BNB Growth Officer Says Public Chains Must Have Sustainable Business Models
Nina Rong, the Growth Executive Director of BNB Chain, commented on the debate between Arbitrum founder Steven Goldfeder and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko regarding the Robinhood Chain fee model: continuing to lower Gas fees is no longer the industry's top priority. What all public chains truly need to find is a sustainable business model that can support technology and growth, which could be through Gas, revenue sharing, or other business collaborations.
She summarized the public perception of the foundation over the past five years into two points: issuing grants for investments and lowering Gas fees. If blockchain companies want to continue for another five years, they must have a solid business structure. She has worked for about four years at Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain Labs and expressed respect for both debaters.
The debate itself is stuck between landlords and tenants. Goldfeder stated that Robinhood could retain about 90% of the gas fees under the Arbitrum framework, while if built on Solana, the underlying fees would go to validators, leaving brokers with nothing, forcing them to cover Gas fees for users out of their own pockets; choosing Arbitrum is to be a landlord rather than a tenant. Yakovenko believes that the 10% paid to Arbitrum is sufficient to cover approximately four times the transaction fees on Solana during the same period, and that applications should earn money on the front end, not rely on network congestion to raise prices; the peak Gas fee is about $0.4.
The Robinhood Chain launched on July 1, with peak daily fees in the millions of dollars, and cumulative fees exceeding tens of millions, with annualized discussions reaching over $100 million. 10% goes into the Arbitrum ecosystem, 8% into the DAO, and 2% into the developer guild. BNB Chain itself has previously lowered Gas fees to about 0.05 gwei, a reduction of over 90% compared to historical levels, and has now publicly announced its exit from the arms race of further reductions.
In terms of market mechanisms, buyers are application companies that need to build their own chains to retain transaction fees, while sellers can offer sorting and fee rights. Funds flow from user congestion premiums to brokerages, which then distribute 10% to middleware token holders. Beneficiaries are those who can sign revenue-sharing agreements; those under pressure are those who rely on lower Gas fees to attract applications but cannot retain congestion fees within the network. The event-driven narrative is that TradFi applications have already proven that transaction fees can exceed $100 million annually, shifting the narrative from throughput to revenue-sharing rights.
Additionally, Rong did not provide the revenue-sharing ratio for BNB Chain itself, nor did she explain how it settles with the Binance application layer.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The competition among public chains has been focused on "cheaper" for five years, while the foundation's balance sheet has been about "issuing tokens for subsidies" for the same duration. Robinhood's daily fees in the millions reveal both accounts: users are willing to pay, but the question is who has the right to collect. Rong, transitioning from her role at Arbitrum to BNB growth, echoes the same sentiment—stacks need to have gross margins like companies. The historical analogy is that cloud vendors stopped competing on free tiers and started selling reserved instances, and mobile systems shifted from no app revenue sharing to taking a 30% cut: once infrastructure becomes the default, the next battle is over revenue sharing tables.
The capital path is shifting from token incentives to contracts. Grants turn developers into cost centers for the foundation; revenue sharing turns developers into sales channels. Arbitrum has turned the Orbit chain into billable leases, Solana retains fees for validators to exchange for security budgets, and BNB connects chains with exchange users but is long viewed as "cheap EVM." Money flows from application daily fees into DAOs or validators, then back to clients and validator upgrades. The motivation is that the foundation's reserve tokens are insufficient to last another five years.
The analogy is not about new public chain white papers, but rather about Stripe and Shopify competing for payment revenue, and AWS and Snowflake competing for query revenue. The industry is shifting from throughput competition to contract competition. Whoever can make Robinhood a landlord will retain the next brokerage; whoever can only make Robinhood a tenant will continue to compete for lower Gas fees.
Structural judgment pertains to the transfer of pricing power. The mechanism is: once Gas is low enough, incremental revenue comes from congestion taxes, sorting rights, and licenses, rather than further lowering fees. If the foundation still regards "cheaper" as a strategy, it hands over pricing power to the application layer. A sustainable structure means: first agree on who collects money during peak periods, then decide whether to subsidize users.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Lowering fees further won't buy the budget for the next five years.
If applications want to be landlords, the stack can only sell leases.
Grants can initiate ecosystems, but contracts are needed to sustain them.