Arbitrum and Solana Co-founders Debate Broker Chain Fees
Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko publicly clashed over how Robinhood Chain should charge fees. Goldfeder claimed that brokers choose Arbitrum to be landlords rather than tenants; Yakovenko argued that relying on network congestion to raise prices is foolish, as the frontend should bill users directly.
Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 based on Arbitrum Orbit, launched on July 1, handling tokenized stocks and on-chain transactions. The expansion plan requires 10% of net protocol revenue to be returned to the Arbitrum ecosystem: 8% to the DAO treasury, 2% to the development fund, with Robinhood retaining about 90%. Recently, peak gas fees reached around $0.4, with daily fees amounting to millions of dollars, far exceeding Solana's typically low rates.
Yakovenko calculated the opportunity cost: that 10% is enough to cover Solana's transaction fees at about four times the rate, and if the chain were built on Solana, brokers could use that money to fully exempt users from gas fees. He questioned why income must come from underlying congestion, suggesting that reducing congestion to scale does not necessarily require sacrificing revenue. Goldfeder responded that this view is absurd: under Arbitrum's architecture, Robinhood retains 90% of gas fees; on Solana, fees go to validators, leaving brokers with nothing, and they still have to cover gas fees. Controlling their own sequencer allows them to also pocket fees from non-frontend and peripheral transactions.
During the planning phase, Robinhood evaluated two paths, ultimately deciding on a chain that could be independently deployed. Peak daily transactions could exceed ten million, with annual fees discussed at around $100 million. The Robinhood wallet is still subsidizing some gas exchanges until the end of September, with congestion premiums and subsidies existing simultaneously.
The landlord model treats sequencing rights as a commodity shelf: whoever produces the block collects the congestion tax. The tenant model leaves sequencing rights to public chain validators, with applications only able to sell subscriptions, spreads, and financial products. The difference in user bills between the $0.4 per transaction and nearly zero fees on Solana is magnified.
In market mechanics, buyers are super applications that retain on-chain transaction fees, while sellers are those who can relinquish their sequencer stack and must use low fees to exchange for throughput. Funds from user congestion fees enter the Robinhood treasury, with 10% distributed to ARB holders; if switched to Solana, the same money would go to validator staking rewards. Beneficiaries are brokers who can act as landlords and middleware that collects rent; those under pressure are end users hit by high peak gas fees and public chains that cannot retain fees from applications. The event is driven by the fact that TradFi's daily fees have become significant enough for both founders to argue over "who is the landlord."
Additionally, neither party has disclosed Robinhood's internal cost model, nor proven whether transaction volumes would proportionally increase after gas exemptions.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
This dispute is not about technical preferences, but rather a revenue-sharing table. Yakovenko views public chains as city roads: the lower the road fees, the better the shops on the road can sell their goods. Goldfeder sees Layer 2 as a shopping mall: the mall collects tolls, and brand stores collect product taxes. Robinhood chose the mall because tokenized stocks and peripheral market-making do not need to go through its app's cash register, allowing the sequencer to bill for all transactions. A historical comparison is Apple's 30% cut from in-app payments and Shopify allowing merchants to build their own checkout—those who control the checkout are the landlords.
The capital path subsequently diverges. Arbitrum turns the Orbit license into a predictable 10% rent, allowing the DAO to bill external chains for the first time. Solana leaves fees to validators, maintaining a security budget and low-latency narrative, but cannot retain the profit margins of super applications. Money from retail exchange slippage enters brokers, who then decide whether to feed ARB or SOL stakers. The motivation is strong: after daily fees reach a million dollars, the choice of architecture is equivalent to choosing shareholders.
Analogous to Base for Coinbase, application chains for Cosmos: once large applications become active daily, they will demand their own cash registers. The industry has shifted from competing on who is cheaper to competing on who allows applications to retain congestion taxes. The BNB growth officer subsequently announced that lowering gas fees is no longer the top priority, merely translating this dispute into industry slogans.
The structural judgment pertains to the transfer of pricing power. The mechanism is: when transactions occur on an application-controlled sequencer, the underlying layer only provides finality and data publication, and the right to charge no longer automatically belongs to validators. For Solana to win, it must prove that the profits from applications billing on Layer 1 exceed the 90% retained by self-built chains; for Arbitrum to win, it must prove that the security bought with the 10% rent is worth brokers continuing to act as landlords. The $0.4 paid by users is the price tag in this property negotiation.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Whoever produces the block collects the congestion tax.
The money for gas exemptions must come from another pocket.
Once applications grow up, they must become landlords themselves.