Robinhood built its own chain. It still pays rent.

Every dollar Robinhood Chain earns, a tenth goes to a DAO treasury controlled by strangers. The arrangement has been covered a dozen times as good news for Arbitrum’s token. Summary Robinhood Chain runs on Arbitrum’s Orbit stack, and under the Arbitrum Expansion Program every Orbit chain settling outside Arbitrum One routes 10% of net protocol revenue back to the Arbitrum ecosystem. The split is fixed: 8% to the Arbitrum DAO treasury, controlled by ARB tokenholders, and 2% to the Arbitrum Developer Guild. The figures are now real, no longer theoretical. Robinhood Chain has passed $2 million in cumulative revenue since its July 1 launch, with roughly $200,000 flowing to Arbitrum, and Arbitrum reported the network earning over $800,000 in a single seven-day stretch, annualizing near $42 million. The payment is calculated on net revenue after operating costs, applies to sequencer profits, and may extend to MEV capture if the chain adopts Arbitrum’s Timeboost mechanism. Every version of this story published so far has been written for ARB holders. The unexamined half is what the arrangement costs the brokerage, and why a company with a $2.2 billion war chest chose to pay it. Nobody has...