Robinhood markets cool down—will Elysium be the next on-chain battleground?
Next Monday, November 9, "Hyperliquid Layer2" Elysium, built by Kinetiq, will officially launch. Fomo and Pumpfun trading apps will both support this chain, and GMGN has also announced it will join on day one. As the Robinhood Chain hype cools down, on-chain traders have already caught wind of a new opportunity. Ansem has also expressed strong interest in Elysium.
Launchpads are also warming up. In the first-day test data released by Ascend, trading volume was approximately $5.97 million, with 47,254 transactions completed, 873 tokens deployed, and $34,808 in protocol fees generated. This demonstrates strong new-token supply and trading demand.
But a new chain is never short of excitement at launch. What truly makes Elysium worth watching is the Hyperliquid and Kinetiq behind it, as well as a group of applications attempting to connect new token issuance, trading, and long-term operations.
The On-Chain Ecosystem Gap on Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid's trading business has already taken off, but there is still a significant gap on the application side.
HyperCore handles the order book and trade matching, while HyperEVM handles smart contract applications. The two share underlying state, and HyperEVM's execution capacity must accommodate HyperCore's operations. This gives Hyperliquid a powerful trading market, but makes it difficult to simultaneously support high-frequency, congested, and constantly evolving on-chain applications.
Kinetiq has firsthand experience with this problem.
Elysium emerged from this. According to Kinetiq co-founder Omnia in an interview, this chain adopts the Arbitrum tech stack and Conduit's G2 sequencer, with a target block time of 100 milliseconds, gas paid in HYPE, and settlement to HyperEVM. As we introduced in a previous article, Elysium's goal is to provide a more spacious execution environment where token trading, issuance, and DeFi demand around Hyperliquid can find a home.
The value of Fomo, Pumpfun trading apps, and GMGN lies in placing Elysium within the habits traders are already familiar with. Seeing new tokens, checking trades, buying and selling—without needing to learn a whole new set of tools first. For new projects, this also means that at issuance they have the opportunity to reach audiences beyond Hyperliquid's native community.
Post-trade services are also being filled in. The ecosystem list introduced by Omnia includes Uniswap, 0x, KyberSwap, Li.Fi, Wormhole, as well as wallets and infrastructure such as MetaMask and Rabby. Nest is preparing to build trading pools on Uniswap v4 to capture the mainstream asset exchange demand brought by new tokens, as well as the ongoing liquidity needs as projects grow.
A Launchpad with Aligned Interests
The easiest business to build for a launchpad is to continuously issue new tokens and extract fees from trading. As long as creators and the platform can get paid quickly, whether a project survives to next week becomes the traders' own problem.
Ascend attempts to break this dynamic.
On the token creator side, it ties fee distribution to project growth. A portion of early creator fees for new tokens is held in escrow and released as the project meets corresponding conditions; at higher market cap tiers, creators receive a larger share of base trading fees while the protocol's cut decreases. Creators can also choose to direct their share toward holder rewards, project token buybacks, or a combination of these uses.
The behavior this design aims to encourage is clear: making a project continuously grow is more attractive than batch-issuing tokens and immediately taking fees. Teams willing to leave trading revenue to the community also have ready-made tools available.
Ascend has made further arrangements for its own revenue.
It does not issue an independent platform token and directly adopts KNTQ as its protocol token. The launchpad's business growth is aligned with the interests of Kinetiq and Elysium.
According to the allocation model in the official documentation, out of every $100 in protocol fees, $10 goes to the treasury, $72 is used to purchase KNTQ, and $18 is used to purchase HYPE. Of the KNTQ purchased, 40% is used for burning, and the remaining 60% supports ecosystem token buybacks, the Ascend points program, and protocol-owned liquidity; the HYPE purchased is used for participant rewards and staking respectively.
Therefore, the more active new-token trading is on Ascend, the more funds flow into KNTQ, HYPE, and ecosystem projects under this design. KNTQ holders can focus on Ascend without having to go through another launchpad token; Ascend can also leverage the existing Kinetiq community for initial attention.
Omnia introduced that Elysium will allocate 50% of sequencer revenue toward KNTQ buybacks; Ascend will use its share of Elysium sequencer revenue for builder support, including grants and preparation for HyperCore spot listings. Revenue generated from on-chain trading has the opportunity to continue helping new projects enter the market.
For HYPE holders, Ascend has also designed another way to participate: deposit kHYPE into its staking vault, use the staking yield to purchase qualifying ecosystem tokens, and then distribute the tokens to the corresponding stakers. Holders retain HYPE exposure while using staking yield to participate in new projects.
These mechanisms collectively point to one goal: making the launchpad's trading activity continue to fund the assets and projects that support it.
Activating HyperCore's "Listing Effect"
The growth goal of many new tokens ultimately lands on "listing on a larger exchange." In the interview, Omnia outlined a similar path for Elysium: projects first accumulate attention, trading, and liquidity on-chain, then enter the HyperCore spot market, and further seek HIP-3 deployers to open perpetual contract markets.
Ascend has written this path into its project support system. Qualifying projects can obtain Ascended status, enter the subsequent ecosystem support scope, and prepare for HyperCore spot and HIP-3 markets.
The same path also applies to assets beyond memes.
Elysium designs its interface around HyperCore prices and order book depth, aiming to attract professional market makers to provide spot quotes here and then hedge risk on HyperCore. When a trader completes an ordinary swap on the front end, the market-making demand behind it can further translate into contract trades on Hyperliquid.
Montra
Unlike Ascend, which directly adopts KNTQ as its protocol token, the other launchpad Montra retains its own protocol token MONTRA and uses it to organize early participants.
Montra's standard token issuance process is built directly on Uniswap v4. Token creators can choose to direct their fee revenue to a team wallet, multiple recipients, or directly distribute it to token holders; the protocol collects its own share, and in the MONTRA buyback design, 70% of that is used to purchase and burn MONTRA, while 30% goes to the treasury.
For traders preparing to explore Elysium, the more direct point of interest is the MONTRA token airdrop.
25% of MONTRA's total supply will be used for airdrops, divided into five categories, each accounting for 5% of the total supply:
- Existing active users of HYPE, KNTQ, and Elysium.
- Early active creators and traders on Montra.
- Participants who discovered, traded, and held Montra's top ten tokens at the time of the snapshot.
- Liquidity providers.
- Verified high-quality creators and builder referrals, as well as social media content and dissemination contributions (verified through the official Discord).
Montra has already opened pre-trading, and two tokens with market caps above 1M have appeared.
Ascend concentrates value into KNTQ, while Montra uses an independent token to expand distribution—two choices that give Elysium different launch approaches. For traders, these two launchpads will also be important windows for observing where new projects emerge and where capital gathers.
After Robinhood, Elysium has the conditions to become the next on-chain focal point: Pumpfun, Ascend, and Montra issuing assets, fomo and gmgn as trading gateways, and Hyperliquid providing "listing" expectations and exit liquidity.
