Article by Eric, Foresight News
Over the weekend starting September 5, a public debate over Robinhood Chain’s fee model brought to the forefront the clash between Solana and Arbitrum’s competing philosophies of “competing on low gas fees” versus “seeking sustainable business models.”
The story begins with Robinhood Chain. On July 1, 2026, the former "viral brokerage" officially launched its independent Layer 2, Robinhood Chain, built on Arbitrum Orbit, featuring tokenized U.S. stocks, perpetual contracts, and other financial products. Since its launch, the L2 has seen steadily increasing popularity, with daily transaction fees at one point surpassing millions of dollars.
As trading volume increased, average gas fees on this L2 rose to around $0.4 in early September—more than 100 times the transaction cost on Solana and twice that on Ethereum mainnet.
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko retweeted this post, noting that Robinhood Chain allocates 10% of net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem—8% to the DAO treasury and 2% to a development fund—while Robinhood retains approximately 90%. Toly calculated that this 10% split would be sufficient to cover four times the transaction fees on Solana. Had Robinhood been built on Solana, it could have provided users with a nearly gas-free experience instead of making them pay for network congestion. He criticized this “profiting from底层 congestion” model as inefficient, arguing that frontend applications should charge users directly, while the underlying layer should strive for minimal cost.
Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder quickly responded, expressing respect for Toly but calling the viewpoint "absurd." Under Arbitrum’s architecture, Robinhood could retain 90% of the gas fees; if deployed on Solana, the underlying transaction fees go to validators, leaving Robinhood with nothing—and if it still wants to subsidize user gas costs, it would have to pay out of pocket. Goldfeder cut to the core: Robinhood chose Arbitrum to be the "landlord," not the "tenant." By operating its own sequencer and controlling the majority of revenue, it can truly turn infrastructure into a sustainable business.
Under Steven Goldfeder’s reply, the two continued discussing whether the model should involve charging fees on the chain itself or keep the chain free while charging through applications.
Following this, Nina Rong, Head of Growth at BNB Chain and a former four-year employee at Arbitrum, stepped beyond the specific debate of “who benefits more from Robinhood.” She noted that further reducing gas fees is no longer the top priority for the blockchain industry. The real priority is to identify sustainable business models that can reinvest in technology and growth—whether through gas fees, revenue sharing, or other commercial agreements. Over the past five years, blockchain foundations have largely been defined by granting grants and lowering gas fees; but to sustain another five years, a solid business structure must be established.
The Chinese-speaking user @lanyihou responded to Nina with more direct data: trading a token worth approximately $200 on Robinhood Chain may require paying $21 in gas fees and taxes—an environment where the business model is “worse than drug trafficking.” Nina replied that fees could be lowered immediately with just a simple number change, but that doesn’t solve the industry’s fundamental problem. It’s precisely in such an environment that we need to find a model users are willing to accept, one where the platform doesn’t lose money—and may even profit. She cited products like GMGN as examples showing that users are willing to pay for genuinely valuable services.
The sustainable development of the blockchain itself
At the heart of this debate are two different paths to value capture.
One approach is “ultra-low cost + ecosystem flywheel.” Solana has long maintained high throughput and low fees, attracting a large number of applications and users. The network itself sustains security and incentives through mechanisms such as base fees and MEV. If applications wish to offer users gas-free transactions, they must absorb the costs themselves or monetize through methods like frontend fees, advertising, or subscriptions. The advantage is an exceptional user experience; the drawback is that applications cannot directly benefit from underlying network congestion.
Solana has indeed surged ahead in recent years' meme wars by relying on low costs and fast transaction confirmations, giving rise to innovative products like propAMM during the traffic boom. This is a proven path.
The other model is “customizable application chains + revenue sharing.” Arbitrum Orbit enables projects to launch dedicated chains, retaining control over the sequencer and most of the fee revenue, while paying a fixed percentage share back to the parent ecosystem. For large entities like Robinhood, this effectively transforms their user traffic and transaction activity into predictable infrastructure revenue, while still benefiting from Ethereum’s security and Arbitrum’s technology stack. The advantage is a clearer business闭环 (business闭环 should be translated as "business loop" or "business cycle" depending on context; here, "clearer business model" fits better), and the drawback is that user-side fees may be higher.
Not only Arbitrum, Optimism, and ZKsync, but even Avalanche's earliest subnet (now an independent L1) were developed based on this same logic.
While relying solely on foundation-funded grants and indefinitely lowering gas fees may work in the short term, for a chain to survive long-term, it must establish a positive cash flow mechanism to sustain development, security audits, ecosystem incentives, and market expansion. Whether it’s an L1 or L2, all must ultimately answer the same question: who pays for the network’s long-term maintenance? Users, application providers, or the protocol itself through appropriate pricing?
This is Arbitrum’s perspective, and it underlies the core logic of the person now responsible for BNB Chain’s growth.
Sustainability does not mean high fees. The key lies in whether the fee structure is transparent, aligned with real value, and capable of creating a positive feedback loop. Fees that are too high drive users away, while fees that are too low turn infrastructure into a tragedy of the commons. Robinhood Chain’s current high fees reflect both the true demand following the end of early subsidies and highlight areas where dynamic pricing and capacity management still need improvement.
Neither approach is absolutely right or wrong. During periods of overall market growth, Solana attracts attention and liquidity due to its low costs; during market downturns, users are willing to pay a higher cost for rare profit opportunities. Solana’s model may rely more heavily on operational capabilities, while Ethereum’s ecosystem闭环 mechanism ensures that “skilled artisans won’t starve in lean times.”
Only Ethereum is getting beaten down.
One potentially overlooked but striking fact in this debate is that while Robinhood Chain settles on Ethereum, most of its value does not flow back to the Ethereum mainnet.
Based on public data and protocol arrangements, the majority of the gas fees paid by users are retained by Robinhood as the chain operator (approximately 90%), while about 10% is distributed to the Arbitrum ecosystem (DAO and development funds). The portion truly allocated to Ethereum’s data availability and settlement is extremely small, at times barely exceeding one ten-thousandth. In other words, Ethereum provides the security foundation but receives only a minimal slice of “toll fees.”
This is the structural reality of today’s Ethereum L2 ecosystem: application chains and dedicated L2s retain most of the execution-layer value for themselves, while the mainnet increasingly serves as a “settlement and data availability layer.” For Ethereum itself, this represents both a success in scaling (traffic is offloaded, reducing mainnet congestion) and a challenge in value capture: the security budget still ultimately depends on fees and staking rewards generated by the mainnet itself. As high-value activity migrates en masse to L2s and even independent application chains, how the mainnet can continue to receive sufficient incentives becomes a critical long-term challenge.
The discussion has been ongoing for years, and the emergence of Robinhood Chain has brought this issue back into the spotlight.
In fact, Ethereum recognized this issue early on but did not rush to "capture value"; instead, it maintained strategic patience, betting on the long-term growth trend of blob demand. For Ethereum, as long as ETH is still used to pay for gas fees and as long as L2 finality continues to require settlement on the mainnet, long-term value realization remains assured.
Conclusion
The clash between Toly and Goldfeder points to an industry consensus: blockchain has moved beyond the phase of purely technical competition centered on "just being cheaper," and has entered the deeper waters of business models and ecosystem sustainability.
For application developers, choosing to be a landlord or a tenant depends on their own traffic scale and monetization capability. For blockchains and L2s, designing mechanisms that attract builders while generating positive cash flow will determine their survival over the next five years. As the largest provider of security, Ethereum must also continuously consider how to ensure its mainnet receives a more reasonable value return amid the flourishing of L2s.
There is no absolute winner in this debate; the core issue is the triangular balance between user experience, infrastructure profitability, and底层 security incentives—far more complex than simply “who has lower gas.” The true winners will be those who can find sustainable solutions among these three factors.