Debate over Robinhood Chain fees: Arbitrum or Solana?

Robinhood’s decision to build its own blockchain on Arbitrum rather than on Solana has sparked a public debate between two prominent founders in the crypto world. Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko fundamentally disagree over which network offers the best revenue model for Robinhood Chain.

In brief:

• Yakovenko argues that the 10% contribution to Arbitrum would have been enough to cover transaction costs on Solana four times over.
• Goldfeder responds that Robinhood retains 90% of gas fees on Arbitrum, whereas on Solana it would be zero.
• At the heart of the disagreement is whether Robinhood is better off as the owner of its own network or as a user of an existing network.

Yakovenko: Solana could have made a gasless experience possible

Anatoly Yakovenko kicked off the debate with the claim that the 10% revenue share Robinhood pays to Arbitrum would have been more than enough to cover all transaction costs on Solana. That would have allowed Robinhood to offer its users a completely fee-free experience, according to Yakovenko.

His reasoning: why give up a share of revenue to Arbitrum if the same amount on Solana would be more than sufficient to compensate for network fees? Moreover, he argued, Robinhood can simply charge users fees through the application itself, while benefiting from a cheaper underlying network at the same time.

Goldfeder: Being the owner pays more than being the tenant

Goldfeder firmly dismisses Yakovenko’s reasoning. On Arbitrum, Robinhood keeps around 90% of gas fees for itself, whereas on Solana it would not receive any share of the layer-1 fees. What is more, any gas costs Robinhood would want to absorb for users would come directly out of its own revenue.

“Robinhood chose Arbitrum to be the landlord rather than the tenant,” Goldfeder writes. In his view, it is not just about the transaction fees generated through the Robinhood app. The bulk of the fees comes from activity that does not go through the Robinhood frontend at all. If Robinhood were merely a user on an external network, it would miss out on that income entirely, even if it had brought in the users itself.

Robinhood Chain has attracted a fair amount of attention since its launch. Earlier, there was a six-minute outage on the network, and the rise of memecoins on Robinhood Chain also drew considerable attention. Robinhood has also faced resistance elsewhere: the CEO of AMC criticised the company over the introduction of tokenised shares.

At the time of writing, Solana is trading at $105, up 2.8% over the past 24 hours. Whether the debate will affect perceptions of the network as a potential platform for financial applications remains to be seen.