The co-founders of leading Crypto platforms Solana and Robinhood Chain went head-to-head on X in what appeared to be a debate over fee charges and profit-sharing percentages.
The debate kicked off after a post from Solananew, an X account dedicated to spotlighting Solana related developments, shared a chart from BlockWorks displaying Robinhood’s transaction fee costs, with a caption noting an upsurge in Robinhood’s average transition fee charges which sat at $0.40 at report time, estimated to be over 100x higher than Solana and Ethereum’s fee charges, both of which sit around an average of roughly $0.003-$0.005 and roughly $0.18–$0.25 respectively.
Solana Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenk followed up with a response asserting that the 10% revenue share paid to Arbitrum would have been enough to cover Solana transaction fees more than four times over, allowing Robinhood to offer users a gasless experience.
Steven Goldfeder, the co-founder of Off-chain Labs, responded to Yakovenk, firmly stating his disagreement and proceeding to highlight Robinhood’s fee model, saying the following;
“I have a ton of respect for Toly (Anatoly Yakovenk), but this is a ridiculous take. On Arbitrum, Robinhood keeps 90% of gas fees. On Solana, they would retain 0, and any gas fees they subsidized would come out of pocket. Robinhood chose Arbitrum so they could be a landlord and not a tenant.”
 
Yakovenko essentially argued that Robinhood could generate revenue by charging users on the front end while cutting costs through a cheaper backend. Goldfeder countered that most fees come from activity that never passes through Robinhood’s front end. If the company were merely a tenant on another chain, he said, it would capture none of that extra activity, even if it had originally attracted those users.
The debate comes shortly after Robinhood Chain faced a brief disruption on September 4th, with batch postings to Ethereum delayed about 14 minutes amid record volumes topping 11 million daily transactions. Notably, the Arbitrum Orbit Layer 2 restored full operations quickly and reported that no funds were lost.
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