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