Dragonfly managing partner, Uniswap founder defend Robinhood Chain from short-term critics

Two notable figures in the crypto space have pushed back against a wave of commentary declaring Robinhood Chain a failure. 

They say that a drop in the network’s fee revenue is not a sign of fading demand. They said it reflects a deliberate cut to trading costs.

Why the revenue chart turned down

Robinhood raised the gas limit on its network and lowered the fees users pay, and chain revenue fell sharply as a result. 

Daily DeFi volume, though, held up. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, confirmed this is an X post where he shared a chart that showed chain revenues sliding while decentralized exchange (DEX) volume stayed strong. 

According to him, the network is “solidly #2 behind Solana.” Qureshi noted that plenty of observers were reading the revenue line as evidence of a mistake.

Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, made a similar point. In a post that was responding to Qureshi’s post, Adams wrote, “It was funny to watch people declare the chain dead bc of the fees chart when actually they just scaled up capacity to meet massive blockspace demand.” 

He said the DEX volume, of which 95% runs through Uniswap, looks good.

Robinhood Chain recorded $403,000 in chain revenue and about $448,600 in fees over the past 24-hour window per DefiLlama data. This is against the $1.81 billion that it recorded in DEX volume within the same 24 hours. It has done over $12.77 billion over seven days, a weekly gain of nearly 23%.

The low-margin objection

However, not everyone shares the same optimism as Qureshi and Adams. A leading voice in that camp is Anatoly Yakovenko, the cofounder of Solana Labs. He wrote in response to Qureshi’s submission, “My spicy take is that a great L2 is a cheap L2 which makes it a shit low margin business for a fintech that can charge 50 bips at the front end.”  

His argument is that cutting fees on the chain hands an advantage to rival front ends such as Fomo and Phantom, leaving Robinhood, in his phrasing, “basically giving away their brand.”

What do Robinhood on-chain numbers show?

The network has grown fast since it went live on July 1. The total value locked (TVL) is over $937 million, which is already close to the $1 billion mark. 

The stablecoin market cap on the chain has passed $1 billion, up about 12% week over week and 72% over the past month. USDG makes up over 68% of that stablecoin float, with Ethena’s USDe next.

What Uniswap and Arbitrum have riding on it

Cryptopolitan reported on September 7 that Uniswap keeps 0.465% of every dollar traded on the Robinhood network. This is more than double its 0.214% rate elsewhere, and it happened because tokenized stocks trade in its priciest fee tiers. Those fees now feed UNI’s buy-and-burn mechanism.

The Robinhood Chain link with Arbitrum is contractual. The chain was built with Arbitrum technology and returns 10% of its net protocol revenue. 8% goes to the Arbitrum DAO treasury and 2% to a developer fund. 

On Tuesday, September 15, Standard Chartered began covering ARB, Arbitrum’s native token, with a forecast that it will reach $10 by the end of 2030. This is nearly 70 times its current price, which is around $0.147.

Standard Chartered cited revenue from networks like Robinhood Chain to also drive that rise. Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, said the launch showed Arbitrum could become “the number 1 choice for TradFi when bringing assets on-chain,” and estimated the chain has pushed Arbitrum toward a $5 million monthly revenue run rate, more than five times its pre-July level.

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