Between 7 August and 6 September 2026 our scanner logged 485 new liquidity pools on Robinhood Chain. We went back and measured how much money was still sitting in each one. The result was not the bloodbath the "every new pool is a rug" reflex predicts, and it was not a gold rush either.
The short version: the median pool was holding 99% of the liquidity it started with. But the average hides a split: roughly three in ten pools lost half their liquidity or more, one in twelve is now effectively empty, and only 16 of 485 doubled. New pools on this chain mostly do not explode — they sit still or slowly bleed.
Figures recomputed from the live source on 6 September 2026. This is a record of what happened to pools we observed, not a recommendation, a signal, or a prediction.
What we measured, and what we didn't
Every pool in this study entered our record automatically when our scanner first saw it. For each one we kept the liquidity it held at that moment, then re-read the same pool from GeckoTerminal on 6 September 2026 and compared the two numbers. That ratio — liquidity now divided by liquidity when first logged — is the only outcome measure used here.
We deliberately ignore price. A token's quoted price stops meaning anything once its pool is empty: a pool with $200 left in it can print any number you like, and screenshots of those numbers are a standard way to sell a dead token. Liquidity is harder to fake, so liquidity is what we track.
This is one snapshot compared against another, not a continuous recording. A pool that spiked to ten times its size and collapsed back in between looks unchanged here. The set is also what our scanner logged, which is not a guarantee of every pool ever created on the chain. And 30 days is one month of one chain's life — a different month may look nothing like this one.
What happened to 485 pools
Sorting every pool by how much of its liquidity survived:
| Outcome after up to 30 days | Pools | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Grew — liquidity at least doubled | 16 | 3.3% |
| Held — between 1× and 2× | 201 | 41.4% |
| Shrank — kept half to all of it | 126 | 26.0% |
| Lost most — kept a tenth to a half | 87 | 17.9% |
| Drained — kept under a tenth | 55 | 11.3% |
Two numbers do most of the explaining. The median pool sits at 0.99×, which is to say the typical new pool on Robinhood Chain is neither growing nor collapsing. But the bottom quarter of pools sits at 0.38× or worse, and the bottom tenth at 0.07× — those pools kept less than a fourteenth of what they started with. Forty-one pools, 8.5% of the set, now hold under $1,000 and are dead in every practical sense.
The upside is thinner than the downside. The 75th percentile is 1.02× and the 90th is 1.20×. You have to reach the top 3% before you find pools that doubled. The single largest gainer was the HOOD/WETH pool, which went from $371,000 to $14.8 million over roughly three weeks — an outlier by an order of magnitude, and the kind of pool that flatters an average until you look at the median instead.
Across the whole set, liquidity fell about 9% — from $64.4 million when the pools were logged to $58.6 million on 6 September. Not a collapse. Not growth either. Money broadly stayed on the chain and moved around inside it.
Almost all of the money is in almost none of the pools
The most striking number in the study is not about failure at all. Of the $58.6 million of liquidity still standing, the largest 10% of pools hold 73.6% of it. The remaining 437 pools share about a quarter of the money between them.
That concentration explains why the median pool looks so uneventful. Most new pools are small, stay small, and are traded thinly enough that their liquidity barely moves in either direction. The pools that matter — the ones with real depth — are a small handful, and they are usually identifiable as the large ones on day one. A pool that starts with $20,000 in it very rarely becomes a pool with $2 million in it.
The tokenized-stock pools behaved differently
Robinhood Chain is unusual in that pools are frequently quoted in tokenized equities rather than a stablecoin or the chain's base asset. Across the month we logged pools priced against 29 different equity and ETF tickers, including NVDA, MSTR, SPY, SGOV, QQQ, META, AAPL, GOOGL, AMZN, TSLA, COIN, GME, NFLX, PLTR and RBLX.
Splitting the set by what each pool is priced against:
| Quoted against | Pools | Median liquidity kept | Held 1× or better | Now under $1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A tokenized equity or ETF | 58 | 1.01× | 51.7% | 0% |
| The chain's base assets (WETH, cbBTC) | 365 | 0.99× | 45.8% | 10.4% |
| A stablecoin (USDG) | 37 | 0.64× | 29.7% | 8.1% |
Equity-quoted pools came through the month in better shape than stablecoin-quoted ones on every measure we looked at, and not one of the 58 ended up empty. It is a wide gap. It is also built on 58 and 37 pools respectively, which is small enough that a handful of outcomes moving the other way would close most of it. Treat it as a question worth asking again next month rather than a finding to trade on — we will re-run exactly this table when the record is three months deep.
The 37 stablecoin-quoted pools include several of the largest pools in the whole set, and a few of them lost most of their liquidity during the month. In a group that small, three or four big departures drag the median down on their own. Small samples move.
The pool that reported $291 million
One pool was removed from every figure above. When our scanner first logged it, the data source reported roughly $291 million of liquidity — more than four times the combined liquidity of every other new pool that month. Today the same pool reports about $12,800.
That is not a rug pull of a quarter of a billion dollars. It is what happens when a pool is priced against another thinly traded token: the reported reserve is denominated in something whose own price was inflated, so the dollar figure is arithmetic rather than money. Left in the dataset, that single pool would have turned a 9% decline in total liquidity into an apparent 84% collapse, and every aggregate in this article would have been wrong.
If a new token's market capitalisation or pool size looks enormous relative to everything around it, the first question is what it is denominated in. A large number quoted in a token nobody can sell is not a large number. This is one of the most common ways new-token screenshots mislead.
What we expected to find, and didn't
Going in, the obvious hypothesis was decay over time: the longer a pool has been alive, the more likely its liquidity has walked out. The data does not show that cleanly.
| Logged | Pools | Median liquidity kept | Held 1× or better |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–7 days ago | 127 | 0.71× | 33.1% |
| 7–14 days ago | 157 | 0.99× | 37.6% |
| 14–21 days ago | 125 | 1.02× | 66.4% |
| 21–30 days ago | 76 | 0.80× | 43.4% |
If age drove outcomes, that last column would fall from top to bottom. It does not — the best-performing cohort is the middle one, and the worst is the most recent. The most likely explanation is mundane: the newest pools are still in their first days of trading, when liquidity moves most violently in both directions, and each cohort is small enough to be swung by a few large pools. We are reporting it because it is what the data says, not because we have a tidy story for it.
What this means if you trade new pools
None of this is advice, and none of it makes a new pool a good trade. But four things follow from the numbers themselves:
- The common outcome is nothing. Nine in ten of these pools ended the month at 1.2× their starting liquidity or below. The dramatic outcomes, in both directions, are the minority.
- The downside arrives faster than the upside. Fifty-five pools kept under a tenth of their liquidity; sixteen doubled. If you size a position as though the two are equally likely, the arithmetic is against you.
- Depth on day one matters more than the story. The pools still holding real money are overwhelmingly the ones that had real money in them from the start.
- Check what the numbers are denominated in. The single largest figure in our record turned out to be an artefact of the quote asset, not a pool anyone could have taken $291 million out of.
The underlying record updates every day on our Robinhood Chain pool tracker, which shows the pools logged today, the pools logged yesterday with their liquidity re-checked, and the running 7- and 30-day figures. We will publish this study again as the record deepens, including the parts that contradict what is written above.
If you are sizing a position against numbers like these, two tools do the arithmetic: the R-multiple and expectancy calculator turns a win rate and average R into the expectancy of the whole process, and the round-trip cost calculator shows how much of a win the fees take on the way in and out. For leveraged positions rather than pools, the funding rate calculator covers what holding one costs.
Risk note: new liquidity pools are among the highest-risk instruments in crypto. Total loss is a routine outcome, liquidity can leave faster than an order can be filled, and historical survival rates say nothing about any individual pool. Nothing here is financial advice.
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