Robinhood Chain took 80% of all Ethereum L2 fees in Q3, Alea Research says

Robinhood Chain banked about 80% of total network fees across the entire Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem in Q3 2026, its first full quarter after mainnet launch, according to on-chain research firm Alea Research. Exchange trading on the chain hit $90.7 billion — more than the $50 billion of crypto volume the Robinhood app and Bitstamp did together. The chain runs on Arbitrum's tech stack without a native token, much like Coinbase's Base.

Strip out the 12-day token launch wave and Robinhood Chain still owned 57.7% of all L2 fees across the quarter's remaining 80 days, versus 30.7% for Coinbase's Base. Total Q3 network fees came to $51 million, while the median for every L2 was just $24,700. Robinhood's own cut landed at $22.9 million under the initial 50% revenue-share tier, equal to 19% of its $120 million crypto business revenue. Arbitrum takes a 10% licensing fee off the top, and Robinhood's retention steps up to 70% and then 85% as cumulative operating revenue scales.

The fee spike traces back to launch platform Pons, whose V2 factory contract went live August 4 and completed 648,701 cumulative token launches, driving 74% of the quarter's fees. Average gas per transaction jumped to 6.4 cents from 1.4 cents before the wave, and September 4 alone pulled in $8.36 million — more than double all of July. Pons V2's fee revenue climbed 7.3 times over a 12-day stretch while pump.fun slid 33%. Robinhood twice lifted the network gas target to 40 million gas per second within three days, then dialed it back to 15 million on October 18; by the last week of September daily average fees had cooled to $121,000, and from October 1 to 19 they sat at $54,600, with launch platforms burning 91% less gas.

Stock tokens are the other story. Their slice of the chain's DEX volume climbed from 2.6% in July, reaching 15.6% in September. Of trading in the top 60 liquidity pools, 67.1% happened while the NYSE was closed, with the two weekend days alone accounting for 18.2% of volume. In all 37 weekend and holiday gap moves of at least 1%, token prices called the direction correctly before Monday's open, hitting a median of 86% of the swing's amplitude. The median spread between the ten most-traded stock tokens and their underlying assets tightened to 13 basis points in September, down from 29 basis points in July, and September volume for existing stock token pairs reached $8.7 billion against bStocks' $6.4 billion. The tokens are debt instruments fully collateralized 1:1 by underlying shares and minted exclusively by Robinhood-owned Bitstamp.

Elsewhere, traders paid $593 million in application-layer fees during Q3, with $147 million kept by app operators. The Uniswap protocol fee switch went live on the chain July 27 and had funded $13.7 million of UNI buybacks and burns by September 30. Robinhood Earn's Steakhouse vault on Morpho held $499 million at the start of its 92nd day, 18% above Coinbase at the same stage, while on-chain application TVL hit a record $1.15 billion on October 22. Returning active addresses in September topped Base's.

The next chapter is already moving. A September 17 SEC order now lets regulated US venues trade tokenized stocks carrying dividend and voting rights — the exact entitlements today's products lack — and Robinhood says it plans to add voting rights for qualified holders and token-to-stock redemptions, though it has set no timeline. Morpho and Robinhood jointly launched a lending market October 22 letting holders borrow stablecoins against stock tokens, and on October 27 Ondo listed 15 tokenized stocks and ETFs on the chain, 11 of them trading directly in Uniswap.