In Brief:
- In its bi-annual progress update released Sept. 2, the Arbitrum Foundation disclosed $6.19 million of unaudited ArbitrumDAO income for the six-month stretch ending June 30.
- Mainnet for Robinhood Chain arrived July 1 — a single day after the reporting period shut — and the network sends 10% of net revenue back to the ecosystem via the Arbitrum Expansion Program.
- July brought $360,000 in AEP license fees, accounting for 35% of what the DAO earned that month. Nothing in the report is broken out for gaming.
The Arbitrum Foundation’s progress update, published Sept. 2, puts ArbitrumDAO income for the first half of 2026 at $6.19 million. That number is unaudited and spans Jan. 1 to June 30.
What it leaves out is the chain currently carrying the load. Robinhood Chain launched on mainnet July 1, exactly one day after the reporting window closed.
ICYMI: The Arbitrum Foundation 2026 half year report is now live.
Over the first six months, the Arbitrum Platform has ramped up it’s efforts in driving long-term growth and sustainable value back to the ecosystem:
> Bringing Robinhood Chain out of stealth and expanding the@ArbitrumView on X ↗
The revenue line that isn’t in the report
July, the chain’s first complete month live on mainnet, produced $360,000 in Arbitrum Expansion Program license fees — 35% of everything the DAO earned that month.
The AEP requires chains that settle outside Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova to hand 10% of net protocol revenue back to the ecosystem. Those same terms cover more than 30 Arbitrum chains. What sets Robinhood Chain apart is the backer: a $100 billion fintech with 28 million users and $307 billion in assets under management.
Since then the divergence has only grown. On Sept. 1, Robinhood Chain logged $3.75 million in daily transaction fees, a post-launch record, alongside DEX volume topping $1.5 billion and TVL north of $750 million. Its 30-day revenue share to the DAO treasury stood at $531,641 by early September.
Those funds land in the treasury rather than in ARB holders’ pockets. Even so, ARB climbed 26% to 30% on the news, approaching $0.11.
Four income lines, thin costs
Four sources fed the DAO’s first-half income: Arbitrum One transaction fees, Timeboost sequencer auctions, AEP license fees and treasury management returns. Blended gross margin on protocol revenue came in above 97%, an improvement on the 90%-plus recorded through 2025.
Timeboost — the mechanism that auctions priority sequencer access — went live in 2025 and passed $5 million in revenue within seven months.
As of June 30 the DAO was sitting on $125 million of non-ARB treasury assets, spread between ether, real-world assets and stablecoins. During the half, fewer than $200,000 of the Foundation’s ecosystem grants were paid upfront with no milestone conditions attached.
“The first half of 2026 shows the Arbitrum ecosystem’s financial profile broadening,” said Brendan Ma, head of investment strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation. “The demand behind those numbers comes from the convergence of traditional finance and onchain finance.”
Activity numbers
Some 478 million transactions moved through Arbitrum during the period — close to 18% of the network’s 2.7 billion lifetime tally. Ecosystem GDP, the Foundation’s yardstick for onchain economic activity, came to $206 million for the half against $1.7 billion cumulatively.
Stablecoin transfer volume averaged more than $70 billion a month, while the number of stablecoin holders grew 40% to 10.5 million. Open interest in derivatives jumped 434% from December 2025 to June 2026, topping out at $1.5 billion.
Ecosystem-wide RWA assets under management came to roughly $850 million — triple the figure a year earlier — with over 2,000 tokenized assets in circulation. The Foundation describes Arbitrum as the leading venue for RWA deployments, citing Robinhood, LG, Mastercard and PayPal among firms building or scaling up on the network.
No gaming section
Gaming metrics get no dedicated breakout in the update. Most Arbitrum game activity continues to live on Orbit chains such as Xai, and on Nova, home to Proof of Play’s Pirate Nation.
Arbitrum Gaming Ventures, the DAO’s investment vehicle, was formerly known as the Gaming Catalyst Program. Its debut cohort was unveiled May 8, 2025, with $10 million committed to Wildcard, Hyve Labs, T-Rex and Xai, backed alongside Paradigm, Framework Ventures and BITKRAFT.
How Robinhood Chain got here
Robinhood first revealed the chain in June 2025, following up with a public testnet on Feb. 10, 2026. Four million transactions cleared in week one, and Alchemy, Allium, Chainlink, LayerZero and TRM were among the early integrations.
The mainnet reveal came during Robinhood’s “The World is Flat” keynote at London’s Old Royal Naval College. Built on Arbitrum Orbit, the chain uses ETH for gas, targets block times near 100 milliseconds, and had Uniswap and Chainlink operating from day one. Robinhood additionally contributed $1 million to the 2026 Arbitrum Open House program, bankrolling buildathons and founder events across New York, Dubai, London and Singapore.
Daily volume reached $568 million inside the first week of launch, and ARB topped the gainers among the 100 largest cryptocurrencies.
According to Ma, July’s numbers alone put third-quarter income on pace to exceed the second quarter by upwards of 40%. “Against subdued market conditions across the industry, the ecosystem’s growth has accelerated since the half ended,” he said.
In the 24-hour stretch across Sept. 1 and 2, Robinhood Chain generated approximately $1.92 million in chain revenue. Arbitrum One brought in roughly $16,000 over the same period.