ARK Invest analyst Lorenzo Valente questions Ethereum’s L2 strategy: Robinhood Chain’s revenue surges, yet the L1 settlement layer gets very little — is this a problem?
His view is that while trading on L2 is hot and fees are high, the cost that falls back to Ethereum mainnet is only a fixed data publication expense, not a revenue split. In one example he cited, when Robinhood Chain’s daily revenue can reach the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ethereum sometimes gets only a very small share, even less than 1%; Arbitrum, by contrast, receives about a 10% share under its protocol.
The debate is therefore reduced to two statements: if your narrative is "ETH is money," then the busier L2s are the better for it; if the narrative is "ETH is an asset that collects cash flow," then L2s taking the lion’s share and L1 getting only crumbs becomes a counterexample.
His view is that while trading on L2 is hot and fees are high, the cost that falls back to Ethereum mainnet is only a fixed data publication expense, not a revenue split. In one example he cited, when Robinhood Chain’s daily revenue can reach the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ethereum sometimes gets only a very small share, even less than 1%; Arbitrum, by contrast, receives about a 10% share under its protocol.
The debate is therefore reduced to two statements: if your narrative is "ETH is money," then the busier L2s are the better for it; if the narrative is "ETH is an asset that collects cash flow," then L2s taking the lion’s share and L1 getting only crumbs becomes a counterexample.