New Launch '$4,000 Liquidity' Is a Pons Curve Reading

Every morning our research feed lists 10 freshly launched Robinhood Chain new tokens, and their liquidity readings are suspiciously uniform: $3.9K, $4.0K, $4.1K. After a few days of this I suspected one crew was seeding every pool with $4,000 from a template. That was wrong. Today I checked properly.

The evidence: almost everything is pons-v2

Around 00:15 UTC on Sep 17, I looked up the DEX label for each new launch on GeckoTerminal:

pons-v2 is the Pons V2 bonding curve. These tokens haven't reached Uniswap. They trade inside the curve contract.

Why the reading sits near $4,000

The cleanest evidence comes from tokens nobody traded. ELON, POKE, TRMNS and HARVEST, all launched Sep 14, had zero trades in the 24 hours to 00:18 UTC Sep 17, yet read $3,999, $3,998, $4,078 and $3,894. ELON and POKE both priced at $0.00000425. No buys, no sells, still $4,000. So it is not money someone put in. It is the reading of the curve's starting point.

Pons' own documentation is consistent with this. The Pons V2 docs say the price "is not set by anyone" and is worked out from how much of the supply has been bought, using constant-product pricing with a phantomQuote (a virtual quote reserve) in the formula. A curve with a virtual reserve shows a non-zero "reserve" at launch. One billion tokens at a starting price of about $0.000004 is roughly a $4,000 starting value. STOCKCAT, quoted in NVDA instead of WETH, reads $3,348, which also fits "the reading follows the quote asset."

(Note: I could not find public documentation of exactly how GeckoTerminal converts a curve reserve into dollars. The above is inferred from zero-trade samples and the Pons docs.)

Some outside context: according to Cryptonomist (Jul 23), Pons V2 graduates at 4.2 ETH and moves liquidity into a full-range, permanently locked Uniswap V4 position. The Pons docs describe an anti-snipe tax that starts at 99% and decays to zero over the first 5 seconds. According to Bitquery (Sep 4), 207,893 tokens launched on Pons between Aug 3 and Sep 3, only 1.55% (3,228) graduated, and 66.8% of the 314,736 wallets involved ended with less than they started.

Correction: "had their money pulled"

On Sep 16, in Ten Launches, 48 Hours Later, we noted that ELON went from $23,172 back to $4,018.78 and POKE from $11,062 to $4,018.30, and wrote that the three tokens "had their money pulled," that they were "back at the launch template's seed amount," and that "the people who added depth are leaving." That reading was wrong. There was no template seed. On a bonding curve, when early buyers sell back into the curve, the reading slides back toward the starting point. The money left through sells, which is not the same as a developer pulling liquidity. Whether the sellers included the developer would take address-level data we don't have. The article's main finding, zero volume for all ten after 48 hours, still stands.

Live example: IRIS back to start in ten minutes

In the 00:09 UTC feed, IRIS showed +182.84%, $13,047 liquidity and $6,849 volume. About ten minutes later GeckoTerminal read $4,071 liquidity, -37.52% over 24h, $12,314 volume, 39 buys and 34 sells. The price was $0.00000407, basically the start. A "+182% new token" was back at square one within ten minutes, and anyone chasing it was buying what earlier buyers were selling.

Sep 16's ten launches, 24 hours later

Only NERD saw real trading (47 buyers, 46 sellers), and its reading is already below the starting level. SPICE shows +68.13%, but with a $0 liquidity reading and 5 buyers against 1 seller the number means nothing. None of the ten show any sign of graduating.

What this means for you

1. Subtract the starting point from a new token's "liquidity." A pons-v2 token showing $4,000 has basically never been bought. One showing $13,000 may hold real buys only in the part above the start (an inference).
2. Curve tokens can be sold, but the price walks down the curve. Early sellers exit first; late sellers eat the slippage.
3. Check whether it graduated. Based on HBET's pools, graduated pools appear as pons-v2-dex on GeckoTerminal (WAIFU's and HBET's main pools are examples).
4. Watch for high-fee pools next to graduated pools. Both HBET and DEPTH picked up 70% to 90% fee pools. See the trap-pool guide.

BigPump's curve works in the same family: a 1.5 ETH virtual reserve only sets the starting price and is not real money. When about 4 ETH of real ETH accumulates, the token graduates automatically into a Uniswap V2 pool with LP burned to the dead address. So when you look at a new token on BigPump, read progress as "how far real ETH is from 4 ETH," not as a dollar liquidity figure. Launch: one-click launch. Mechanics: docs.

FAQ

A new Robinhood Chain token shows $4,000 liquidity. Can I sell $4,000 into it?

No, don't read it that way. For a pons-v2 curve token, that figure is mostly the curve's starting point, not real money available to you.

How do I tell whether a new token is a Pons curve token?

Check the pool's DEX label on GeckoTerminal. pons-v2 means the curve stage. pons-v2-dex appears to be the post-graduation pool, based on HBET: its curve pool opened at 00:28:20 and now reads zero, and the pons-v2-dex pool opened 13 seconds later holding the liquidity.

If a new token's reading drops back to $4,000, is that a rug?

Not necessarily. It means the money that came in has left through sells. Who sold needs address-level data.

BigPump is an independent project, not affiliated with Robinhood Markets, Inc. Not financial advice — memecoins can go to zero.

Disclaimer: memecoins are extremely volatile and most go to zero. This article is not financial advice. Do your own research and only spend what you can afford to lose.