Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

Last weekend, Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder clashed with Solana co-founder Toly over the fee model of Robinhood Chain, arguing about whether a 10% cut should be taken, and whether the charges from the sorter count as a disguised MEV protection fee.

This debate occurred against the backdrop of Robinhood Chain's single-day transaction fees soaring to 6 million dollars, causing infrastructure tokens like HOOD, ARB, and UNI to surge. Toly initiated the debate, his tone reflecting some reluctance, which is difficult to explain solely through a technical dispute, appearing more like an expression of personal anxiety.

Multiple KOLs lamented that Solana's greatest loss this round is not having its own top exchange and is currently in an awkward position.

Setting aside who is right or wrong in this argument, do holders and potential investors still have a solid reason to be bullish on Solana?

Why did Robinhood Chain choose Arbitrum? How is this calculated?

According to market news, Robinhood evaluated both Solana and Arbitrum during the project initiation phase and ultimately chose Arbitrum, which can independently deploy chains.

Under the Arbitrum framework, Robinhood can retain about 90% of the Gas revenue; if it were Solana, the retention rate would be 0 and it would have to subsidize Gas fees itself.

According to Arbitrum's official AEP terms, the Orbit chain needs to transfer 10% of the net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum Foundation, with 8% going into the DAO treasury and 2% to the developer guild, and there will be no automatic dividends, buybacks, or cash distributions to ARB holders.Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder summarized this choice in one sentence: be a landlord, not a tenant.

Solana co-founder Toly questioned the landlord model's viability, stating on X that the 10% taken from Robinhood's fees by Arbitrum, by his estimates, is enough to cover 4 times the total transaction fees across the Solana network, and if Robinhood were deployed on Solana, it could achieve an experience close to zero Gas fees, with income still being chargeable at the application frontend; he provided a reference number indicating a charge of 50 to 80 basis points at the frontend.

According to data from Blockworks, the average transaction fee on Robinhood Chain reached as high as 0.40 dollars, over 100 times that of Solana and more than twice that of Ethereum. Toly believes that charging based on overall network congestion is not a healthy business model.

On September 6, Steven posted that one cannot only compare superficial transaction fees; Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain actively prevent front-running and most harmful MEV. Some chains that claim to have low fees actually incur higher costs of front-running and sandwich attacks for retail investors, and he would rather pre-pay a clear fee than incur hidden losses for a seemingly lower fee.

Toly countered that Arbitrum's current bid-ask spread is already worse, with higher fees, and the 10% cut taken from fees, converted into basis points, exceeds ten times the loss rate from sandwich attacks, not even accounting for the impact of the spread.

This MEV debate has also drawn technical skepticism from peers. Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov believes that front-running protection should not be a problem the infrastructure layer should solve. Toly responded that competition is the only way to ensure that infrastructure provides the service quality applications actually need while suppressing the unwanted MEV.

Meme token strategies being replicated

A launchpad on Robinhood Chain has produced a Pons, prompting many to compare it with Pump.fun on Solana.

According to public data, Pons token has increased more than 20 times in the past month and in September, the average daily meme coin trading volume exceeded Pump.fun, reaching about 500 million dollars.

Even hotter is the trend of pairing memes with stocks. Long.xyz, launched on Robinhood Chain on July 14, facilitates trading of community tokens paired with stock ticker tokens, such as AI/NVDA, SPACEHOOD/SPCX, BONER/HIMS. It does not have its own platform token, and holding paired community tokens does not represent corresponding company equity.

The follow-up project, Bankr, is an AI-driven token creation platform supporting over 90 stock and ETF tickers as pricing assets, like LEVE/AAPL, SPX690/SPY. It launched with only a 50,000 dollar liquidity pool, serving as a proof of concept for this model.

Similar products on BSC include Flap, which also binds meme coins with stock tickers and rewards holders with stock-related rewards.

On Solana, the corresponding product is StonkFun, also known as LaunchOnSF, allowing users to create tokens paired with other assets, including tokenized stocks and ETFs, like STONK paired with the tokenized product tracking the S&P 500 index, SPYx.

On September 4, Solana's official X account responded to a StonkFun post, expressing support for Stonk tokens, which saw its market cap rise to about 140 million dollars on the same day, with a 24-hour increase of over 250%. However, the fee revenue from the StonkFun platform over the past 30 days was only 1.23 million dollars, less than Pons's revenue in a day.

Market analysis indicates that regular meme and USD token pairings are struggling to attract speculative funds; only narrative and stock ticker pairing strategies can re-attract these users.If Pump.fun does not follow this feature, StonkFun’s current leading position will likely be hard to maintain.

Crypto KOL Haotian believes that Solana's advantages lie in capital efficiency and high load capacity. Platforms like pump, gmgn, and fomo are new entry points for Solana; the lack of a leading exchange at the exit isn't a key issue because when a market cycle reaches the point where it relies solely on CEX for monetization, the cycle is often already nearing its end.

He argues that the true capital amplifiers in this round are new super entry points like fomo, pump, and Robinhood Wallet. For CEX to become an entry point, it must have the capacity to support the chain's narrative fermentation, which Base and BSC have already verified over a full cycle; new narratives always ferment on-chain.

Some users also believe that rather than saying Solana lacks its own exchange, it will likely become a place where various exchanges compete for traffic.

Stablecoins, payments, and prediction markets – are key links missing?

The replication of the meme strategy is just a surface phenomenon. A deeper issue is that public chains like Robinhood Chain, built by giants themselves, are gradually reclaiming the elements that originally relied on Solana back into their own hands.

Public information shows that Circle's own public chain, Arc, is scheduled to launch its mainnet on September 16. When USDC is settled on Ethereum or Solana, the transaction fees flow to the validators and seekers of those chains, and Circle itself does not receive this portion of the revenue. After Arc's launch, USDC will become the native Gas token, enabling this money to be credited to Circle's own accounts.

Currently, Arc has secured BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, and other institutions as founding validators, having raised 222 million dollars with a valuation of 3 billion dollars.

Robinhood is issuing its own chain, and Circle is also launching its own chain; these giants are no longer satisfied with putting assets and traffic on other chains but are choosing to bring settlement to themselves.

From the perspective of several major crypto sectors, Solana is not lacking in products, but in the areas of settlement, issuance, and entry. Whether these are still held in their own hands is the more fundamental source of anxiety behind Toly's initiation of debate this time.

According to DefiLlama data, Solana's DEX transaction volume in the past 24 hours was about 1.961 billion dollars, accumulating approximately 65.028 billion dollars over 30 days, ranking first among all chains, while Ethereum was around 837 million dollars and Base was approximately 567 million dollars during the same period.

However, Robinhood Chain has only been online for two months and has already reached 1.613 billion dollars in 24-hour DEX transaction volume, ranking third after Solana and BSC, with the gap to Solana closing rapidly.

In terms of exchanges, Backpack, which obtained the Dubai VARA license, offers stock tokens and perpetual products on Solana, but its scale does not reach the level of Binance, Robinhood, or Coinbase.

Robinhood Chain has already demonstrated that retail investors concentrate in brokerage apps, not on public chain websites; Solana cannot access sorter commissions and thus cannot claim to have this user base.

Crypto KOL Christine stated that the surviving L2s often rely on exchanges, and new entrants have learned Solana's meme strategies with stronger backgrounds.

This round's popular sectors—valuation and narratives in prediction markets—also have not returned to SOL. Polymarket is deployed on Polygon, and Kalshi is a licensed fiat platform. Solana's own product is Forecast, which launched on June 4; the former Jup Predict had a cumulative transaction volume of about 17 million dollars, revealing a significant scale disparity. The derivatives protocol in the ecosystem, Drift, experienced a security event of 285 million dollars this past April.

In terms of payments, Visa, PayPal, and Western Union are all using Solana for settlement. PayPal designated Solana as the default network for PYUSD due to faster settlement and lower fees; however, as of now, Ethereum still accounts for about 73.74% of PYUSD supply, while Solana accounts for about 20.76%, meaning that the default network status has not yet converted into a leading position in supply.

x402 was initially proposed by Coinbase and later handed over to the Linux Foundation for governance, with Solana being one of the connected chains; however, there have been no observed separate revenues or burns returning to SOL.

In terms of stablecoin supply, USDC, USDT, and PYUSD are all running on the Solana chain, but the issuance rights reside with Circle, PayPal, and Western Union, with fees going to the issuers. According to Visa Onchain Analytics data, in July of this year, Solana and Base had nearly equal monthly settlement volumes, both around 286 billion dollars; by August, Base's share surged to 29.67%, while Solana dropped to 7.05%, falling rapidly behind in just a month.

In terms of accumulation settlement, Solana's cumulative settlement volume of USDC in the past 12 months still stands at 2.6 trillion dollars, higher than Base's 2.1 trillion dollars, but this month's momentum has reversed.

However, by transaction count, Solana had 47.29 million transactions in August, accounting for 20.43%, ranking third behind BNB Chain and Tron, while Base had only 12.11 million transactions, with the amount falling behind but still holding an advantage in the number of transactions, indicating that there are more high-frequency small transfers on Solana, which have not converted into a share of settlement amounts.

Last week, Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu published an article suggesting that the internet capital market would become the largest capital market in the world, stating that combining stablecoins, institutional asset migrations, blockchain infrastructure, and AI would serve as long-term narratives supporting Solana's value.

However, in comparison, although Solana's product layer is mostly complete and DEX transaction volumes may even lead, it always lacks issuance rights, settlement rights, and entry points. In many of the current hot narratives, it seems hard to find a closed loop that could directly increase the value of SOL.