Offchain Labs and Solana co-founders spar over whether Robinhood Chain’s fee model is feature or bug

Two months after Robinhood launched its own blockchain, the question of who actually benefits from its fee structure has turned into a proxy war between Arbitrum and Solana’s founding teams. Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko took their disagreement public on X in early September 2026, trading barbs over Robinhood Chain’s transaction fee model. At stake: a philosophical rift about whether blockchain infrastructure should function as a revenue engine for the app sitting on top, or whether fees should flow to the validators keeping the network secure. The $0.40 question Robinhood Chain launched on July 1, 2026, built on the Arbitrum Orbit framework. It uses ETH as its gas asset, runs 100-millisecond block times, and supports both tokenized real-world assets and DeFi activity. By early September, the chain was processing around 10.4 million transactions per day during peak periods, generating roughly $4.22 million in daily fees. Average transaction costs had climbed to approximately $0.40 each during congestion spikes. Yakovenko fired first, posting his critique around September 3-4. His argument: Robinhood’s chain effectively profits fro...