Written by: Eric, Foresight News

Since the weekend starting September 5, a public debate regarding the fee model of Robinhood Chain has brought the conflict of ideas between the two major camps of Solana and Arbitrum—"competing for low gas fees" and "seeking sustainable business models"—to the forefront.

The story begins with Robinhood Chain. On July 1, 2026, this once "popular brokerage" officially launched its independent Layer 2 Robinhood Chain based on Arbitrum Orbit, focusing on tokenized U.S. stocks, perpetual contracts, and other financial products. Since its launch, this Layer 2 has gained popularity day by day, with daily fees at one point exceeding several million dollars.

As trading volume increased, in early September, the average gas fee on this Layer 2 rose to about $0.40, which is more than a hundred times the trading cost on Solana and even twice the trading cost on the Ethereum mainnet.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko shared this tweet and stated that Robinhood Chain allocates 10% of net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem by agreement (8% goes to the DAO treasury, 2% to the development fund), while Robinhood retains about 90% for itself. Toly calculated that this 10% share is enough to cover the fees that would be four times higher if the same transaction volume were on Solana. If Robinhood had initially built on Solana, it could have provided users with an almost gas-free experience instead of making users pay for network congestion. He criticized this model of "making money from underlying congestion" as unwise, arguing that frontend applications should charge users directly while the underlying layer should pursue extremely low costs.

Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder quickly responded. He expressed respect for Toly but deemed the viewpoint "absurd." Under the Arbitrum architecture, Robinhood can retain 90% of the gas revenue; if it were deployed on Solana, the underlying fees would go to the validators, and Robinhood wouldn’t get a cent. If it still wanted to subsidize users' gas, it would have to pay out of its own pocket. Goldfeder succinctly summed up: Robinhood chose Arbitrum to be the "landlord" rather than the "tenant." By operating its own sequencer and controlling the majority of revenue, it can truly transform the infrastructure into a sustainable business.

In response to Steven Goldfeder’s reply, the two continued discussing whether the model should be "charged by the chain itself" or "free chain with charging through applications."

Subsequently, Nina Rong, BNB Chain's growth director and former worker at Arbitrum for about four years, stepped into the specific debate about "who is more beneficial to Robinhood." She pointed out that further reducing gas fees is no longer the top priority in the blockchain industry. The real priority is to find a sustainable business model that can feed back into technology and growth, whether it's gas fees, revenue sharing, or other business agreements. Over the past five years, blockchain foundations have mostly focused on issuing grants and reducing gas fees; however, if they want to last another five years, they must establish a solid business structure.

Chinese user @lanyihou responded to Nina with more direct data: trading a token worth about $200 on Robinhood Chain might incur a gas fee of $21, stating that discussing a business model in such an environment is "tougher than drug dealing." Nina countered that fees can be lowered immediately if desired (it's just a matter of changing a number), but this doesn't solve the fundamental issue of the industry—it's precisely in such an environment that there is a greater need to find a model that can satisfy users while not losing money, or even making a profit. She cited products like GMGN to illustrate that users are willing to pay for truly valuable services.

Sustainability of the Chain Itself

The core of this debate is essentially about two different paths of value capture.

One is "extremely low costs + ecological flywheel." Solana has long adhered to high throughput and low fees, attracting a large number of applications and users, with the network itself maintaining security and incentives through base fees and MEV and other mechanisms. If applications want to offer users gas-free transactions, they need to bear the costs themselves or monetize through frontend charges, advertising, subscriptions, etc. The advantage is an extraordinary user experience, while the downside is that application providers find it difficult to directly benefit from underlying congestion.

Solana has indeed leveraged low costs and fast transaction confirmations to stand out during the meme battle over the past few years, giving rise to innovative products like propAMM during the traffic frenzy. This has proven to be a viable path.

The other is "customizable application chains + revenue sharing." Arbitrum Orbit allows project parties to launch exclusive chains, controlling the sequencer and most of the fee revenue while paying a fixed proportion to the parent ecosystem. For large entities like Robinhood, this essentially transforms their user traffic and trading behavior into predictable infrastructural income, while still being able to leverage Ethereum's security and Arbitrum's technology stack. The advantage is a clearer business loop, while the downside may be higher fees on the user side.

Not only Arbitrum but also Optimism and ZKsync, even Avalanche's earliest subnet (now an independent Layer 1), have developed based on this logic.

Relying purely on foundations burning money to issue grants and infinitely lowering gas fees is certainly feasible, but for chains to survive long-term, they must have a positive cash flow mechanism to support R&D, security audits, ecological incentives, and market expansion. Whether it's Layer 1 or Layer 2, the ultimate question they must answer is: who pays for the long-term maintenance of the network? Users, application providers, or the protocol itself through reasonable pricing?

This is Arbitrum's perspective and also the underlying logic of BNB Chain's growth leader.

Sustainability does not equate to high fees. The key lies in whether the fee structure is transparent, whether it aligns with real value, and whether it can form a positive cycle. Excessively high fees will drive away users, while excessively low fees will turn the infrastructure into a public goods tragedy. The current high fees of Robinhood Chain reflect the true demand after the early subsidies ended and also expose the need for optimization in dynamic pricing and capacity management.

There are no absolute rights or wrongs in these two ideas. During periods of overall market prosperity, Solana gathered attention and liquidity due to low costs; however, during downturns, users do not mind paying a bit more for rare profitable opportunities. Solana's model may depend more on operational capabilities, while the Ethereum ecosystem's closed-loop mechanism ensures that "artisans don't starve in lean years."

"Only Ethereum is Taking the Beatings"

A possibly overlooked but painful fact in this debate is: although Robinhood Chain settles on Ethereum, most of the value does not flow back to the Ethereum mainnet.

According to public data and protocol arrangements, the vast majority of gas fees paid by users are retained by Robinhood as the chain operator (about 90%), with about 10% shared with the Arbitrum ecosystem (DAO and development fund), leaving the portion actually used for Ethereum data availability and settlement extremely low, sometimes even just slightly above one ten-thousandth. In other words, Ethereum provides the security base but only receives a thin layer of "toll fee."

This reflects the structural reality of the current Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem: application chains and dedicated Layer 2 solutions are retaining most of the execution layer value for themselves, while the mainnet plays more of a role as the "settlement and data availability layer." For Ethereum itself, this is both a success in expansion (transactions are diverted, alleviating congestion on the mainnet) and a challenge in value capture: the security budget ultimately still relies on the fees and staking yields of the mainnet itself. As numerous high-value activities migrate to Layer 2 or even independent application chains, how the mainnet can continue to receive sufficient incentives becomes an ongoing challenge that must be faced.

The related discussions have continued for years, and the emergence of Robinhood Chain has once again brought this issue to the forefront.

In fact, Ethereum has been aware of this issue for a long time but has not rushed to "capture value." Instead, it has maintained strategic determination, betting on the long-term growth trend of blob demand. For Ethereum, as long as ETH is still used to pay gas fees, and as long as Layer 2's finality still requires settlement on the mainnet, there will always be expectations for realizing long-term value.

Conclusion

The clash between Toly and Goldfeder points to the formation of an industry consensus: blockchain has moved past the pure technical competition phase of “cheaper is better” and has entered the deep waters of business models and ecological sustainability.

For application providers, the choice between being the landlord or the tenant depends on their traffic scale and monetization ability; for public chains and Layer 2 solutions, how to design mechanisms that not only attract builders but also create positive cash flows will determine their survival over the next five years. As the largest security provider, Ethereum also needs to continuously think about how to allow the mainnet to receive more reasonable value returns while Layer 2 thrives.

This debate has no absolute winners, the core is the triangular balance between user experience, infrastructure profitability, and underlying security incentives, which is far more complex than "whose gas is cheaper." The true winners will be those participants who can find sustainable solutions among these three aspects.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。