Robinhood Chain's Fees Fall 97% as Transactions Hold Near Peak

Robinhood Chain took in about $230,000 of fees on 16 September. Two weeks earlier it was running near $8 million a day. That is a 97% fall, and the traffic did not fall with it: the network handled 8.9 million transactions on the 16th against 13.1 million at the peak, and a transaction that cost 64 cents at the height of the rush cost 2.6 cents on the 16th. CoinDesk published the figures at midday UTC on Saturday and updated them an hour later. The chain is still busy. What it is no longer doing is earning.

Where the money went

The memecoin trade that produced the peak cooled. Pons, the launchpad token that carried much of the volume, saw trading fall 37% week on week, and protocol revenue on it nearly halved, $10.7 million against $5.8 million. Across the seven days to 16 September the chain's fees averaged 82% below the week before while transactions were down 6%, on daily volume of about $1.5 billion. Use barely moved. The price of using it collapsed.

Two peaks, two numbers

How big the peak was depends on which line of the dashboard an outlet read. CoinDesk's $8 million is a fee figure. Crypto Briefing, in an account KuCoin carried on 11 September, puts peak daily revenue above $4 million falling to $1.06 million, and counts the decline at 83% from the peak and 76% week on week as of that date. Those are different measurements over different windows, and neither account reconciles with the other. This desk recorded $1.92 million of revenue in a single day on 1 September, the chain's best since it opened on 1 July. The same KuCoin item traces gas on the network from about 0.02 gwei to 0.5 gwei at the height of the rush, a 25-fold move no other account read here carries.

What did not move

Liquidity stayed put. Stablecoin supply on the chain slipped 1% to about $1 billion, and decentralized exchange volume rose 5% to $13 billion over the week. Applications built on the network kept roughly $1.5 million of daily revenue between them, several times what the chain itself collected. Solana, the obvious home for a departing memecoin crowd, saw its own exchange volume fall 8% across the same seven days; the network cut its slot time to 250 milliseconds on Friday in an unrelated upgrade. Nothing in the week's data shows traders leaving. KuCoin's item also puts cumulative exchange volume above $34.6 billion in the chain's first two months, with real-world asset trading under $30 million, less than 0.1% of that total. Those two figures appear in one account only.

A cheaper chain, and who pays for it

Robinhood Chain routes a tenth of its net revenue to Arbitrum, whose technology it is built on, so a fee collapse lands on that treasury as well. No account read here publishes what the Arbitrum share comes to at $230,000 a day. Whether 16 September is a floor or a step on the way down is also unpublished; the figures stop there. Three of the accounts carrying CoinDesk's numbers, PANews, Phemex and Bloomingbit, add a line that trading volume fell 32%. CoinDesk's own figures put transactions down 6% and exchange volume up 5%, and carry no 32% anywhere. The readings do not reconcile, and the 32% is not used here.