Robinhood's chain has collected $3.8 million in transaction fees since July 1st, and Ethereum has taken about $24,000 of it (save this).
That's the criticism our crypto analyst John Gillen put to Ansgar Dietrichs, Ethlabs' executive director, on The Milk Road Show.
Robinhood Chain is an L2, executing the trades itself and then posting a compressed record of them back to Ethereum for final settlement.
Robinhood keeps what its own chain charges, hands Arbitrum 10% for the software it runs on, and pays Ethereum only the cost of publishing that record.
According to growthepie, fees on the chain since launch come to roughly $3.8 million, of which about $23,700 reached Ethereum, or 0.6%.
On growthepie's numbers the L2s paid Ethereum roughly 41% of their revenue in 2024 and under 10% in 2025, and Robinhood Chain is at 0.6%, which means the busier this ecosystem gets the less the base layer collects, and that almost never happens to infrastructure.
The mechanism that would carry any of it to an $ETH holder is the burn, because the fee an L2 pays for data space on Ethereum gets destroyed rather than distributed, and that destruction is automatic rather than a governance decision.
So the plumbing works as designed while almost nothing moves through it, and ETH is on the receiving end of a price Ethereum deliberately set near zero.
Ansgar's answer was that fees are the third of three things and the least important of them. The first is Ethereum being where activity between all these chains has to meet, and the second is new demand for ETH as fintech chains bring their own customer bases.
Every transaction on that Robinhood Chain is paid for in ETH and DefiLlama puts $242 million of assets bridged in through its official bridge.
That said, Robinhood's Q2 filing on July 29 reported 28.4 million funded customers with just over 1 million of them outside the US, and Robinhood's own disclosure says its stock tokens are not registered under US securities laws and not available to US persons.
There's also the question of what any of these figures measure, because they all sit inside a 90-day window where Robinhood is covering its customers' gas, and that window closes at the end of September.
October is the month that tells you something, the first one where the people transacting have to pay for it themselves.
@M0xt_ has argued that Ethereum can win without ETH winning, and that those are two separate bets, and that $24,000 against $3.8 million figure is what he's getting at.
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