors for pump.fun's users on Solana does not launch tokens at all.

FOMO, a social trading app built by FOMO Labs, took $9.76 million in fees over the 30 days to Aug. 11, up 172% from $3.58 million in the 30 days before that. Its revenue over the seven days to Aug. 11 was $3.01 million, more than double the $1.34 million it made in the week to July 11, and above Phantom's $1.51 million and Jupiter's $0.96 million over the same week. Its daily revenue record, $544,444, was set on Aug. 6.

FOMO charges "a minimum fee of 0.50% per transaction (subject to a minimum fee of $0.95 per transaction)," according to its terms of service. It sells copy-trading, a leaderboard, and Apple Pay onboarding. It raised a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures in June, and says more than 625,000 people have joined and traded over $4 billion. It has no token and no launchpad.

The competition pump.fun faces on Solana is now for the trade rather than the mint, and pump.fun has answered by widening its own app. On July 8 it made Robinhood Chain tokens tradable inside the pump.fun app with no bridging, which The Defiant covered as CASHCAT trading built. Alon Cohen, the pump.fun co-founder who posts as @a1lon9, wrote that "the pump fun app is not just for pump fun coins, it covers all of your crosschain trading."

Fewer Coins, Better Odds

The share of pump.fun tokens that graduate from the bonding curve averaged 2.82% in the first 11 days of August and 2.55% in July, against 0.86% in June and 0.62% in September 2025, per Dune data published by The Block. Launches rose over the same stretch, ruling out a shrinking denominator.

Pump.fun has taken $1.17 billion in fees and $1.083 billion in revenue since March 2024. In April it committed half of revenue to buying back and burning PUMP for a year, after burning roughly $370 million of previously repurchased tokens, about 36% of circulating supply at the time. DefiLlama has attributed $17.9 million of revenue to holders over the past 30 days.

Memecoins Did Not Come Back

None of this reached memecoin prices.

The memecoin sector was worth $25.15 billion on Aug. 12, according to CoinGecko, or 1.11% of the $2.27 trillion crypto market. CoinGecko's own research puts the sector's peak at $150.6 billion in December 2024. The sector is 83% below that. It is roughly flat over 30 days and down about a third over 90, by The Defiant's calculation from CoinGecko market-cap history for the category's 16 largest constituents, which hold 80% of its value.

Of the 20 largest memecoins excluding wrapped duplicates, seven are up over 30 days. BONK is down 42%, SPX6900 down 15%, FLOKI down 7%, TRUMP down 7%, WIF down 7%, FARTCOIN down 6%, DOGE down 2%. Across the 5,774 memecoins CoinGecko prices with a market capitalization, 34% are higher than a month ago and the median one sits 99% below its record, by The Defiant's count.

The exception is PUMP, up 83% over 30 days to $0.00273 and a $1.07 billion market capitalization, per CoinGecko. It remains 69% below its September 2025 high. It is the token of the business this story is about, with buybacks funded from that business's revenue.

The launch business is bigger, better-monetized and more contested than it was in June. The sector its output belongs to is worth 83% less than at its peak.