A feud over Robinhood Chain’s fee model has pulled in the founders of Solana and Arbitrum and a BNB Chain executive, and it exposes a shift in how blockchains compete. The argument began when Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko remarked on September 4 that the 10% revenue share Robinhood pays Arbitrum could have covered Solana transaction fees four times over, potentially letting the brokerage offer gasless trading. Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder pushed back the same day, and the debate widened across X on September 6.
Robinhood Chain launched on July 1, 2026 as a dedicated Ethereum layer-2 built on the Arbitrum Platform. Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program license, the chain returns 10% of protocol net revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 8% flowing to the DAO treasury and 2% funding the Arbitrum Developer Guild, according to an ArbitrumDAO factsheet. Robinhood keeps the remaining 90%.
“On Arbitrum, Robinhood keeps 90% of gas fees. On Solana they would retain 0 and any gas fees they subsidized would come out of pocket. Robinhood chose Arbitrum so they could be a landlord and not a tenant,” Goldfeder wrote on X.
Building a chain versus using one
Goldfeder’s point cuts to the difference between deploying an application on someone else’s blockchain and operating your own network. On Solana, Robinhood would pay gas like any other user, with that money going to validators. On its own layer-2, the brokerage collects the fees itself and pays a licensing share for the underlying technology. The mainnet announcement described a network natively connected to Robinhood’s onchain users, launched alongside stock tokens, lending, and perpetual futures.
The numbers show why the arrangement matters. Applications on Robinhood Chain generated $2.66 million in 24-hour revenue as of August 31, ahead of Ethereum and Hyperliquid L1 on the same measure. GMGN, Pons, and Uniswap produced about 88% of that day’s total, a mix weighted toward trading terminals and token launches rather than the tokenized equities the chain was built around.
BNB Chain enters the argument
Nina Rong, executive director of growth at BNB Chain, used the dispute to argue that the industry’s priorities have moved on. Foundations have spent the past five years distributing grants, making investments, and cutting gas fees, she wrote, and doing that for another five years requires solid commercial structure.
“Further lowering gas fee is no longer the highest priority of the blockchain industry,” Rong wrote. “The real priority of all blockchains today is finding sustainable business model that feeds back into its tech and growth.”
Her argument reframes the debate. If cheap transactions were the goal, Robinhood’s model looks extractive: a public company capturing most of a network’s economics while paying a fraction back. If sustainable funding is the goal, the model looks like the future: companies pay for infrastructure that supports them, and that revenue feeds development. Grayscale reported in August that tokenized equity trading reached nearly $3 billion in weekly volume, with Robinhood Chain, BNB Chain, and Solana handling most of it, so the stakes are real money.
Competition with Base
Rivalry with Coinbase’s Base has centered on user distribution and recurring activity rather than transaction prices. Base has spent nearly three years accumulating users and developers, while Robinhood Chain leans on the brokerage’s retail base migrating onchain. Layer-2 networks generally process activity away from a base blockchain before settling it, which gives operators room to set fees, performance, and commercial terms. Rong’s argument places the next competitive test on whether those networks convert activity into dependable funding for technology and growth.
The debate also arrives as regulators watch tokenized equities closely. AMC publicly demanded Robinhood pull its stock token earlier this month, a fight over what token holders actually own. The economics argument and the legal one are related: whoever captures the fees is also the entity carrying the obligations.
For now, Robinhood has the setup it wanted. Arbitrum gets a recurring revenue stream and a marquee tenant. Solana, which processed the same activity without a revenue share, gets the argument it can make to every other company considering its own chain. The next few quarters of flows will show which model developers actually choose.
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