The Arbitrum Foundation released an unaudited half-year progress update, reporting a total revenue of $6.19 million for the Arbitrum DAO in the first half of 2026, with a gross profit margin of over 97%, surpassing the over 90% level of the entire year of 2025.

Revenue comes from four sources: Arbitrum One transaction fees, Timeboost sorting priority auctions, Arbitrum expansion plan licensing fees, and treasury management income. As of June 30, non-ARB treasury assets amounted to $125 million. Brendan Ma, head of investment strategy at the foundation, stated that the ecological financial structure is broadening and is nearing a diversified operational entity.

In the first half of the year, the network processed 478 million transactions, accounting for about 18% of the historical total of 2.7 billion. The average monthly stablecoin transfer volume exceeded $70 billion, with stablecoin holders increasing by 40% to 10.5 million. The report also indicated an ecological GDP of $206 million for the first half, totaling $1.7 billion, with 1,142 online projects and a 434% increase in open interest for derivatives, peaking at $1.5 billion, and over 2,000 tokenized RWA deployments, leading the category.

Based on the Arbitrum tech stack, the Robinhood Chain, which settles on Ethereum, launched its mainnet on July 1. The expansion plan stipulates that chains settling outside of Arbitrum One and Nova must return 10% of net protocol revenue to the ecosystem, with 8% going to the DAO treasury and 2% to the developer guild. In its first month, the chain contributed $360,000 in licensing fees, accounting for 35% of the DAO's revenue for that month, corresponding to a total revenue of about $1.03 million for the month.

On September 1, the Robinhood Chain's daily transaction fees reached $3.75 million, briefly exceeding those of the Ethereum mainnet and Base; that day, DEX trading volume surpassed $1.5 billion, with TVL exceeding $750 million. In about two months since launch, total transaction fees reached approximately $13.05 million, with about $1.3 million entering the Arbitrum ecosystem based on revenue sharing. Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, previously clarified that all external Layer 2s using this tech stack will return revenue at the same ratio.

In market mechanics, buyers include stock token, stablecoin, and meme traders flowing in from the Robinhood app, while sellers are on-chain speculative and market-making funds paying gas and priority fees. The driving forces are events and products: mainnet launch, tokenized stocks, and meme trading combined with the expansion plan that siphons external chain revenue back to the DAO. Funds are migrating from centralized brokerage accounts to self-built Layer 2s, with 10% turning into technology licensing fees. Beneficiaries include the DAO treasury, developer guild, and ARB governance pool, while the burden falls on Arbitrum One, which still mainly relies on its own transaction fees and has seen its daily fees significantly outpaced by external chains, as well as traditional brokerage models that delegate traffic to other settlement layers.

As of August 17, approximately 9.23 billion ARB tokens have been unlocked or stored in the DAO treasury, accounting for 92.3% of the total supply, with the remaining 770 million tokens scheduled to be released by March 2027 according to the original allocation plan.

Source: Public Information