Robinhood Chain users paid a record $3.75 million in transaction fees on September 1, an all-time high for the two-month-old network. The figure placed the chain ahead of both Ethereum mainnet and Base — the Coinbase-backed layer-2 that has been among the most active Ethereum networks by transaction throughput — for the day, and every dollar of it feeds a revenue share back to Arbitrum, the technology stack the network runs on.

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

The $3.75 million in fees is the highest daily total since Robinhood Chain went live on mainnet on July 1, and the network finished September 1 ahead of Ethereum mainnet and Base.

Decentralized exchange volume surpassed $1.5 billion on the same day, also a record. Total value locked stood just above $750 million.

Robinhood Chain's public testnet had registered more than 200 million transactions before the mainnet launch, and Robinhood had already 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 its day-one partners gave 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.

The launch is part of a broader shift in which established retail brokerages and financial firms are deploying their own blockchain infrastructure on existing layer-2 technology rather than building networks from scratch.

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

The Arbitrum Expansion Program is the mechanism that ties Robinhood's fees to Arbitrum's balance sheet. Chains built 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 totaled $360,000 in July, its first full month of operation. That single figure accounted for 35% of Arbitrum DAO's income for the month.

The Expansion Program operates much like a franchise: teams launch their own chains on Arbitrum's technology, pay licensing fees, and in return receive the security and interoperability of an established network.

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

Gross margins on protocol revenue exceeded 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 launched after that reporting window closed, so its impact appears in July and later figures rather than in 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.

Based on July's figures, Ma said third-quarter income is already tracking to beat the second quarter by more than 40%. Whether that pace holds will become clearer in the coming monthly licensing figures, which will show how much of the record September 1 activity converts into sustained Expansion Program revenue for Arbitrum.