Robinhood, the major tenant, allows Arbitrum to start collecting rent.

Written by: angelilu, Foresight News

ARB briefly reached $0.094 today, rising nearly 20% over the past week, making it one of the strongest performing mainstream L2 tokens in the past week.

The catalyst for this surge is the launch of the "Robinhood Chain"—a RWA (real-world assets) Layer 2 built on Arbitrum technology, officially launched on the mainnet at the press conference in London on July 1.

Behind this lies a more subtle logic: an old rule that has been running for a year and a half is being brought back to the forefront: a portion of the revenue from Robinhood Chain will automatically flow back to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with a significant amount going directly into the ArbitrumDAO treasury. This is not a new policy but a previously lukewarm revenue-sharing mechanism that is being priced in seriously for the first time due to Robinhood's heavyweight presence in the TradFi sector.

The First Major Tenant in One and a Half Years

This rule is known as the Arbitrum Expansion Program (AEP), which will be launched in January 2024 by the Arbitrum Foundation in collaboration with Offchain Labs. Simply put, it allows Arbitrum to open up its technology for other chains to build upon, with a condition of sharing the revenue.

The revenue-sharing logic is straightforward: any independent chain built using Arbitrum Orbit technology, but not settling on Arbitrum One/Nova (such as settling directly on Ethereum or Base), must share 10% of its net protocol revenue with the Arbitrum ecosystem—8% goes to the DAO treasury, and 2% to the developers' guild. However, L3 that settles back to Arbitrum One/Nova, such as Xai and Sanko, do not need to share revenue and retain their status as ecosystem level members.

The key point is that Robinhood Chain is not the first chain to trigger the AEP. Previous small chains like Degen Chain, Onyx, and Flynet, which settled to Base, had already been paying this share, but their scale was too small to attract attention. The difference with Robinhood Chain is that it is the first heavyweight chain to make the revenue-sharing amount feel substantial.

The Data Looks Impressive, But the Revenue Is Still Small

According to the latest data disclosed by Johann, head of international and cryptocurrency business at Robinhood, as of July 10, more than a week after its launch, Robinhood Chain had over 17 million transactions, over 350,000 addresses, a TVL of about $250 million, and a DEX trading volume exceeding $1 billion. For a newly launched chain, this report card is indeed impressive.

However, the actual revenue is far from substantial. According to Dune Data, as of the writing of this article, Robinhood Chain currently has protocol revenue of about $147,000, and after deducting costs for settling back to Ethereum L1, only $146,000 remains. Even if 10% is given to Arbitrum DAO, this amount is pitiful. The recent increase in ARB reflects the market's premium valuation on the future expansion boundaries of the AEP protocol, representing a typical narrative-driven trend.

Expanding the realm of imagination, the ceiling for AEP is indeed not low: the total assets of the Robinhood platform are about $324 billion, with managed assets around $143.6 billion, and tokenized stocks have expanded to over 2,000 tokens covering 120 countries, most of which have not yet been put on-chain. Once settlement gradually moves here, the revenue-sharing base of $57,000 will move to an entirely different level.

While the Old Landlord Loses the Largest Tenant, the New Landlord Just Received a Big Order

This "rent collection" model of Arbitrum is actually not new. Optimism has been running the "landlord" business for quite some time.

The Optimism Collective collects rent from all Superchain member chains (such as Base, Zora, Mode, Unichain, etc.) via the OP Stack—charging 2.5% of protocol sorting income or 15% of net profits (whichever is higher), and OP Mainnet also contributes its net income to the treasury. However, its rental income has been gradually shrinking, with projections for Q1 2026 to fall further to about $2.9 million (of which Base contributes about $1.4 million), a 21.5% decrease compared to $3.7 million in the previous quarter.

In February of this year, Base officially announced its departure from OP Stack—based on gas fee metrics, Base contributed about 96.5% of the income flowing into the Collective, and upon this announcement, the OP token fell by 28% within two days.

Meanwhile, Arbitrum happened to revive its landlord business from zero with Robinhood Chain. The structures are completely equivalent—both are collecting rent from external chains based on underlying technology, with the money flowing into their own DAO treasury (ArbitrumDAO vs Optimism Collective), except that although Arbitrum's AEP rules were drafted in 2024, it had not seen any major tenants until this week when it finally made "rent collection" feel substantial.

But Can This Major Tenant Be Retained?

It is precisely this history of Base that some analysts use to cast doubt. Some opinions suggest that following the same script, Robinhood Chain will eventually also detach from OP Stack and align itself directly with Ethereum, just like Base. According to data from growthepie, Robinhood Chain's daily sorting income has nearly reached $60,000, second only to Base's $72,000 in Ethereum L2, and approaching three times that of its parent chain, Arbitrum.

Furthermore, the beneficiaries' issue is more subtle. Within a week of its launch, Robinhood Chain has become the second-largest demand side for Ethereum DA, second only to Base, with sorters paying blob fees, settling in ETH, and permanently destroying tokens. Some analysts believe if there is only one ecosystem currency for this chain, it is more likely to be ETH rather than ARB.