Author: Nancy, PANews
Arbitrum is emerging as one of the key beneficiaries behind the surge on Robinhood Chain, consistently generating substantial revenue through fee sharing, while the "selling shovels" narrative has driven ARB’s price steadily higher.
However, as trading activity on Robinhood Chain surged, its persistently high gas fees became the catalyst for a public exchange between the founders of Solana and Arbitrum, bringing to the forefront the question of how blockchains can achieve commercialization and capture on-chain value.
Two months' rent nearly equals annual income; Arbitrum earns passively through revenue sharing.
Robinhood is wildly attracting funds on the surface, while Arbitrum is quietly collecting rent behind the scenes.
According to the latest data from ArbData, since the mainnet launch of Robinhood Chain in early July, cumulative fee income has risen to $37.56 million, setting a new all-time high and surging 362.6% over the past seven days. Based on the annualized average of fee income over the past 30 days, its annualized revenue scale is approximately $406 million.
Robinhood Chain continues to generate significant revenue, allowing its partner Arbitrum to benefit indirectly. Under their licensing agreement, Robinhood Chain is required to return 10% of net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem. Based on Robinhood Chain’s current accumulated revenue, approximately $3.75 million will flow directly to the Arbitrum ecosystem.
However, the fees earned by Arbitrum’s own network are far lower than its revenue share from Robinhood Chain. According to DeFiLlama, Arbitrum’s network has accumulated approximately $3.87 million in fees since the beginning of this year, while Robinhood Chain’s revenue share generated in just two months has nearly reached Arbitrum’s full-year fee income.
Looking at the latest daily fees, this gap is even more pronounced. Over the past 24 hours, Robinhood Chain generated $2.9 million in daily fees; at a 10% revenue share, Arbitrum would receive approximately $290,000. In the same period, Arbitrum’s own network daily fees amounted to just $12,000. In other words, Robinhood Chain’s daily rental income is roughly 24 times higher than Arbitrum’s own network fee revenue.
This “selling shovels” business has further boosted market expectations for Arbitrum’s future revenue growth and value capture, becoming a key driver behind ARB’s sustained upward momentum.
According to CoinGecko data, ARB rose over 135.8% over the past 30 days, reaching its highest level since January this year. During this period, ARB posted single-day gains that outperformed numerous major assets, becoming one of the leading performers in the crypto market.
It should be noted that the revenue contributed by Robinhood Chain has not yet been used for any token buybacks or burns. According to the protocol, 8% of the 10% revenue returned by Robinhood Chain flows into the Arbitrum DAO treasury, while 2% goes to the Arbitrum Developer Guild. In other words, Robinhood Chain’s substantial revenue is generating cash flow for the Arbitrum ecosystem, but this cash flow has not yet been directly converted into value backflow to ARB. The market is effectively paying for an unrealized expectation of value capture.
More importantly, ARB still faces ongoing token unlocking pressure, with the unlocking schedule continuing until March 2027. Token Unlocks data shows that ARB’s next unlock is expected on September 16, releasing approximately 92.65 million ARB, valued at around $17.1 million at current prices, representing about 1.59% of the total supply.
However, Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder recently pointed out that there may be some misunderstanding in the market regarding the future actual increase in ARB’s circulating supply. He noted that the token unlocks for ARB investors and team members are nearly complete and will be fully unlocked by March next year. Currently, this portion of unvested tokens accounts for approximately 7.7% of the total supply. Meanwhile, the Arbitrum DAO treasury currently holds 2.84 billion ARB tokens, but these are not traditional locked tokens; rather, they are controlled by circulating token holders, and any transfer requires approval via a vote by other token holders.
Thus, for ARB, the revenue growth brought by Robinhood Chain has indeed opened new possibilities for value capture. However, whether Robinhood Chain’s trading activity and high fees can be sustained, whether future revenue sharing will flow back to ARB holders, and how ongoing token unlocking pressure will be alleviated remain key factors the market must monitor.
Two major blockchains' co-founders exchange public criticisms, with high gas fees sparking debate over blockchain business models.
However, as trading activity on Robinhood Chain grows rapidly, its rising gas fees have begun to spark market discussions about on-chain costs and value capture models.
Recently, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly) publicly criticized Robinhood Chain’s fee model, clashing with Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder. Interestingly, when Robinhood initially decided to build its own L2, it considered Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Solana as potential options before ultimately choosing Arbitrum.
As on-chain transaction activity surged, Robinhood Chain's average transaction fee once spiked to approximately $0.40, over 100 times higher than Solana's during the same period. Toly shared the data, noting that even just 10% of Robinhood Chain's revenue shared with Arbitrum would be sufficient to cover more than four times the transaction costs on Solana.
In Toly’s view, if Robinhood Chain had been built on Solana, Robinhood could have fully chosen to cover gas fees for users, enabling nearly gas-free transactions. He believes that frontend applications should monetize through their own users and products, rather than relying on underlying infrastructure to profit by increasing network-wide transaction costs.
Toly even described Robinhood Chain’s current model as “brain dead,” and further questioned why Robinhood couldn’t simply charge users directly through the app while reducing its own operating costs by leveraging lower-cost underlying infrastructure. Does pursuing lower congestion and greater scale necessarily mean sacrificing revenue?
In Toly’s view, revenue from the application layer and the underlying infrastructure should be independent. Robinhood could monetize its business by charging a percentage fee on the frontend, while treating the blockchain as a low-cost, high-efficiency backend infrastructure—rather than making on-chain transaction fees a core part of its business model.
In response to this criticism, Steven Goldfeder countered that Toly’s view is “ridiculous.” On Arbitrum, Robinhood can retain 90% of the gas fees; if it were to use Solana directly, the underlying transaction fees would go to the Solana network and its validators, meaning Robinhood would have to cover the full cost of gas-free transactions itself. By choosing Arbitrum, Robinhood aims to be the “landlord,” not the “tenant.” By controlling its own sequencer, Robinhood can keep the majority of fee revenue in its own hands. More importantly, most of the on-chain fee revenue does not come from transactions directly initiated by Robinhood’s frontend. As merely a “tenant,” even if you bring users and transaction activity to a public chain, you cannot benefit from the additional transaction fees generated as a result.
However, Toly does not endorse this value-capture model. He further points out that the actual transaction costs on Arbitrum are not limited to the stated Gas fees—users also bear implicit costs such as bid-ask spreads and MEV. According to his estimates, the 10% revenue share collected by Arbitrum, when converted into basis points, already exceeds the losses caused by sandwich attacks and reaches approximately ten times that amount, even before accounting for the impact of bid-ask spreads. He emphasizes that a single, profit-maximizing sequencer cannot outperform permissionless competition in the long run.
Goldfeder believes that transaction fees should not be compared solely on the surface. Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain actively prevent front-running and most harmful MEV, while some chains claiming lower fees may have higher hidden MEV costs, including front-running targeting retail users. He states that he would rather pay a clear, upfront fee than take on hidden costs such as front-running and sandwich attacks for lower transaction fees.
Steven also noted that operating a blockchain is itself a profitable business, and Robinhood has demonstrated that it does not need Solana’s traffic and distribution capabilities. Of course, it similarly does not require the traffic or distribution power of Ethereum or Arbitrum One—except that the Arbitrum+Ethereum combination enables Robinhood to own and operate its own chain. Therefore, in his view, the market can certainly continue discussing what business model and fee structure should be used for operating a blockchain. But the core issue is: Robinhood has no need to rely on other public blockchains, so there is no reason to share the revenue it generates with them.
It is clear that the core of the founders' debate is not merely the cost of a single transaction, but two fundamentally different models of value capture on public blockchains. The model represented by Toly aims to make the blockchain a low-cost backend infrastructure, with applications directly charging users and monetizing their services. In contrast, the model emphasized by Goldfeder focuses on applications building their own chains to control sequencing and fee pricing, keeping more of the revenue generated by on-chain economic activity within their own ecosystems.
In fact, from a technical standpoint, L2 gas fees primarily consist of L1 data availability (DA) fees and L2 execution fees. In recent years, DA fees have decreased significantly, while L2 execution fees are largely determined by each chain’s sequencer. This means L2s have greater pricing flexibility and can adjust execution fees according to their business models—potentially lowering user costs through subsidies or fixed low pricing. In other words, the fee level of Robinhood Chain is an intentional part of its business model.
However, with the end of the gas subsidy for Robinhood Wallet users on September 29, and the gradual phase-out of gas fee waivers and subsidies from future CEXs, users will begin to bear higher real transaction costs. At that point, whether Robinhood Chain can maintain its current level of transaction activity and ecosystem vitality amid higher actual transaction costs will serve as a stress test for the sustainability of its high-fee model.