Arbitrum's token, ARB, has risen more than 30% over the past 24 hours to around 11 cents, breaking out of the 7-10 cent range that had contained it since June.
The move followed a ramp-up in activity on Robinhood Chain, the Ethereum layer-2 introduced on July 1 by trading platform Robinhood . The chain uses Arbitrum’s technology stack and pays the Arbitrum DAO directly. And payments have accelerated over the past 10 days.
Robinhood Chain generated $1.92 million in revenue over the past 24 hours, according to DefiLlama, the most of any blockchain. Canton came next, with $1.76 million, followed by Tron at $974,039, Base at $98,416 and Ethereum at $75,004.
The past 24 hours accounted for roughly a third of the $5.92 million the chain has generated over 30 days, with more than two-thirds of that total arriving in the past week alone.
Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, chains built with the Arbitrum stack that settle to a parent chain other than Arbitrum One or Nova pay 10% of chain profit, with 8% to the ArbitrumDAO treasury and 2% to a protocol developer guild.
The DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) that runs Arbitrum received $175,612 over the past 24 hours, $363,153 over seven days and $531,641 over 30 days, according to DefiLlama.
"Ethereum's cut is a fixed-ish L1 data-posting cost, not a revenue share. Arbitrum's cut is a true percentage-of-revenue license," ARK Invest analyst Lorenzo Valente wrote in a post on X. "So on a spike day, Arbitrum scales up with REV but Ethereum barely moves in dollar terms."
Altcoin rallies are often driven by thin liquidity and speculation, but ARB's move looks better supported than most. The token saw $618 million in volume in the past 24 hours, an eightfold increase over the previous day.
Order books have thickened alongside. Across the 40 largest venues, roughly $6.2 million sits within 2% of the current price on the buy side and $7.4 million on the sell side, according to CoinMarketCap, though almost a third of that depth is concentrated on a single exchange, BTCC.
The price has tracked onchain activity more closely than it did in recent months. ARB bottomed near 7.3 cents around Aug. 18, then rallied to roughly 10.5 cents in the final week of August as Robinhood Chain's daily revenue climbed off its lows, faded back to about 8.5 cents, and broke the range top this week as revenue hit records. Trading volumes on the chain followed a similar path, reaching $6.92 billion across the week, a gain of 89.47%, according to DefiLlama.
What the order books cannot demonstrate is whether the repricing is proportionate to what Arbitrum actually earns, particularly given the source of the fees. Trading bot GMGN took $1.23 million in revenue over 24 hours and launchpad Pons $948,044, both ahead of Uniswap at $445,379, a mix that points to speculative token trading rather than the tokenized equities Robinhood built the chain to host.
The cash flow and the price move are not the same size. ARB carries a market cap of about $746 million, having added roughly $170 million over the past day, on a revenue share that has delivered $531,641 to the Arbitrum treasury over the past month.
Arbitrum's documentation describes payments into the treasury and the developer guild, not distributions to tokenholders. Turning that income into ARB value would require a governance vote, and none has been proposed.
Ryan Myher, chief operating officer at Genius, said the move reflects how capital rotates once a primary trade has run.
"Even if it's not directly tied to revenues, we've seen this dynamic a few times where the beta eventually plays catch up, which is what we're seeing now with ARB," Myher said.
"When a trade gets crowded or people miss the initial move, capital tends to look for the next closest way to express the same thesis. Robinhood Chain is having a breakout moment, and ARB is the obvious downstream exposure given the relationship between the two."
He described it as structural. "Narratives tend to move faster than fundamentals, and once the primary trade has moved, traders quickly work their way down the stack looking for correlated assets that haven't repriced yet," Myher said.
Even after the jump, ARB sits below 13.1 cents, and well short of recent peak in May.
Additional reporting by Shaurya Malwa.