Memecoin Launchpad Fees Grew 77% in a Month

gm, Defiers!

These were the biggest crypto and DeFi stories today:

• Launchpad fees grew 77% in a month and Robinhood Chain built almost all of it
• Solana Foundation president Lily Liu rejects “kingmaking” after a perps founder quits
• Franklin Templeton wins staff relief to use its onchain money fund as registered-fund collateral
• Boltz’s founders walk and hand the suspended swap service to an unnamed Bitcoin group
• Harmony patches two verification flaws after a claim that four billion ONE was minted

Launchpads collected $75.39 million in fees over the 30 days to Aug. 11, against $42.53 million in the month before that. Nearly all of the $32.86 million of growth came off a chain that opened its public mainnet six weeks ago.

Robinhood Chain produced $33.49 million of those fees, up 236% from the $9.97 million of its own first month, by The Defiant’s calculation from DefiLlama daily fee data across 125 launchpads. Solana did $33.61 million and grew 18%. The four largest new entrants of the period — Pons, StonkBrokers, LetsCash and Uniswap’s Pools — all launched on Robinhood Chain. Pump.fun’s share of the category fell to 42.2% from 57.5% while its own take rose 30% to $31.83 million.

None of it reached prices. The memecoin sector was worth $25.15 billion on Wednesday, 83% below its December 2024 peak, roughly flat over 30 days and down about a third over 90. Across the 5,774 memecoins CoinGecko prices with a market capitalization, the median one sits 99% below its record. What expanded is the toll booth: 1% swap fees at NOXA and Pons, 1.25% on pump.fun’s bonding curve, 125 venues charging on launch churn. Robinhood Chain supplied the churn, $16.58 billion in DEX volume over 30 days against $4.49 billion the month before, and its own weekly launchpad fees have already fallen from a $11.95 million July peak to $7.07 million.

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WATCH

Bitcoin Under Attack

Camila Russo talks to Foundation CEO Zach Herbert, whose Lightning node was swept in the BTCPay Server attack, and Casa CEO Nick Neuman about three weeks that ran from a 2021 Coldcard firmware bug through Boltz shutting down to merchant nodes being drained overnight.

DEFI

Pump.fun’s Share of Launchpad Fees Fell to 27% in July. Four Weeks Later It’s Back Above Half

Pump.fun took 26.7% of launchpad fees in the week to July 14, down from 79.4% in the week to June 30, then recovered to 51.7% in the week to Aug. 11 on its largest weekly haul in 90 days, $9.21 million. Two Robinhood Chain products caused the collapse. NOXA reached the chain before the public did, with a factory live on June 16, two weeks ahead of public mainnet; its fees jumped to $2.22 million on July 8 and peaked at $2.33 million on July 11, implying roughly $233 million of trading in a day on a chain then 10 days old. Nine seconds after the last token launched through it, the deployer wallet called setLaunchEnabled(false) and cited spam and copy bots. Every launch attempted since has reverted. Pons deployed two days later and has taken $19.80 million in 30 days, more than every launchpad except pump.fun. Uniswap’s pools.trade opened Aug. 5 charging no launchpad fee and has taken $806,000. Solana’s own challengers shrank over the same stretch: fees fell 65% on Bags, 56% on Meteora’s Dynamic Bonding Curve and 44% on BONK.fun.

Pump.fun’s Share Of Launchpad Fees Fell To 27% In July. Four Weeks Later It’s Back Above HalfTwo Robinhood Chain launchpads cut pump.fun to 26.7% of category fees in a fortnight. Its own weekly take then hit a 90-day high, because the business grew 77% around it.thedefiant.io

Why this matters: Pump.fun lost two-thirds of its share in a fortnight and earned more money anyway, because the launch business Robinhood Chain created was bigger than the one it took away.

BLOCKCHAINS

Solana Community Argues Over Whether Its Foundation Should Pick Winners

Flash.Trade founder Anas Khader named the Solana Foundation among three reasons for shutting his perps exchange on Aug. 7, writing that he had learned of a plan to back one team “to the teeth” ahead of Breakpoint because “Solana needs one winner.” He named Phoenix two days later and said the money behind its volume came from Foundation grants directly or indirectly, offering no evidence; the Foundation has disclosed no recipients or amounts under its perps program. Foundation president Lily Liu answered on Aug. 10 that “‘King making’ is short sighted and self limiting,” called credible neutrality inadequate where humans are paid to exercise judgment, and named the perps program and the Frontier Traders institutional track as evidence of breadth while conceding the Foundation’s socials have understated the range of teams it supports. Solana’s perps market cleared $1.34 billion in 24-hour volume on Wednesday against Hyperliquid’s $4.45 billion, per DefiLlama. Phoenix ranks fourth on Solana at $40.23 million; Flash.Trade did $4.79 million.

Why this matters: The Foundation’s June perps program pays for fully onchain order books, which Phoenix runs and Flash.Trade did not, so the selection Khader describes is published policy.

TRADFI

SEC Staff Clears Franklin Funds to Use Onchain Money Fund for Cash and Collateral

The SEC’s Division of Investment Management said Wednesday it would not recommend enforcement action if Franklin Templeton’s US registered funds hold shares of its onchain money market fund through an affiliated blockchain-integrated custody and recordkeeping system, including as securities-lending collateral. The relief covers paragraphs (b), (e) and (f) of Rule 17f-2, written for physical vault custody, on 12 conditions spanning account segregation, transaction controls, daily reconciliation, annual board review and three independent verifications each fiscal year, two of them unannounced. Franklin Templeton Investor Services keeps the official ownership record in an internal book-entry system linked in real time to Stellar, secures the private keys, and retains administrative controls to freeze or migrate wallet records and reverse unauthorized transactions. FOBXX, whose shares are recorded as BENJI, held about $726.6 million as of Aug. 12, per RWA.xyz, and puts at least 99.5% of assets in government securities, cash and fully collateralized repos. The letter is a staff position tied to Franklin’s stated facts with no legal force.

Why this matters: A tokenized money fund is now usable collateral inside registered funds, and the price of admission was 12 conditions and a transfer agent that can freeze any wallet.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Boltz Founders Exit as Unnamed Bitcoin Group Agrees to Take Over Suspended Swap Service

Boltz’s original founders left the company effective immediately on Wednesday, handing the suspended Bitcoin swap service to a group of “veteran Bitcoiners” whose names it is withholding. The incoming operators bring capital and engineering while work to find and fix vulnerabilities continues, Boltz said, and the departing founders will hold no formal or authoritative role, with any future contribution to the open-source software voluntary. The service went down on Aug. 3 after months in which AI-assisted attackers hit it with rising frequency, intensity and sophistication; Boltz said several attacks succeeded and cost the company money, while user funds stayed safe because the service is non-custodial. On Wednesday it described itself as a bootstrapped five-person startup without the resources to absorb that pressure long term. The web app still reads “Swap Services Disabled”; the API stays up for cooperative refunds, and unilateral refunds run without Boltz infrastructure. Aqua Wallet, Bull Bitcoin Mobile, Klever Wallet and Misty Breez all build on its libraries.

Why this matters: A five-person team ran Lightning and Liquid swap rails for four wallets until automated attacks outpaced it, and the replacement operators are anonymous.

HACKS

Harmony Patches Pre-Staking Quorum and Receipt-Replay Flaws After ONE Mint Claim

Harmony shipped mainnet release v2026.1.1 on Wednesday, changing two verification paths after reports of an unauthorized ONE mint. The first covers quorum for pre-staking-epoch committees, where the verifier compared full committee size against the threshold without counting validators enabled in the signer bitmap; the pull request says an all-zero bitmap plus an all-zero identity aggregate BLS signature could satisfy quorum. The second covers cross-shard receipts, where the spent marker relied on proof fields that were never authenticated against the signed block header, so an already-applied receipt could be resubmitted with changed proof identifiers and credit the destination again with no source debit. Onchain account Juiceberg claimed four billion ONE, about 26% of supply, was created and 2.8 billion sent to exchanges; Harmony quoted the post without adopting the numbers, and has named neither a rollback point nor a disputed total. It asked exchanges to block four wallets and paused its bridge. ONE traded around $0.000773, down 37.6% on the day.

Why this matters: The patch tells nodes how to judge future blocks and leaves the balances already minted standing, so the size of the hole is still whatever Harmony decides to publish.

Other Stories Worth Your Time

Marinade Says 28.83% of Solana Stake Went Delinquent, Nearing Finality Halt — A Teraswitch routing fault took 12 sites offline and 94% of the 118.89 million SOL on AS20326 with them, leaving Solana 4.5 percentage points from the threshold where nothing finalizes. Its status page logged no incident.

SEC Advances Tokenized-Securities Exemption That Could Enable 24/7 Trading — Chair Paul Atkins has described the “innovation exemption” in two speeches and no rule text, with no legal form, effective date or binding conditions named. Friday’s Commission agenda covers a separate crypto offering regime.

Circle’s cirBTC Is Live on Ethereum but Has Only 40 BTC Outstanding — Circle renewed its pitch for cirBTC as neutral institutional collateral on Aug. 12. The token has been live since June 8 with 40.02 in supply across 11 holders, against 116,132 WBTC and 97,231 cbBTC.

BitGo CFO to Exit as Q2 Net Loss Hits $19 Million — Revenue climbed 79.6% to $4.33 billion and $4.19 billion of it went straight back out as direct trading costs, leaving about $7.1 million of margin as the unit take fell to 17 basis points from 32.

Bitwise Cuts 14% of Staff as Client Assets Fall to $9 Billion — Headcount goes to roughly 155 from 180, a year after the firm counted 108 employees and more than $15 billion in client assets. Its BITW index fund ended June at $532.8 million, down from $1.03 billion at year-end.

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