Arbitrum takes 10% as Robinhood Chain posts a record $3.75 million fee day

Robinhood Chain users paid a record $3.75 million in transaction fees on September 1.

That pushed the two-month-old network ahead of Ethereum mainnet and Base for the day, and every dollar of that feeds a revenue share back to Arbitrum, the stack it runs on.

DEX volume topped $1.5B, and locked value cleared $750M

The $3.75 million is an all-time high since the chain went mainnet on July 1. Robinhood Chain ended the day ahead of both Ethereum mainnet and Base.

Decentralized exchange volume surpassed $1.5 billion on September 1, also a record. Total value locked was just over $750 million.

Robinhood Chain’s public testnet had registered more than 200 million transactions before the mainnet went live. And Robinhood had been issuing tokenized stocks on Arbitrum One before spinning up a chain of its own.

According to Cryptopolitan, Robinhood Chain ranked No. 1 in Electric Capital’s ranking of developer activity less than two weeks after launch. On July 21, Alchemy CEO Nikil Viswanathan posted about the accomplishment on X.

The chain’s EVM compatibility and day-one partners provided developers a familiar surface to build on. Those partners included Alchemy, BitGo, Chainlink, and Uniswap.

Robinhood introduced the mainnet at a London keynote on July 1.

“We’re bringing the best of traditional finance and DeFi together,” Robinhood’s General Manager of Crypto and International Johann Kerbrat said at the time.

$360,000 in July licensing covered 35% of the DAO’s income

The Arbitrum Expansion Program is the vehicle that binds Robinhood’s fees to Arbitrum’s balance sheet. Chains on the Arbitrum stack that settle outside Arbitrum One or Arbitrum Nova send 10% of net protocol revenue back to the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Robinhood Chain’s licensing fees tallied $360,000 in July, its first full month. That one figure accounted for 35% of Arbitrum DAO’s income for the month.

The Expansion Program is like a franchise. Teams launch their own chains on Arbitrum’s technology, pay licensing fees, and get the security and interoperability of an established network in return.

The DAO pulled in $6.19 million in income in the first half of 2026. The four sources were Arbitrum One transaction fees, Timeboost priority-access auction, Expansion Program licensing, and treasury returns.

Gross margins on protocol revenue were above 97%, up from more than 90% in 2025. At the end of June, the DAO’s treasury held $125 million in non-ARB assets.

Robinhood Chain landed after that reporting window closed. Its effect is reflected in the July and forward numbers, not the headline H1 total.

“Against subdued market conditions across the industry, the ecosystem’s growth has accelerated since the half ended,” Arbitrum Foundation Head of Investment Strategy Brendan Ma said.

On July’s figures, Ma said, third-quarter income is already tracking to beat the second quarter by more than 40%.

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.