Robinhood Chain Books $1.92M in a Day, Lifting Arbitrum's ARB

Robinhood Chain took in $1.92 million of revenue over 24 hours on Tuesday, the most since the network opened on 1 July. A tenth of that goes to Arbitrum, whose technology the chain is built on. Ethereum earned $75,004 across the same day, so Robinhood's network out-earned it by roughly 25 times. ARB rose on the figures. How far it rose depends on which outlet is read, and the accounts run from 25% to 31%.

How the split works

The Arbitrum Expansion Program covers any layer-2 network built with Arbitrum's stack that settles somewhere other than Arbitrum One or Nova. Such a chain hands back 10% of its net protocol revenue: 8% to the Arbitrum DAO treasury, which ARB holders govern, and 2% to a developer guild. The charge falls on revenue after operating costs and not on gross fees, and the base is sequencer profit — the money a chain makes from ordering transactions. CoinDesk put the treasury's take at $175,612 over the day and $531,641 over 30 days, a breakdown no other account carries.

Three labels, three numbers

What the chain earned depends on which line of the dashboard an outlet read. CoinDesk and The Crypto Times both give revenue of $1.92 million for the 24 hours, and that is the only figure two outlets confirm. The Crypto Times separately gives fees of $2.13 million. Invezz, writing earlier on Tuesday, gives app revenue of $2.66 million. Fees, revenue and app revenue are three measurements of three things, and no account reconciles them. Over 30 days CoinDesk counts $5.92 million, about two thirds of it earned in the final week.

Where the volume comes from

Most of the traffic behind those fees is speculative. The Block reported a record $989 million of decentralized exchange volume on the chain on 28 August, and total value locked at $708 million after close to doubling in a month. PONS, the launchpad token, went from a $20 million market capitalization to more than $200 million during August. What people were buying shifted inside the month.

"In July, Robinhood Chain was dominated by memecoin beta, following the run and eventual Robinhood spot listing of CASHCAT. In August, tokens that have garnered the most attention and volume have been those related to utility and infrastructure," The Block's data team wrote on 31 August.

The chain also carries tokenized equities, a business whose transfer volume jumped 415% over 30 days. No outlet breaks Tuesday's revenue down by source, so how much of the record came from memecoin trading and how much from anything else is not published anywhere. Base, built on a competing stack, took $98,416 that day.

Two dates for one token release

ARB traded near 11 cents. CoinDesk called it a 30% gain over 24 hours, against the 7-to-10-cent range the token held from June, on volume of $618 million that was eight times the previous day's. The Crypto Times, later the same evening, had it at $0.1085 and up 26%, in a session between $0.08696 and $0.1202. Invezz, earliest of the three, said nearly 30% and about 45% across two weeks. Snapshots of a live market taken at different hours will differ, and these do. The scheduled September token release is a harder case: The Crypto Times puts it on 16 September at 92.6 million ARB, Invezz on 23 September at 139.15 million. Different date, different size, and we could not establish which is right.

Neither Robinhood nor Offchain Labs is quoted in any of the coverage located, and no governance proposal for the treasury's new income has been reported. "Even if it's not directly tied to revenues, we've seen this dynamic where beta eventually plays catch up," Ryan Myher, chief operating officer at Genius, told CoinDesk. The nearer test is mechanical. Robinhood Chain launched with a 90-day subsidy on gas, the fee paid to get a transaction processed, which crypto.news reported in July was holding its fee figures down. It runs out around October. Whether its removal lifts net revenue or thins the traffic decides what 8% of it is worth, and nobody has modelled that yet.