Two months after Robinhood launched its own blockchain, the question of who actually benefits from its fee structure has turned into a proxy war between Arbitrum and Solana’s founding teams.
Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko took their disagreement public on X in early September 2026, trading barbs over Robinhood Chain’s transaction fee model. At stake: a philosophical rift about whether blockchain infrastructure should function as a revenue engine for the app sitting on top, or whether fees should flow to the validators keeping the network secure.
The $0.40 question
Robinhood Chain launched on July 1, 2026, built on the Arbitrum Orbit framework. It uses ETH as its gas asset, runs 100-millisecond block times, and supports both tokenized real-world assets and DeFi activity. By early September, the chain was processing around 10.4 million transactions per day during peak periods, generating roughly $4.22 million in daily fees.
Average transaction costs had climbed to approximately $0.40 each during congestion spikes.
