DeFi Researcher Ignas Questions ETH Not Charging Rent to L2
DeFi researcher Ignas pointed out that Robinhood's Layer 2 chain only paid about $722 to the underlying layer in a single day, while Robinhood's daily fee revenue set a record of about $6 million; about 10% of this flowed to Arbitrum, with the portion reaching Ethereum Layer 1 being almost negligible. He asked: Is it a problem for Ethereum that the platform makes a lot of money while the settlement layer gets almost nothing?
Robinhood Chain went live on the mainnet on July 1, based on Arbitrum Orbit, for tokenized stocks, ETFs, and on-chain lending, with a block time of about 100 milliseconds. The Arbitrum expansion plan stipulates that 10% of net protocol revenue from the Orbit chain is returned to the ecosystem, with 8% going to the DAO treasury, 2% to the developer guild, and the operators keeping about 89%. In early samples, when on-chain revenue was about $816,000, Arbitrum received about $80,000, and Ethereum settlement was about $1,538, accounting for about 0.15%.
Fees surged after the end of August. Statistics from DefiLlama and others show that daily user fees reached between $3.75 million and $4.45 million, at one point exceeding the total gas fees of Ethereum, Solana, and Tron for that day. On September 3, there were reports indicating that user-side fees were about $4.5 million, with $396 paid to Ethereum for data publication and about $2 for proof, a ratio of about 11,400 to 1. Robinhood Wallet subsidizes gas for exchanges over $0.5 until September 29, with a large portion of demand coming from trading software addresses.
Ignas compared the current situation to Uber's early subsidies for growth: initially using low rents to bring traditional brokers into the ecosystem, and then raising rents once the migration costs are high enough. He believes that if the roadmap clearly states "first attract a large number of Layer 2 users, then monetize to Layer 1 after switching costs become high," it could be beneficial for ETH; however, he does not see this strategy in the current Ethereum roadmap. The Dencun upgrade itself is aimed at actively reducing the costs of publishing data on Layer 2.
In terms of market mechanisms, the buyers are the tokenized trading users in the Robinhood app, while the sellers are the brokers' self-operated chain. Funds are stuck in application layer fees, with the intermediate layer Arbitrum taking a 10% cut, and the settlement layer only selling cheap data blocks. The beneficiaries are Robinhood's retained profits and the ARB treasury; the pressured parties are holders of ETH who rely on gas burn and fees to maintain ETH's monetary premium. The event driver is TradFi keeping users on its own Orbit chain, only buying the thinnest finality from Ethereum.
Additionally, the $6 million and $4.45 million are peak values from different statistical measures, while the $722 corresponds to the underlying bill Ignas referred to for that day. It remains unverified whether users will continue to pay after the subsidies end.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
After Ethereum delegated execution rights to Layer 2, Layer 1 has become a wholesaler of security and data. Robinhood has maximized the wholesale price: setting gas prices itself, subsidizing users, and retaining 90%, only sending the compressed batches back to the mainnet. This is not a loophole, but a result of the 2024 Dencun design. A historical comparison is that Visa does not share every card swipe profit with the commercial banks behind the clearinghouses, and SaaS running on AWS does not have to give 89% of its revenue to Amazon— the difference is that ETH's narrative has always equated "economic activity" directly with "token capture."
The capital path has already stratified. Robinhood uses a super app to keep stock tokens and exchanges within its own chain, Arbitrum sells replicable Orbit licenses, and Ethereum sells blob space. Money flows from retail trading slippage and gas, first to brokers, then to DAOs, and finally to mainnet validators. The motivation is that regulatory-friendly brokers need finality but do not need to make their order books public on a congested Layer 1. Ignas's idea of "subsidizing first and then raising rents" requires Layer 1 to have pricing power over data availability, rather than continuing to treat blob prices as public goods.
Analogous to Base for Coinbase and OpBNB for Binance: application companies build their own chains, the parent brand takes a cut, and public chains collect tolls. Ethereum is transitioning from "charging for computation" to "charging for archival fees." Without rent increase clauses, archival fees will always be compressed; the high switching cost is the user's reliance on their Robinhood account, not on the Ethereum client.
Structural judgment belongs to the transfer of pricing power. The mechanism is: whoever interacts with the user sets the fees. If the settlement layer only sells substitutable data bits, rents will be pushed down to the marginal cost of the blob market. If the roadmap does not clearly state when and how to charge Layer 2 fees linked to its revenue, low rents are not a strategy, but merely a default. TradFi has entered, but the bills have not.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Wherever users place orders, profits remain at that layer.
Security can be wholesale, but pricing power cannot.
Low rents attract, but without rent increase clauses, it will always be at wholesale prices.