Robinhood can "leave anytime," but ARB has to wait for large unlocks.

Written by: Nicky, Foresight News

Against the backdrop of the continuously rising trading volume of Robinhood Chain, in the past two days, the price of the long-standing Ethereum Layer2 Arbitrum's token ARB has surged by up to 43%. According to Bitget market data, the price of ARB has rebounded from a historical low of about $0.07 to around $0.113.

On September 1, according to Adam data, the 24-hour trading volume on the DEX of Robinhood Chain exceeded $900 million for the first time, the daily trading volume of the Meme token launchpad reached a historic high of $438 million, and the RWA transaction amount exceeded $200 million for the first time. These three data points point in one direction: Robinhood Chain, built on Arbitrum Orbit, is bringing much-awaited market attention to ARB.

Robinhood Chain is not a competitor to Arbitrum, but its "customer." This Layer2 network launched by the U.S. stock brokerage Robinhood is built on the Arbitrum Orbit technology stack and officially launched its mainnet on July 1 this year, focusing on tokenized stocks and other real-world assets.

According to the Arbitrum expansion plan, chains built on its technology must return 10% of net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 8% going into the ArbitrumDAO treasury. This means that every revenue generated by Robinhood Chain has a fixed proportion flowing to Arbitrum, regardless of whether this portion is ultimately used to repurchase ARB; at least in terms of revenue logic, the market has bound the two together.

Crypto blogger Chen Jian quantified this relationship in an analysis on September 1. He stated that since its launch on July 8, Robinhood has had an average daily revenue of around $100,000, corresponding to about $10,000 for Arbitrum; however, this number skyrocketed to $1.92 million yesterday, with Arbitrum's corresponding share reaching $190,000. Although this amount seems insignificant in the face of ARB's $742 million market cap, the revenue growth rate itself forms the basis for the market's re-evaluation of ARB.

Arbitrum was one of the leading Layer2s in Ethereum's ecosystem in terms of TVL and actual usage. The ARB token airdrop in March 2023 was also one of the largest airdrop events in the industry's history, with a total of approximately 1.162 billion ARB tokens covering 625,000 addresses, averaging about 1,859 tokens per address, with the estimated per capita airdrop value between $2,000 and $2,800 at that time. The website crashed on the day of the claim, and on-chain activity set records.

After reaching a historical high of $2.40 in January 2024, ARB has been on a downward trajectory, creating a historical low of $0.07 in June 2026, a decline of over 97% from its peak. According to CoinMarketCap data, ARB currently has a market capitalization of about $742 million, a fully diluted market cap of about $1.11 billion, ranking 69th in market cap, with a current total circulation of about 6.67 billion tokens, a maximum circulating supply of 10 billion tokens, and approximately $376 million worth of tokens remaining to be unlocked.

From on-chain data, according to DefiLlama, Arbitrum currently has a TVL of about $1.408 billion, with the top five applications being Aave V3 ($490 million), Spiko ($441 million), USD AI ($228 million), Spark ($226 million), and GMX ($197 million). Among them, GMX, as the most representative perpetual contract product on Arbitrum, had only $26,800 in fees within 24 hours, with its market share continuously siphoned off by emerging platforms like Hyperliquid and Aster.

Behind the price collapse is not only the continuous decline in ecosystem market share, but also the systematic flaws in the economic model of Ethereum Layer2 tokens. ARB and OP, as the tokens of the two major Layer2s—Arbitrum and Optimism on Ethereum—are designed solely for governance purposes, with network fees paid in ETH, and token holders cannot directly benefit from the growth in network usage. Meanwhile, team and investor tokens are continuously unlocked according to a schedule, with new supply entering the market every month. According to Tokenomist data, on August 16 alone, ARB unlocked 92.65 million tokens, accounting for 1.61% of the circulation, and about 10.45 million tokens will be unlocked on September 16. In the absence of a value capture mechanism, the continuous release of tokens has intensified market selling pressure.

This has led to the viewpoint in the market that "buying ARB is less effective than buying PONS." On September 1, crypto blogger Dayu stated that he believes directly purchasing the PONS token from the launchpad on Robinhood Chain is much more efficient than buying ARB, since PONS accounts for 50% of the chain's revenue and 80% is used for repurchase and burning, while ARB "is still air, with a large amount still unlocking every month." According to MemeFees data, the launchpad for the Robinhood Chain token Pons ranked first in fee revenue among all launchpads in the past 24 hours (about $4.73 million), with a 24-hour trading volume of about $82.68 million.

Optimism's situation provides a harsher footnote to Arbitrum's current predicament. On February 18, 2026, the Coinbase official blog announced that Base would exit the OP-Stack and Superchain system and shift to a self-developed unified technology stack. According to Bitget market data, OP dropped from $0.1869 to $0.1247 within three days after the announcement, a decline of 33%. Base had previously contributed the vast majority of Superchain's revenue, and its departure not only took away revenue sharing but also undermined the narrative foundation of OP Stack as "one-click chain launch" infrastructure.

This prior cautionary tale has kept the market vigilant regarding the prospects of cooperation between Robinhood Chain and Arbitrum. On September 1, crypto blogger Chen Jian pointed out that at that time Base only needed to pay Optimism 2.5% of profit sharing and received a subsidy of 120 million OP tokens, yet ultimately chose to leave; whereas Robinhood needs to pay Arbitrum 10% of net protocol revenue without receiving any subsidies. As a U.S. publicly traded company, Robinhood may face shareholder inquiries in the future, making this ongoing revenue share very likely the starting point for re-negotiation. Based on this, Chen Jian judges, "the ending of this marriage can be roughly guessed."

As revenue, users, and trading volume converge on Robinhood Chain, while ARB itself is still constrained by monthly unlocks and the influence of governance tokens, the current upswing more reflects the improvement of expectations rather than a fundamental reversal. Is the relationship between Robinhood Chain and Arbitrum a long-term win-win, or a prelude to another "Base exit" story?