Arbitrum co-founder addresses decentralization concerns over Robinhood Chain

Robinhood Chain launched its mainnet on July 1, 2026, and the crypto community immediately noticed something awkward: a chain built on Arbitrum’s technology, settling to Ethereum, with a sequencer controlled entirely by Robinhood. Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder has now weighed in on the debate, acknowledging the current architecture’s limitations while laying out a path forward. His core argument: decentralizing the sequencer would meaningfully improve censorship resistance without requiring any changes to Arbitrum’s existing fraud-proof mechanisms. How Robinhood Chain actually works The chain runs as an Arbitrum Orbit chain with chain ID 4663, settling directly to Ethereum. It uses ETH for gas and supports 100-millisecond block times, a speed that helped it process over 200 million transactions during its testnet phase alone. Robinhood controls the sequencer, the component responsible for ordering and batching transactions before they’re posted to Ethereum. Only two whitelisted fraud-proof challengers exist on the network. Upgrades to the chain are governed by a 7-of-8 multisig arrangement, meaning seven out of eight keyholders must agree before any protocol changes go live....