Arbitrum co-founder explains licensing trick that prevents Robinhood Chain from forking code and keeping all the fees

Most open-source software operates on a simple premise: take the code, do whatever you want. Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder decided that was a terrible business model for Layer 2 infrastructure, and built a licensing structure that makes forking the code without paying up effectively pointless.

The mechanism is called “community source” licensing, and it creates an economic leash on any chain that uses Arbitrum’s Orbit/Nitro stack but settles outside of Arbitrum One or Nova. Those chains must send 10% of their net revenue back to the ecosystem. Of that 10%, eight percentage points flow to the Arbitrum DAO treasury, which is governed by ARB token holders, and the remaining two points go to the Developer Guild.

Why Robinhood Chain is the perfect test case

Robinhood Chain launched its mainnet on July 1, 2026, operating as a dedicated Ethereum Layer 2 that settles directly to Ethereum rather than through Arbitrum One. The chain was purpose-built to handle tokenized stock offerings, a product line Robinhood had been testing on Arbitrum One since June 2025 before deciding it needed its own dedicated infrastructure.

The financial results have been hard to ignore. On September 1, 2026, Robinhood Chain posted record single-day fees of $3.75 million. In July 2026 alone, the chain contributed $360,000 to the Arbitrum DAO, which represented roughly 35% of the DAO’s total monthly income for that period.

For Robinhood, the math still works comfortably. The company retains approximately 90% of its net revenue under the arrangement.

The anti-fork philosophy

The entire licensing structure exists because Goldfeder and the Offchain Labs team made a deliberate early decision to reject fully permissive open-sourcing. If you release your code under a standard open-source license like MIT or Apache 2.0, any well-funded company can clone it, deploy their own chain, and capture 100% of the economics. The original developers and their community get nothing.

This approach stands in direct contrast to the Optimism ecosystem, which has embraced more permissive licensing terms.

The landlord economics of Layer 2

The September 2026 debate between Goldfeder and Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko brought this tension into sharp focus. The discussion centered on fee economics and revenue retention models, highlighting fundamental disagreements about how blockchain infrastructure should be monetized.

For ARB token holders, the arrangement has tangible governance implications. The 8% flowing to the DAO treasury means token holders have a direct economic interest in the success of chains like Robinhood’s. In July 2026, Robinhood Chain’s $360,000 contribution represented 35% of the DAO’s total monthly income for that period.

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