arbitrum

According to DefiLlama's on-chain cross-chain net flow data, Robinhood Chain had a net outflow of 306.19 million USD last week, ranking first among all chains in terms of outflow scale, far exceeding Hyperliquid (-179.51 million USD) and Polygon (-145.33 million USD).In terms of net inflow, Arbitrum leads with 184.14 million USD, followed by BSC (+142.38 million USD), Plasma (+120.38 million USD), Ethereum (+112.9 million USD), and Avalanche (+102.43 million USD).

Co-founder of Arbitrum Steven Goldfeder and co-founder of Solana Toly engaged in a debate over on-chain transaction fees, MEV protection, and the single sequencer model.Steven stated that one cannot simply compare surface-level fees. Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain actively prevent front-running and most harmful MEV, while some chains that claim lower fees have higher MEV costs, including front-running against retail investors. He expressed a preference for paying clear fees upfront rather than incurring hidden losses from front-running, sandwich attacks, and other issues for the sake of lower fees.Toly countered that Arbitrum currently has a less favorable bid-ask spread and higher fees. The 10% cut taken from transaction fees alone translates to a cost in basis points that exceeds the loss rate from sandwich attacks, which he estimates to be about 10 times that of the latter, not accounting for the impact of the spread. He emphasized, "A single sequencer that pursues shareholder value maximization can never outperform permissionless competition."

Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder stated that there is a misunderstanding in the market regarding the supply of ARB, often including the tokens held by the DAO in the locked supply.He pointed out that the token unlock for ARB investors and team members is nearing completion and will be fully unlocked by March next year. Currently, the portion of tokens that have not yet been unlocked accounts for approximately 7.7% of the total supply.The Arbitrum DAO treasury currently holds 2.84 billion ARB, but these tokens are not traditional locked tokens; they are controlled by circulating token holders, and their transfer must be approved by a vote from other token holders.

The founder of Arbitrum, Steven Goldfeder, and Solana co-founder, Toly, engaged in a debate over the fee model of Robinhood Chain. Toly claimed that the 10% revenue share paid to Arbitrum by Robinhood Chain is sufficient to cover four times the transaction fees on the Solana chain, suggesting that if deployed on Solana, user gas fees could significantly decrease. In response, Goldfeder stated that Robinhood could retain about 90% of gas revenue under the Arbitrum architecture, thus choosing Arbitrum to "be the landlord, not the tenant."Toly countered that Robinhood could charge fees at the application front end while utilizing a lower-cost underlying network; Goldfeder, however, indicated that a large amount of on-chain activity does not go through the Robinhood front end, and if it were merely a "tenant" of the underlying network, Robinhood would not be able to capture the revenue generated from these peripheral activities.According to market news, Robinhood evaluated both Solana and Arbitrum during the product initiation phase and ultimately chose Arbitrum, which allows for independent chain deployment.

Arbitrum issued a clarification stating that Robinhood Chain did not experience downtime today. Due to the impact of L1 market Blob behavior, Robinhood Chain experienced delays in batch publishing, but user-initiated transactions were not affected by the delays.Arbitrum stated that some infrastructure service providers relying on data streams from Robinhood Chain experienced temporary performance impacts due to a high number of subscribed data sources. Currently, Robinhood Chain continues to operate normally.

According to DeFiLlama data, the daily Gas fees of Robinhood's Ethereum Layer 2 network, Robinhood Chain, surged approximately 82 times within 11 days, surpassing all other blockchain networks to become the chain with the highest daily Gas fees. This network is built on the Arbitrum Orbit technology stack and has been live for only about two months.Data shows that the average daily Gas fees of Robinhood Chain climbed from about $56,000 on August 23 to approximately $3.75 million on September 1, continuously breaking historical records for several days. The fee surge is primarily driven by speculative trading of Meme coins, with the weekly trading volume on the on-chain DEX exceeding $1 billion at one point, where the token issuance platform Pons contributed the majority of the trading volume. As of September 1, the average transaction fee on this chain rose to $0.33, while Base was only about $0.0026 and Solana was about $0.013 during the same period.The high fees have also brought considerable revenue to Robinhood Chain. According to the protocol agreement, 10% of its net revenue must be allocated to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 80% going to the Arbitrum DAO and 20% to the developer fund; in comparison, Arbitrum One's Gas fees on the same day were less than $15,000. The official Robinhood wallet still offers Gas subsidies for eligible transactions, which will continue until September 29.

According to The Block, Arbitrum DAO achieved revenue of $6.19 million in the first half of 2026, mainly from Arbitrum One transaction fees, Timeboost ranking auctions, licensing fees for sidechains using Arbitrum technology, and treasury management income, with a protocol revenue gross margin exceeding 97%, holding $125 million in non-ARB assets at the end of the period.The report shows that during this period, the network processed 478 million transactions, with a monthly average transfer volume of stablecoins exceeding $70 billion, the number of holding addresses increased to 10.5 million, and it ranked first in the number of on-chain RWA deployments. In its first month after launching the mainnet in July, Robinhood Chain paid $360,000 in licensing fees to the Arbitrum Expansion Program, accounting for 35% of the DAO's revenue for that month.

The derivatives protocol Variational on the Arbitrum ecosystem has announced the launch of its swaps market, initially including gold (XAU) and the Nasdaq 100 index (US100) markets. Swaps are similar to perpetual contracts in that they provide exposure to the underlying asset, but differ in terms of liquidity sources and holding costs: the holding cost for swaps is based on the USD borrowing interest rate, with long positions currently paying an annualized rate of 4% to 6%, and short positions receiving an annualized rate of 2% to 3%, replacing the more volatile funding rates.The swaps market charges no trading fees, with an initial open contract limit of approximately $10 million per market. The team plans to increase the limit to over $50 million in the coming days, and the initial protocol can support an open contract size of over $1 billion. The team stated that in the coming months, they will continue to raise limits, launch more swaps and perpetual contract markets, introduce trading APIs, and promote around-the-clock liquidity.

According to the latest data from arbdata, Robinhood Chain has been online for only two months, and its cumulative fee revenue has risen to 13.05 million USD, setting a new historical high. Based on the annualized average of the fee revenue over the past 30 days, its annualized revenue scale is approximately 110 million USD. Based on the current cumulative revenue, about 1.3 million USD will directly flow into the Arbitrum ecosystem. According to the cooperation agreement between the two parties, Robinhood Chain is required to return 10% of the net revenue from the agreement to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 8% flowing into the Arbitrum DAO treasury and 2% going to the Arbitrum Developer Guild.CoinGecko data shows that ARB has increased by a cumulative 46.7% over the past two weeks. The ARB unlocking period will continue until March 2027, with the next unlocking expected to take place on September 23, releasing approximately 139.2 million ARB, which is valued at about 15.2 million USD based on the current price, accounting for about 1.4% of the total supply.

According to CoinDesk, the Arbitrum token ARB has risen over 30% in the past 24 hours, reaching about 11 cents, breaking through the range of 7 to 10 cents since June.According to DefiLlama data, the Ethereum Layer 2 network Robinhood Chain, launched by Robinhood on July 1, generated $1.92 million in revenue in the past 24 hours, ranking first among all blockchains, followed closely by Canton with $1.76 million, and Tron, Base, and Ethereum with $974,000, $98,000, and $75,000 respectively. The chain's cumulative revenue over 30 days is $5.92 million, with about one-third coming in the past 24 hours and more than two-thirds concentrated in the past week.Robinhood Chain uses the Arbitrum tech stack and pays directly to the Arbitrum DAO according to the Arbitrum expansion plan. Under this plan, chains that use the Arbitrum tech stack and settle to non-Arbitrum One or Nova parent chains must pay 10% of the chain's profits, with 8% going to the ArbitrumDAO treasury and 2% to the protocol developer guild. In the past 24 hours, the DAO received $175,600, with $363,000 and $532,000 received over 7 days and 30 days respectively.

According to The Defiant, Arbitrum activated the ArbOS 61 Elara upgrade on August 20, adding optional protocol-level transaction filtering, priority fee support, and alternative data availability interfaces for dedicated chains, while adjusting the base fee management and expanding the Stylus contract capacity of Arbitrum One. The compliance filtering feature is turned off by default and requires the chain owner to actively configure external compliance service providers (such as TRM Labs or Chainalysis) and set rules, executing through a dual mechanism of simulated transactions and on-chain guardians.The priority fee feature is also turned off by default and requires the chain owner to enable it through pre-compilation. The collection of priority fees on Arbitrum One still requires a separate DAO vote. Elara also introduced the BaseFeeManager contract, allowing Offchain Labs to adjust the base fee within the DAO-approved range of 0.01 to 0.1 gwei, with a validity period of two years. The code size limit for Stylus contracts has been increased from 24KB to 96KB, which does not apply to Solidity contracts.

The Arbitrum development team stated that they are introducing zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs into the Arbitrum platform to achieve a multi-proof settlement model. Through ZK proofs, the settlement time of Arbitrum blocks to Ethereum L1 is expected to be reduced from several days to several hours, while enhancing user, cross-chain bridge, and protocol capital efficiency, and maintaining security through the multi-proof mechanism. Related capabilities are aimed at Arbitrum One and dedicated chains based on the Arbitrum platform. Offchain will subsequently submit upgrade proposals to the DAO.Current progress includes: the ability to run the same state transition functions in SP1 zkVM as in optimistic execution, generating ZK proofs for real mainnet block production; Stylus's WASM contracts can be proven alongside Solidity contracts; the team has launched an independent Rust verifier, making ZK proofs a first-class mode alongside standard verification; the BoLD settlement protocol has supported the acceptance of ZK proofs and is endorsed by a fast confirmation committee, while the original dispute games still serve as a fallback path, forming a multi-proof architecture that coordinates ZK proofs, proof committees, and fraud proofs.The team claims to be continuously reducing proof costs and will gradually merge related code into the Nitro main production path. The next steps include further optimizing proofs and shifting to Reth-based execution, completing L1 message inbox proofs, and integrating ZK settlement capabilities into node configurations for on-demand activation across chains.

According to Arbitrum's official disclosure, Robinhood Chain has accumulated a total fee revenue of 5 million dollars in just over a month since its launch. This chain is aimed at programmable financial scenarios and is designed to promote further integration of traditional finance with on-chain infrastructure.Robinhood Chain is built on Arbitrum technology, providing an execution environment for on-chain businesses related to the brokerage Robinhood. The progress of this fee revenue indicates that its early network activity and application deployment speed are relatively fast, reflecting the trend of institutions migrating to programmable finance.

The Offchain Labs research team has released advancements in zero-knowledge proof technology, covering areas such as proof acceleration, verifiable AI, and recursive security. Among them, the vector commitment scheme has reduced the proof generation time for 64,000 data entries from about 2 minutes to 32 milliseconds, achieving a speedup of approximately 4000 times; the new proof system Zaratan has achieved native full succinct proofs for integers for the first time, which can reduce the computational overhead of operations like RSA by about 5000 times; in terms of verifiable AI, a lightweight verification protocol can shorten the inference verification time for large models from several minutes to milliseconds.Arbitrum is exploring a multi-prover architecture that combines ZK proofs with fraud proofs and TEE to eliminate single points of failure and shorten L1 settlement cycles.

ChianCatcher news, Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder tweeted that Arbitrum has been ahead of its time in several aspects. The team strongly advocated for interactive proof design (which was controversial at the time and has now become the standard for optimistic Rollups); chose to establish a business when the business model was still highly controversial; focused on DeFi when most people had not yet understood perpetual contracts and many had given up on DeFi; and launched a dedicated blockchain when the industry generally believed that more chains were unnecessary.Facing backlash each time, but now the industry is aligning with the direction they set from day one: building robust and high-performance financial infrastructure. Goldfeder is proud of the Offchain team for delivering world-class products at an incredibly fast pace and stated that they will continue to deliver, even if most people currently do not understand its necessity; the industry will soon understand.

According to Blockaid's monitoring, the Arbitrum ecosystem protocol AFX was attacked at 5:30 AM Beijing time, targeting a cross-chain bridge operated by the protocol. So far, approximately 24.15 million USDC has been stolen. Blockaid stated that it is working with the Arbitrum team to respond to the incident, communicate with the affected protocols, and assist in freezing the stolen funds.In addition, Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder responded on the X platform, stating that the Arbitrum team has noted the reports of the cross-chain bridge attack on Arbitrum and is investigating. Goldfeder confirmed that the related transactions originated from a third-party protocol, and the Arbitrum native bridge was not attacked or exploited. The team will coordinate with the third-party team and provide more details.

According to Coindesk, Bernstein stated in a research report released on Monday that Robinhood's newly launched blockchain, Robinhood Chain, has performed strongly since its launch, quickly becoming one of the most active networks for decentralized trading.The report noted that since the mainnet went live on July 1, the DEX trading volume on Robinhood Chain reached $3.1 billion in the past week, ranking it among the top five chains by DEX activity. Currently, over 65,000 users hold approximately $13 million in tokenized stocks and $300 million in stablecoins on the chain.Bernstein believes that the early adoption of Robinhood Chain highlights the accelerated integration of tokenized real-world assets with the broader DeFi ecosystem. The network is built on Arbitrum, an Ethereum Layer 2, supporting Robinhood's tokenized stock products, providing 24/7 trading, self-custody, as well as on-chain use cases such as lending and collateralization, and has integrated with partners like Uniswap, Morpho, Lighter, Chainlink, and BitGo.The report also stated that although the current early trading volume is primarily driven by meme coins, Robinhood is expected to focus more on tokenized stocks, commodities, and other RWA assets, as well as perpetual contract business in the future.