There are no signs at all that the fundamentals of the Robinhood Chain are going bad:
On-chain TVL remains stable at around $900 million On-chain stablecoin market cap has broken above $1 billion and continued to hit new all-time highs DEX trading volume hit $1.8 billion yesterday, also a phase high Ap Revenue stays at about $3 million, a high level, with Pons contributing nearly half
Meanwhile, Chain Fees—the metric representing the cost for users to use the chain—has been steadily declining.
Strategic abandonment of Robinhood Chain: a non-strong buyback burn-and-deflation dashboard, and a fake buyback propaganda board for buybacks not yet initiated.
Just two weeks after another ancient public chain, @Lisk, announced it was shutting down, yet another ancient public chain, @harmonyprotocol, has also announced it is shutting down.
The Harmony chain launched as early as 2019, and the team claims it was the first PoS chain to truly bring sharding onto mainnet.
In June 2022, Harmony’s cross-chain bridge Horizon was hacked for about $100 million, later confirmed by the FBI to have been carried out by North Korea’s state-sponsored hacker group Lazarus;
And just last month, Harmony was attacked again. By replaying cross-shard receipts, a huge amount of native token $ONE was minted out of thin air, and the team had no choice but to roll back the chain.
This became the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
Yet another ancient L1 blockchain that has been running for decades has announced its shutdown. @Lisk. The Lisk Chain went live on the mainnet as far back as 2016.
Its early positioning was consistently as an L1. In 2024, it transitioned from an independent sovereign L1 into an L2 built on OP Stack, joining the OP Superchain ecosystem.
After the transition to L2, the Lisk team had ulterior motives and carried out a second round of token inflation-style extraction, similar to Sonic.
As expected, it ended up cutting the community users again.
Before, when the technology wasn't good enough, it passively charged L2s high DA fees and was criticized for poor infrastructure, causing L2 gas fees to soar;
Now, when the technology is good enough, it proactively lowers DA fees for L2s by scale, and is criticized for collecting too little tax and being unable to capture the value of the L2 ecosystem.
The explosive popularity of Robinhood Chain has driven Ethereum DA usage to an ATH, but it is still far below Ethereum's target block capacity (block capacity will increase significantly after the Fusaka upgrade + BPO hard fork).
Not pumping the price has become Ethereum's original sin.
Let's verify the data end again: Robinhood Chain's outrageous gas fees from yesterday:
Yesterday, RH Chain's daily Chain Fees and Chain Revenue were the highest among all public chains. Chain Revenue reached an astonishing $3.38M, which is more than $2M higher than Solana.
The difference is that Solana distributes fees to validator nodes, while RH Chain keeps everything as sorter revenue and has Robinhood pocket it (it shares 10% with Arbitrum).
So how much did Robinhood pay for this? Using Fees $3.75M - Revenue $3.38M, it roughly cost them $0.37M. This includes the DA fees paid to L1, the costs of maintaining the state tree for packed blocks, and so on.
In other words, when you pay gas fees of several U on-chain, only $0.37M is the cost Robinhood truly spends to serve you; the rest is basically your tip paid to Robinhood.
A full-on money-printing machine. Just look—the Arbitrum team people can't even hold back their smiles.
It’s all Robinhood’s fault: Solana founder Toly and Arbitrum founder Steven are openly feuding on X.
First, some background: when Robinhood was in the product-planning stage, it evaluated @solana and @arbitrum, and ultimately chose Arbitrum, which could be deployed as an independent chain.
@toly mocked the 10% revenue share that RH Chain pays to Arbitrum, saying it could fully cover 4x Solana’s on-chain transaction fees. In other words, if RH Chain had been built on Solana from the start, user gas fees could have been reduced by an order of magnitude;
@sgoldfed’s rebuttal was equally sarcastic, saying that by building on Arbitrum, Robinhood could keep 90% of sequencer revenue; if it chose Solana, it would keep 0. He also said Robinhood chose to be a landlord rather than a tenant.
The real question is: If Robinhood had chosen to be a tenant on Solana back then, would it have achieved what it has today?
Robinhood Chain Yesterday’s actual mainnet load can be considered to have eased: it dropped from 42 million gas/s to 36 million gas/s.
Even Base, which is as strong as an L2 and already extremely mature in technology, has a gas target of only around 33 million gas/s—and it still can’t hold up.
If you put such a long period of high load on any Ethereum L2 chain, sky-high gas fees may be hard to avoid.
Unless—I mean unless, the L2 project team doesn’t want to make money from this congestion fee.
Robinhood can reduce the magnitude of on-chain gas fees by changing just one parameter.
It’s called gas target. This parameter does not indicate the hard capacity limit of a block—gas limit is. It’s an ideal amount set by the official to adjust the base fee. If the actual load exceeds the ideal amount, you’ll get a backlog (gas backlog). The more backlog there is, the higher the base fee becomes, and accordingly the L2 execution fee gets more expensive.
Yesterday, the average actual load on the RH Chain was about 40 million gas/s. Although the official hasn’t published the gas target metric, we can be sure gas target is set to some extent below 40 million gas/s, causing severe backlog and resulting in exorbitantly priced gas fees.
Robinhood has also not disclosed the specific value of gas limit. If we assume its Arbitrum Orbit default gas limit of 32 million gas per block, then with an RH Chain block time of 0.1s per block, its theoretical gas limit should be 320 million gas/s.
TLDR: As long as you adjust the gas target parameter to be higher than the chain’s actual load, the gas fees can be reduced by orders of magnitude.
Robinhood can reduce the magnitude of on-chain gas fees by changing just one parameter.
It’s called gas target. This parameter does not indicate the hard capacity limit of a block—gas limit is. It’s an ideal amount set by the official to adjust the base fee. If the actual load exceeds the ideal amount, you’ll get a backlog (gas backlog). The more backlog there is, the higher the base fee becomes, and accordingly the L2 execution fee gets more expensive.
Yesterday, the average actual load on the RH Chain was about 40 million gas/s. Although the official hasn’t published the gas target metric, we can be sure gas target is set to some extent below 40 million gas/s, causing severe backlog and resulting in exorbitantly priced gas fees.
Robinhood has also not disclosed the specific value of gas limit. If we assume its Arbitrum Orbit default gas limit of 32 million gas per block, then with an RH Chain block time of 0.1s per block, its theoretical gas limit should be 320 million gas/s.
TLDR: As long as you adjust the gas target parameter to be higher than the chain’s actual load, the gas fees can be reduced by orders of magnitude.
Whether the hype around Robinhood Chain can last is already facing clear division on X.
My personal view is very clear: the narrative of the RH Chain ecosystem is another long-cycle story following the inscription narrative, and it is still in the relatively early stage of incubation.
Robinhood’s hotspot is not driven by a single point. Instead, meme, NFT, crypto stocks, and DeFi all bloom in parallel and rise and fall in succession—whenever the attention starts to cool down, it quickly picks back up.
And all of this is happening in a blockchain environment crowded with strong rivals and extreme competition, with formidable opponents like Solana, Base, and HyperEVM. With such strong resource backing, it’s easy to imagine how strong the resources behind RH Chain are.
So is the underlying technology of RH Chain truly outstanding? The answer is no. It can’t even be called an L2 chain with technical innovation. This can be seen from L2Beat’s grading, from the recent high gas fees, and from the fact that they never promote their own technology.
But even with an L2 chain that has no technical advantages, it has still managed to beat Base—while Base is holding a “coin issuance expectation” card as a trump.
You’re telling me that such a chain only has about a month of spotlight? I can’t agree.
Last night, Base changed its “free-rider” style in a rush, rushing to the creator incentives; Today Solana has changed all its profile pictures, doing auctions and spending to clean up PR—disaster all around;
Robinhood Chain finally managed to push competitors to the edge.
Whether the hype around Robinhood Chain can last is already facing clear division on X.
My personal view is very clear: the narrative of the RH Chain ecosystem is another long-cycle story following the inscription narrative, and it is still in the relatively early stage of incubation.
Robinhood’s hotspot is not driven by a single point. Instead, meme, NFT, crypto stocks, and DeFi all bloom in parallel and rise and fall in succession—whenever the attention starts to cool down, it quickly picks back up.
And all of this is happening in a blockchain environment crowded with strong rivals and extreme competition, with formidable opponents like Solana, Base, and HyperEVM. With such strong resource backing, it’s easy to imagine how strong the resources behind RH Chain are.
So is the underlying technology of RH Chain truly outstanding? The answer is no. It can’t even be called an L2 chain with technical innovation. This can be seen from L2Beat’s grading, from the recent high gas fees, and from the fact that they never promote their own technology.
But even with an L2 chain that has no technical advantages, it has still managed to beat Base—while Base is holding a “coin issuance expectation” card as a trump.
You’re telling me that such a chain only has about a month of spotlight? I can’t agree.
Robinhood Chain's app revenue at the daily level continues to go up, terrifying indeed.
It already broke $3 million yesterday, ranking second behind Hyperliquid L1, only after Solana.
Excluding protocols that have not yet issued tokens, the top 5 protocols by vevenue over the past 24 hours are: @ponsdotfamily @Uniswap @uponrh @S_L_V_R_FUN @Lighter_xyz
Treat their protocol tokens as a basket ETF and buy and hold: $PONS + $UNI + $UP + $SLVR + $LIT
It may be far happier than coming and going on Robinhood.
Whether the hype around Robinhood Chain can last is already facing clear division on X.
My personal view is very clear: the narrative of the RH Chain ecosystem is another long-cycle story following the inscription narrative, and it is still in the relatively early stage of incubation.
Robinhood’s hotspot is not driven by a single point. Instead, meme, NFT, crypto stocks, and DeFi all bloom in parallel and rise and fall in succession—whenever the attention starts to cool down, it quickly picks back up.
And all of this is happening in a blockchain environment crowded with strong rivals and extreme competition, with formidable opponents like Solana, Base, and HyperEVM. With such strong resource backing, it’s easy to imagine how strong the resources behind RH Chain are.
So is the underlying technology of RH Chain truly outstanding? The answer is no. It can’t even be called an L2 chain with technical innovation. This can be seen from L2Beat’s grading, from the recent high gas fees, and from the fact that they never promote their own technology.
But even with an L2 chain that has no technical advantages, it has still managed to beat Base—while Base is holding a “coin issuance expectation” card as a trump.
You’re telling me that such a chain only has about a month of spotlight? I can’t agree.
Let's verify the data end again: Robinhood Chain's outrageous gas fees from yesterday:
Yesterday, RH Chain's daily Chain Fees and Chain Revenue were the highest among all public chains. Chain Revenue reached an astonishing $3.38M, which is more than $2M higher than Solana.
The difference is that Solana distributes fees to validator nodes, while RH Chain keeps everything as sorter revenue and has Robinhood pocket it (it shares 10% with Arbitrum).
So how much did Robinhood pay for this? Using Fees $3.75M - Revenue $3.38M, it roughly cost them $0.37M. This includes the DA fees paid to L1, the costs of maintaining the state tree for packed blocks, and so on.
In other words, when you pay gas fees of several U on-chain, only $0.37M is the cost Robinhood truly spends to serve you; the rest is basically your tip paid to Robinhood.
A full-on money-printing machine. Just look—the Arbitrum team people can't even hold back their smiles.
In recent days, people have been complaining that gas fees on the Robinhood Chain are expensive—often several “U.” But have you ever thought about why, despite the technology being quite mature, L2 is still turning into a “members-only” chain?
L2 gas fees mainly consist of two parts: L1 DA fees + L2 execution fees. After the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade and the BPO hard fork, DA capacity increased significantly, and this portion of the DA fees has already achieved an order-of-magnitude reduction.
So the problem must be with the L2 execution fees. The pricing power for L2 execution fees is determined by Robinhood—more precisely, jointly determined by Robinhood and Arbitrum.
As L2 execution fees are used as revenue for the RH Chain sequencer, Robinhood takes them and then shares 10% of net profit with Arbitrum.
Now you’ve found the reason why RH Chain’s recent total chain-level revenue has been continuously hitting new all-time highs, right? You’ve also found the reason Arbitrum has been using this as a bullish catalyst to pull the market up, right?
I bet the smart one in you has already guessed the reason why gas fees on the Robinhood chain are so expensive.