Arbitrum's Arbitrary Airdrop Machine: Robinhood Chain Prints Revenue, $ARB Pops 30% 📈

Arbitrum's native token, $ARB, climbed more than 30% over the past 24 hours to roughly 11 cents, breaking out of the 7-to-10-cent range that had contained it since June. The move followed a ramp-up in activity on Robinhood Chain, the Ethereum layer-2 introduced on July 1 by trading platform Robinhood, whose shares (HOOD) trade at $106.23. The chain uses Arbitrum's technology stack and pays the Arbitrum DAO directly, and those payments have accelerated over the past 10 days.

Robinhood Chain generated $1.92 million in revenue over the past 24 hours, the most of any blockchain, according to DefiLlama. Canton came next with $1.76 million, followed by Tron at $974,039, Base at $98,416 and Ethereum at $75,004. The past 24 hours accounted for roughly a third of the $5.92 million the chain has generated over 30 days, with more than two-thirds of that total arriving in the past week alone.

Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, chains built with the Arbitrum stack that settle to a parent chain other than Arbitrum One or Nova pay 10% of chain profit, with 8% to the ArbitrumDAO treasury and 2% to a protocol developer guild. The DAO that runs Arbitrum received $175,612 over the past 24 hours, $363,153 over seven days and $531,641 over 30 days, according to DefiLlama. "Ethereum's cut is a fixed-ish L1 settlement fee per tx, Arbitrum's cut scales with chain profit," according to a post on X. "So on a spike day, Arbitrum scales up with REV but Ethereum barely moves in dollar terms."

The $ARB token saw $618 million in volume in the past 24 hours, an eightfold increase over the previous day, with order book depth rising alongside. Across the 40 largest venues, roughly $6.2 million sits within 2% of the current price on the buy side and $7.4 million on the sell side, according to CoinMarketCap, though almost a third of that depth is concentrated on a single exchange, BTCC.

$ARB bottomed near 7.3 cents around Aug. 18, then rallied to roughly 10.5 cents in the final week of August as Robinhood Chain's daily revenue climbed off its lows, faded back to about 8.5 cents, and broke the range top this week as revenue hit records. Trading volumes on the chain reached $6.92 billion across the week, a gain of 89.47% according to DefiLlama.