Today, Arbitrum ($ARB) demonstrated one of the most impressive price surges on the cryptocurrency market. Ranking 53rd among the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, $ARB has risen approximately 49% over the last 24 hours, reaching a price of $0.1972. Although the gain at some points during the day exceeded 50%, $ARB remains roughly 92% below its all-time high of $2.40, recorded on January 12, 2024.
One of the main catalysts for the sharp rise in $ARB is the rapid growth of Robinhood Chain, built on $ARB's technology from Robinhood. Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 network that launched its mainnet on July 1, 2026, uses Arbitrum Orbit infrastructure. As part of the Arbitrum expansion program, $ARB-based blockchains operating outside of Arbitrum One and Nova allocate 10% of their protocol net revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem. According to data from the Arbitrum Foundation, in July, the first month of Robinhood Chain's operation, the $360,000 in licensing revenue received through this program accounted for 35% of the monthly revenue for the Arbitrum DAO.
The recent unprecedented surge in activity on Robinhood Chain has further heightened the importance of this revenue model for Arbitrum. Daily fee collection in the network increased to millions of dollars in early September, on some days surpassing that of the Ethereum mainnet and Coinbase's Base network. Record levels were also recorded in trading volume on Robinhood Chain's decentralized exchange: daily DEX trading volume reached billions of dollars, boosting investor interest in the $ARB ecosystem.
One of the most common use cases for Robinhood Chain is its 'Tokenized Stocks' product. Issued by Robinhood Assets Limited, these tokens track the economic performance of US companies such as NVIDIA, Apple, and Alphabet. While they do not provide users with direct legal ownership of the company shares, these products are offered in many countries outside the United States.
The economic interaction model between Arbitrum and Robinhood has also sparked notable discussion on social media between the founders of Solana and Arbitrum. Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, argued that the 10% of Robinhood Chain's revenue paid to the Arbitrum ecosystem is sufficient to cover roughly four times the transaction fee amount on Solana, suggesting that if Robinhood chose Solana, it could offer users significantly lower, even subsidized, transaction costs.
Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs and $ARB, responded to Yakovenko, stating that Robinhood retains approximately 90% of the transaction revenue on the $ARB infrastructure, while receiving no revenue from base transaction fees on the Solana network. Goldfeder added that by choosing Arbitrum, Robinhood decided to "become a landlord, not a tenant".
In $ARB's revenue distribution model, 8% of the 10% goes to the Arbitrum DAO treasury, managed by $ARB token holders, and 2% is allocated for ecosystem development. Thus, the continuous growth in transaction volume and network revenue on Robinhood Chain, although not directly distributed to $ARB token holders, is viewed as an important factor in strengthening the revenue and economy of the Arbitrum DAO ecosystem.
*This is not investment advice.
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