Robinhood Chain Revenue Falls 83% From Its Peak While Trading Volume Sets Records

Robinhood Chain earned $943,728 in gas revenue on Sept. 10, down 82.6% from the $5.44 million it took on Sept. 4, DefiLlama data shows. Trading activity on the network did not fall with it.

Gas revenue tracks demand for blockspace. Robinhood Chain is clearing roughly the same number of transactions it cleared at the peak, at a fraction of the price, after the early-September congestion that pushed its base fee more than 20 times above its floor eased.

Sept. 4 is the network's record day for both fees and revenue, at $6.04 million and $5.44 million. By Sept. 10 the fee line was $1.05 million and the revenue line $943,728, the lowest daily figure since Aug. 29.

But activity doesn’t track revenue decline. Decentralized exchange volume was $1.87 billion on Sept. 10 against $1.89 billion on Sept. 4. DEX volume over the seven days through Sept. 10 came to $12.34 billion, up 26.5% from $9.76 billion the previous week, and included a record $2.06 billion on Sept. 8. Friday's incomplete day had already passed that, at $2.42 billion.

The drop circulated on X after Stacy Muur put it at 87% on Friday morning. DefiLlama's series puts the fall from the Sept. 4 peak through Sept. 10 at 82.6%.

Same Trades, Cheaper Blockspace

Robinhood Chain processed 13.6 million transactions on Sept. 10 against 13.98 million on Sept. 4, a 3% decline, according to Blockscout. Dividing DefiLlama's daily fee line by that count gives the average cost of a transaction: $0.077 on Sept. 10 against $0.43 on Sept. 4, and $0.009 on Aug. 25, before the run-up.

What changed is the price of blockspace. The chain's base fee rises with congestion off a floor of 0.02 gwei, the level that held through mid-August before memecoin activity drove fees up 82-fold in 11 days and took the median to 0.467 gwei on Sept. 2. Blockscout listed gas at 0.14 to 0.31 gwei on Friday and network utilization at effectively zero.

Robinhood's documentation splits the charge into an L2 execution fee and an L1 data fee for posting transaction data to Ethereum. Ethereum's own fees fell 32% over the same window, to $304,600 on Sept. 10 from $447,161 on Sept. 4, and Arbitrum's fell 15%.

Still Second Among Chains

The chain is still the second-largest network by daily revenue, behind Canton, which took $1.55 million over 24 hours against Robinhood Chain's $943,728. Tron followed at $897,830, Base at $164,200 and Ethereum at $64,025. Over seven days Robinhood Chain leads every other chain at $15.15 million against Canton's $11.17 million.

The seven days through Sept. 10 produced $15.15 million in revenue, flat versus the previous seven days. Cumulative revenue since the July 1 mainnet launch is $35.84 million on $39.88 million of fees.

Arbitrum's Cut Shrinks

DefiLlama books the gap between the two lines as Ethereum L1 costs plus the 10% fee share Robinhood owes under the Arbitrum Expansion Program license, which The Defiant covered when the chain launched. That gap was $605,058 on Sept. 4 and $105,612 on Sept. 10.

ARB traded at $0.1459 on Friday, down 2.9% over 24 hours and up 6.3% over seven days, for a market capitalization of $974 million, according to CoinGecko. ETH was at $2,611.40.

Apps Kept Earning

Applications on the chain earned $2.64 million in revenue on $12.46 million of fees over 24 hours, the DefiLlama series that excludes stablecoin issuers, liquid staking and gas. Robinhood Chain passed Ethereum on that measure on Aug. 29 and has held the position since.

Launchpad Pons collected $5.85 million in fees on Sept. 10, down 35% from $9.05 million on Sept. 4 and 49% from its own $11.42 million peak on Sept. 5. Trading bot GMGN took $1.86 million against $3.45 million. Both declines are a fraction of the chain's.

Total value locked stands at $903.77 million, up 1.66% over 24 hours, and stablecoins on the chain total $1.01 billion, up 10.07% over seven days.

Robinhood does not break out chain revenue in its results. The company reported $1.31 billion in total net revenues for the second quarter, up 32% year over year, with cryptocurrency revenue of $100 million, down 38%. The release names the mainnet launch and carries no line item for gas.