Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko publicly disagreed on Sept. 6 over the economic logic behind Robinhood’s decision to build its blockchain using Arbitrum technology rather than deploy applications directly on Solana.
Goldfeder argued that Robinhood retains roughly 90% of net chain revenue generated under the Arbitrum Expansion Program. He wrote, “Robinhood chose Arbitrum so they could be a landlord and not a tenant.” Robinhood Chain routes 10% of net protocol revenue to the broader Arbitrum ecosystem, with eight percentage points going to the Arbitrum DAO treasury and two percentage points supporting the Arbitrum Developer Guild funding program.
The revenue-sharing arrangement has already produced measurable results. Robinhood Chain collected a record $6.04 million in daily transaction fees and retained approximately $5.44 million after expenses and its Arbitrum payment. Over seven days, the network generated $20.33 million in revenue, which would annualize to about $1.06 billion if the pace were sustained.
Yakovenko argued that Robinhood could instead monetize users through application-level fees on Solana, subsidizing transaction costs while charging customers through its own interface. Goldfeder countered that such a model would not capture value from activity outside Robinhood’s front end, including activity from third-party wallets, trading bots, decentralized exchanges, and token launchpads. Recent data supports that point: memecoin launchpad Pons and trading platform GMGN have become large contributors to Robinhood Chain traffic, with much of that activity originating outside Robinhood’s brokerage interface.
Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 built using Arbitrum Orbit. It uses ETH as its native gas token and posts transaction data to Ethereum using blobs. The network’s activity has surged during a 90-day gas subsidy for Robinhood Wallet users that is scheduled to expire on Sept. 29. Daily decentralized exchange volume recently reached approximately $1.71 billion, while total value locked in native protocols stood near $1.17 billion. A Bitquery investigation found the network’s gas price increased roughly 25-fold within 11 days, with much of the demand attributed to a limited group of heavily active wallets.
The founders’ exchange did not produce verified movement in HOOD, SOL, ETH, or ARB. The commercial question remains whether owning a Layer 2 generates more value than deploying an application on an existing Layer 1, and Robinhood Chain’s first unsubsidized operating period after Sept. 29 will provide clearer evidence.
