Arbitrum Price and Revenue Soar, but Robinhood Chain's High Gas Fees Draw 'Brain Dead' Criticism

Author: Nancy, PANews

Arbitrum is emerging as one of the behind-the-scenes winners of the Robinhood Chain on-chain boom, steadily earning significant revenue through fee sharing while the "selling shovels" narrative drives ARB's price higher.

However, as Robinhood Chain's trading activity heats up rapidly, its persistently high gas fees have become a flashpoint for a public spat between the co-founders of Solana and Arbitrum, bringing the question of how public chains should commercialize and capture on-chain value to the forefront.

Two Months of Rent Nearly Matches Annual Revenue: Arbitrum Profits from Revenue Sharing

Robinhood is raking in money on the front end, while Arbitrum collects rent behind the scenes.

According to the latest data from arbdata, since the Robinhood Chain mainnet launched in early July, cumulative fee revenue has climbed to $37.56 million, hitting an all-time high, with a 362.6% surge over the past seven days. Based on the annualized average of the last 30 days' fee revenue, its annualized revenue scale is approximately $406 million.

Robinhood Chain's continuous "money printing" is also letting its partner Arbitrum reap the benefits. Under their licensing agreement, Robinhood Chain must return 10% of its net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem. Based on Robinhood Chain's current cumulative revenue, roughly $3.75 million will flow directly to the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Yet, the fees Arbitrum's own network earns are far lower than its share from Robinhood Chain. DeFiLlama data shows that so far this year, Arbitrum's own network has accumulated about $3.87 million in fees, while Robinhood Chain's revenue share generated in just two months is already close to Arbitrum's entire annual fee income.

Looking at the latest daily fees, the gap is even more striking. Over the past 24 hours, Robinhood Chain's daily fees reached $2.9 million. At the 10% sharing rate, Arbitrum would receive about $290,000; during the same period, Arbitrum's own network daily fees were only $12,000. In other words, Robinhood Chain's single-day rent is already about 24 times Arbitrum's own network fee revenue.

This shovel-selling business has further boosted market expectations for Arbitrum's future revenue growth and value capture capabilities, becoming a key driver behind ARB's sustained rally.

CoinGecko data shows that over the past 30 days, ARB has surged more than 135.8%, reaching its highest level since January this year. During this period, ARB's single-day gains at times outpaced many major assets, making it one of the leading gainers in the crypto market.

It is worth noting that the revenue contributed by Robinhood Chain has not yet been used for any token buybacks or burns. According to the agreement, of the 10% revenue returned by Robinhood Chain, 8% goes to the Arbitrum DAO treasury and 2% to the Arbitrum Developer Guild. In other words, Robinhood Chain's high revenue is generating cash flow for the Arbitrum ecosystem, but this cash flow has not yet been directly converted into value accrual for ARB. The market is effectively paying for an expectation of value capture that has not yet materialized.

More importantly, ARB itself still faces ongoing token unlock pressure, with the unlock schedule extending until March 2027. Token Unlocks data shows that ARB's next unlock is expected on September 16, releasing approximately 92.65 million ARB tokens, worth about $17.1 million at current prices, accounting for roughly 1.59% of the total supply.

However, Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder recently pointed out that the market may have some misreading regarding the actual new circulating supply of ARB in the future. He stated that token unlocks for ARB investors and team members are nearly complete and will be fully unlocked by March next year. Currently, these remaining locked tokens account for about 7.7% of the total supply. Meanwhile, the Arbitrum DAO treasury currently holds 2.84 billion ARB, but these tokens are not locked in the traditional sense; they are controlled by circulating token holders, and any transfer must be approved by a vote of other token holders.

Therefore, for ARB, the revenue growth brought by Robinhood Chain does open up new possibilities for value capture. But whether Robinhood Chain's trading activity and high fees can be sustained, whether the shared revenue will eventually flow back to ARB holders, and how the ongoing token unlock pressure will be released remain key concerns for the market.

Co-Founders of Two Major Public Chains Trade Barbs: High Gas Fees Spark Debate Over Public Chain Business Models

However, as Robinhood Chain's trading activity grows rapidly, its climbing gas fees have begun to trigger market discussions about on-chain costs and value capture models.

Recently, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly) and Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder traded barbs over Robinhood Chain's fee model. Interestingly, when Robinhood initially decided to build its own L2, it had shortlisted Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Solana as candidates, ultimately choosing Arbitrum.

As on-chain trading activity surged, Robinhood Chain's average transaction fee once spiked to about $0.40, more than 100 times higher than Solana's during the same period. Toly reposted the relevant data and pointed out that the 10% revenue share Robinhood Chain pays to Arbitrum alone, when converted, would be enough to cover more than four times the equivalent transaction costs on Solana.

In Toly's view, if Robinhood Chain had been built on Solana, Robinhood could have chosen to cover gas fees for users, enabling near-gasless transactions. He believes front-end applications should monetize through their own users and products, rather than relying on underlying infrastructure to profit by raising network-wide transaction costs.

Toly even called Robinhood Chain's current model "brain dead," and further questioned why Robinhood couldn't simply charge users directly on the app side while using lower-cost underlying infrastructure to reduce its own operating costs. Does pursuing lower congestion and greater scale necessarily mean sacrificing revenue?

In Toly's view, application-layer and underlying infrastructure revenues should be independent. Robinhood could easily monetize by charging a certain percentage of fees on the front end, while using the chain as a low-cost, high-efficiency backend infrastructure, rather than making on-chain transaction fees themselves part of the business model.

In response, Steven Goldfeder fired back, calling Toly's view "absurd." On Arbitrum, Robinhood can keep 90% of gas revenue; if it used Solana directly, the underlying fees would belong to the Solana network and its validators, and Robinhood would have to pay out of pocket to offer users fully gas-free transactions. Robinhood chose Arbitrum to be a "landlord," not a "tenant." By controlling its own sequencer, Robinhood can keep most of the fee revenue in its own hands. More importantly, most of the on-chain fee revenue does not actually come from transactions initiated directly through Robinhood's front end. If it were merely a "tenant," even bringing these users and trading activities to a public chain would not allow it to benefit from the additional transaction revenue generated.

However, Toly does not accept this value capture approach. He further pointed out that the actual transaction costs on Arbitrum are not just the visible gas fees; users also bear hidden costs such as bid-ask spreads and MEV. By his estimate, the 10% revenue share collected by Arbitrum alone, when converted into basis points, already exceeds the losses caused by sandwich attacks—by about 10 times—and that does not even include the impact of spreads. He stressed that a single sequencer aiming to maximize shareholder value cannot, in the long run, outperform permissionless competition.

In response, Goldfeder argued that one cannot simply compare surface-level fees. Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain proactively prevent front-running and most harmful MEV, while some chains that claim lower fees may have higher MEV costs, including front-running against retail users. He said he would rather pay explicit fees upfront than bear hidden costs like front-running and sandwich attacks for the sake of lower fees.

Steven also stated that operating a chain is itself a profitable business, and Robinhood has proven that it does not need Solana's traffic and distribution capabilities. Of course, it also does not need the traffic and distribution capabilities of Ethereum or Arbitrum One; it is just that the Arbitrum+Ethereum combination allows Robinhood to own and operate its own chain. Therefore, in his view, the market can certainly continue to debate what business model should be used to operate a chain and how fees should be priced. But the core issue is: Robinhood simply does not need to rely on other public chains, and therefore has no reason to share the revenue it creates with other public chains.

As can be seen, the core of the debate between the two founders is not merely the cost per transaction, but two fundamentally different models of public chain value capture. The model Toly represents is to make the public chain as low-cost backend infrastructure as possible, with the application layer charging users directly and monetizing; the model Goldfeder emphasizes is for applications to build their own chains, control the sequencer and fee pricing power, and keep more of the revenue generated by on-chain economic activity within their own ecosystem.

In fact, from a technical perspective, L2 gas fees are mainly composed of L1 data availability (DA) fees and L2 execution fees. DA fees have dropped significantly in recent years, while L2 execution fees are largely determined by their respective sequencers. This means L2s have greater freedom in fee pricing and can adjust execution fees according to their own business models, even lowering user costs through subsidies or fixed low prices. In other words, the level of Robinhood Chain's fees is part of an active choice in its business model.

However, with the gas subsidies for Robinhood Wallet users ending on September 29, and future gas fee waivers and subsidies from CEXs gradually phasing out, users will begin to bear more of the real transaction costs. At that point, whether Robinhood Chain can maintain its current trading activity and ecosystem prosperity under higher actual transaction costs will become a stress test for the sustainability of its high-fee model.