Altcoins News

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

By James Thorp

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The Landlord Model vs. Traditional Fee Flows. The Arbitrum Expansion Program license is what makes the whole thing work.

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$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.

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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.

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The chain runs on Arbitrum. Under that setup, Robinhood keeps 90% of gas fees — a cut that Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko quickly noticed.

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

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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…

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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.

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BNB Chain executive Nina Rong weighed in too, and her take was less about Solana versus Arbitrum and more about the industry at large.

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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.

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

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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…

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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.

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Layer-2 solutions generally offer lower transaction costs and higher throughput than mainnet Ethereum. That's the baseline pitch.

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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.

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

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