Free isn't always a good thing.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

Over the weekend starting September 5th, a public debate about Robinhood Chain's fee model brought the ideological conflict between the Solana and Arbitrum camps—focused on "competing for lower gas fees" versus "seeking sustainable business models"—to the forefront.

The story begins with Robinhood Chain. On July 1, 2026, this once "viral brokerage" officially launched Robinhood Chain, an independent L2 based on Arbitrum Orbit, focusing on financial products like tokenized U.S. stocks and perpetual contracts. Since its launch, this L2 has seen growing popularity, with daily fees once exceeding millions of dollars.

As transaction volume climbed, in early September, the average gas fee on this L2 rose to about $0.40—more than 100 times the transaction cost on Solana, and even twice that on Ethereum mainnet.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko reposted the tweet and noted that Robinhood Chain allocates 10% of net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem per the agreement (8% to the DAO treasury, 2% to the development fund), while Robinhood retains about 90% itself. After calculation, Toly stated that this 10% share is enough to cover four times the fees for the same transaction volume on Solana. If Robinhood had built on Solana initially, it could have offered users an almost gas-free experience instead of making users pay for network congestion. He criticized this "making money from underlying congestion" model as unwise; front-end applications should charge users directly, while the underlying layer should pursue extreme low costs.

Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder responded quickly. He expressed respect for Toly but called the view "absurd." Under the Arbitrum architecture, Robinhood can retain 90% of gas revenue; if deployed on Solana, the underlying fees go to validators, and Robinhood gets nothing—if it still wants to subsidize user gas, it has to pay out of its own pocket. Goldfeder succinctly summarized: Robinhood chose Arbitrum to be a "landlord" rather than a "renter." Only by operating its own sequencer and controlling most of the revenue can it truly turn infrastructure into a sustainable business.

Under Steven Goldfeder's reply, the two continued to discuss whether fees should be charged by the chain itself or by applications while the chain remains free.

Subsequently, Nina Rong, Head of Growth at BNB Chain who previously worked at Arbitrum for about four years, stepped out of the specific debate on "which is better for Robinhood." She pointed out that further reducing gas fees is no longer the top priority for the blockchain industry. The real priority is finding a sustainable business model that can feed back into technology and growth—whether through gas fees, revenue sharing, or other commercial agreements. Over the past five years, most blockchain foundations have focused on granting funds and lowering gas fees; but to survive another five years, a solid commercial structure must be established.

Chinese user @lanyihou responded to Nina with more direct data: Trading a token worth about 200U on Robinhood Chain might require paying 21U in gas plus taxes—discussing business models in such an environment is "worse than drug trafficking." Nina replied that fees can be reduced immediately if desired (it's just a matter of changing a number), but this doesn't solve the industry's fundamental problem—precisely in such an environment, there's a greater need to find a model that users can accept, and that platforms don't lose money or even profit from. She cited products like GMGN as examples to show users are willing to pay for truly valuable services.

Sustainable Development of the Chain Itself

The core of this debate is actually two different value capture paths.

One is the "extreme low cost + ecosystem flywheel" approach. Solana has long maintained high throughput and low fees to attract a large number of applications and users, and the network itself maintains security and incentives through mechanisms like base fees and MEV. If an application wants to offer users gas-free transactions, it needs to bear the cost itself or monetize through front-end fees, ads, subscriptions, etc. The advantage is an extreme user experience; the disadvantage is that applications cannot directly benefit from underlying congestion.

Solana indeed relied on low costs and fast transaction confirmation to stand out in meme wars over the past few years, and innovative products like propAMM emerged during traffic booms. This is a path that has been verified.

The other is the "customizable app chain + revenue sharing" approach. Arbitrum Orbit allows projects to launch their own dedicated chains, control their own sequencers and most fee revenue, while paying a fixed percentage to the parent ecosystem. For large entities like Robinhood, this is equivalent to converting their user traffic and transaction behavior into predictable infrastructure revenue, while still leveraging Ethereum's security and Arbitrum's tech stack. The advantage is a clearer business loop; the disadvantage is potentially higher fees for users.

Not only Arbitrum—Optimism, ZKsync, and even Avalanche's early subnets (now independent L1s) are developing based on this logic.

Burning money on grants and infinitely lowering gas fees is feasible, but for a chain to survive long-term, it must have a positive cash flow mechanism to support R&D, security audits, ecosystem incentives, and market expansion. Whether it's L1 or L2, they all eventually have to answer the same question: Who pays for the network's long-term maintenance? Users, applications, or the protocol itself through reasonable pricing?

This is Arbitrum's view, and also the underlying logic of BNB Chain's current growth head.

Sustainability doesn't equal high fees. The key is whether the fee structure is transparent, matches real value, and forms a positive cycle. Excessively high fees drive away users; excessively low fees turn infrastructure into a tragedy of the commons. Robinhood Chain's current high fees reflect real demand after early subsidies end, and also expose room for optimization in dynamic pricing and capacity management.

Neither approach is absolutely right or wrong. When the market is booming, Solana gathers attention and liquidity due to low costs; during market downturns, users don't mind paying a little more for rare profit opportunities. Solana's model may rely more on operational capabilities, while Ethereum's ecosystem loop ensures "craftsmen won't starve in lean years."

"Only Ethereum Is Taking the Hit"

There's an easily overlooked but harsh fact in this debate: Although Robinhood Chain settles to Ethereum, most of the value does not flow back to the Ethereum mainnet.

According to public data and protocol arrangements, most of the gas fees paid by users are retained by Robinhood as the chain operator (about 90%), about 10% goes to the Arbitrum ecosystem (DAO and development fund), and the portion actually used for Ethereum data availability and settlement is extremely low—at its lowest, it's barely more than one ten-thousandth. In other words, Ethereum provides the security base but only gets a very thin "toll fee."

This is the structural reality of the current Ethereum L2 ecosystem: App chains and dedicated L2s截留 most execution-layer value, while the mainnet plays more of a "settlement and data availability layer" role. For Ethereum itself, this is both a scaling success (transactions are offloaded, mainnet congestion relieved) and a value capture challenge: The security budget ultimately relies on mainnet's own fees and staking rewards. When a large number of high-value activities migrate to L2 or even independent app chains, how the mainnet continues to get sufficient incentives becomes a long-term problem.

Related discussions have continued for years, and Robinhood Chain's emergence has pushed this issue to the forefront again.

In fact, Ethereum noticed this problem early on but didn't rush to "capture value"; instead, it maintained strategic focus and bet on the long-term growth trend of blob demand. For Ethereum, as long as ETH is still used to pay gas fees and L2s still need mainnet settlement for finality, long-term value realization can always be expected.

Conclusion

The confrontation between Toly and Goldfeder points to the formation of an industry consensus: Blockchain has passed the pure technical competition phase of "as long as it's cheaper, it's better" and entered the deep waters of business models and ecosystem sustainability.

For applications, choosing to be a landlord or renter depends on their own traffic scale and monetization capabilities; for public chains and L2s, how to design mechanisms that both attract builders and generate positive cash flow will determine survival in the next five years. As the largest security provider, Ethereum also needs to continuously think about how to get reasonable value backflow for the mainnet while L2s prosper.

There is no absolute winner in this debate; the core is the triangular balance between user experience, infrastructure profitability, and underlying security incentives, which is far more complex than "who has lower gas fees." The real winners will be those participants who can find sustainable solutions among these three.