A fight over Robinhood Chain’s fee design has moved past a two-person argument and now includes voices from Solana, Arbitrum, and BNB Chain. The issue is no longer only how much a single transfer costs. It is who should earn money from network activity, and how a chain pays for the next several years of development.
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko opened the exchange after Robinhood Chain fees jumped during a busy stretch.
He said the 10 percent of net protocol revenue that Robinhood already sends to Arbitrum would have paid for the same traffic on Solana several times over.
On that basis, he argued, Robinhood could have subsidized users and offered a gas-free product instead of collecting congestion-driven fees on its own layer-2.
Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder rejected that framing.
On an Arbitrum Orbit chain, Robinhood keeps most of the net sequencer proceeds after settlement costs.
On Solana, base-layer fees go to the network, so Robinhood would keep none of them.
Zooming out on the debate of "what's best for Robinhood", I really want to point out further lowering gas fee is no longer the highest priority of the blockchain industry.
The real priority of all blockchains today is finding sustainable business model that feeds back into its… https://t.co/ic6Ixr5bPs
— Nina Rong (@nina_rong) September 6, 2026
Any waiver would then come from the company’s own cash.
Goldfeder’s line was that Robinhood picked Arbitrum so it could run the venue rather than rent space on someone else’s.
BNB Chain growth lead Nina Rong then widened the lens.
She said cutting gas further is no longer the industry’s main job.
Foundations spent years handing out grants and pushing fees down.
To last another cycle, she argued, chains need commercial structures that send money back into engineering and growth—whether that is gas, a revenue-share license, or some other contract.
The question, in her telling, is not which network is cheapest today.
Robinhood Chain went live on July 1 as an Ethereum layer-2 using Arbitrum’s stack.
Under the Expansion Program, 10 percent of net protocol revenue goes to the Arbitrum ecosystem (most to the DAO treasury, a smaller slice to developer funding).
Robinhood keeps the rest.
That is the “landlord” model Goldfeder described: the company operates its own environment and treats the stack as a licensed product.
Much of the recent fee volume has come from trading apps and token launches rather than only from tokenized stocks.
Layer-2 design lets the operator set prices and commercial terms while still settling to Ethereum.
Rong’s point is that the next test is whether that activity funds technology instead of another round of fee races.
The three views now sit side by side.
Solana’s case is that applications should live on cheap public rails and monetize in the product. Arbitrum’s case is that a large firm should own the chain and keep most of the economics. BNB Chain’s case is that the whole sector has to stop treating ever-lower gas as the finish line.