Robinhood’s 90% Gas Fee Cut Sparks Debate Over Arbitrum vs. Solana

Robinhood went live with its Ethereum layer-2 chain on July 1. And right away, the fee structure it chose sparked a real argument among some of the bigger names in blockchain.

The chain runs on Arbitrum. Under that setup, Robinhood keeps 90% of gas fees — a cut that Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko quickly noticed. Yakovenko said publicly that Robinhood’s revenue-sharing deal with Arbitrum could have subsidized Solana’s transaction fees multiple times over. It was a pointed observation, basically framing Solana as the cheaper, more user-friendly option. But Steven Goldfeder of Offchain Labs pushed back hard. His argument was pretty direct: on Solana, Robinhood would have kept nothing. Any fee subsidies would’ve come out of Robinhood’s own pocket. On Arbitrum, Robinhood runs the economics. It’s a landlord, not a tenant — that’s actually how Goldfeder framed it.

The 10% Robinhood doesn’t keep gets split between the ArbitrumDAO treasury and the Arbitrum Developer Guild.

The Landlord Model vs. Traditional Fee Flows

The Arbitrum Expansion Program license is what makes the whole thing work. It lets Robinhood capture a real slice of protocol net revenue while also routing a portion back into the broader Arbitrum ecosystem. For Robinhood, that’s not just a financial perk — it’s the core reason the chain exists the way it does. Traditional blockchain setups send fees straight to the network. Robinhood flipped that. By building its own layer-2 rather than just deploying on an existing chain, it gets to set the terms.

Goldfeder’s landlord-versus-tenant framing stuck because it’s accurate. A tenant pays rent and builds equity for someone else. A landlord collects. Robinhood chose to collect.

BNB Chain executive Nina Rong weighed in too, and her take was less about Solana versus Arbitrum and more about the industry at large. She said blockchains can’t keep running on grants and subsidized fees forever. After years of pouring money into reducing transaction costs, networks need commercial structures that actually hold up. Long-term growth and technological development won’t fund themselves. Rong’s point wasn’t subtle: the era of “build it cheap and hope” is probably over.

$2.66 Million in a Single Day

The numbers from Robinhood Chain are hard to ignore. As of August 31, its applications pulled in $2.66 million in 24-hour revenue. That beat Ethereum on the same metric that day. Not bad for a chain that launched just two months earlier.

More context: Robinhood Chain and Solana Fuel $3B Surge in Tokenized Equity Market

What’s driving the revenue isn’t what Robinhood originally pitched. The chain was supposed to focus on tokenized equities — a clean, regulated use case that fits Robinhood’s brokerage roots. But the actual revenue is coming from trading terminals and token launches. That’s a different crowd, a different kind of activity. It works, clearly. But it’s a shift.

And it puts Robinhood Chain squarely in competition with Coinbase’s Base. Both are layer-2 networks chasing user engagement and recurring on-chain activity. Base has been around longer and has a head start in terms of ecosystem depth. But Robinhood’s fee numbers show it’s not playing catch-up anymore — at least not on the revenue side. The competitive angle here is less about transaction costs and more about who can build a sticky, active user base that keeps generating fees.

Layer-2 solutions generally offer lower transaction costs and higher throughput than mainnet Ethereum. That’s the baseline pitch. But what Robinhood is trying to prove is that the model can also be financially self-sustaining — that a chain can generate enough revenue to fund its own development without leaning on grants or token inflation. That’s not a given. Most layer-2 networks are still figuring it out.

The broader blockchain industry is watching. If Robinhood can keep pulling in revenue at this level while growing its ecosystem, the landlord model becomes a template. Other companies building their own chains will look at the 90% retention figure and run the math. It’s a compelling number.

Related: Arbitrums 51.6% Surge Signals Community Momentum Despite Calm Crypto Market

Whether the chain’s activity stays diversified — or whether it doubles down on tokenized equities eventually — isn’t clear yet. Robinhood hasn’t said. The trading terminals and token launches are paying the bills right now, and that’s probably enough to keep the current model going for a while.

As of August 31, Robinhood Chain’s 24-hour revenue sat at $2.66 million.

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