arbitrum

On October 2, at 11:30 AM Eastern Time, the Arbitrum Security Committee executed an emergency upgrade on Arbitrum One and Nova, suspending the activation of all new Stylus contracts on both chains, while adding a protective mechanism against BoLD single-step proofs in the dispute system of Arbitrum One. The Arbitrum Foundation stated that this action is part of ongoing proactive security measures aimed at protecting the security and integrity of the network.Stylus allows developers to write smart contracts using languages such as Rust and C++, while maintaining compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, with its programs compiled into WebAssembly format. This suspension primarily targets manually written WASM programs that do not use the standard Stylus compiler toolchain and have not yet been patched by the current version of ArbOS. The Security Committee increased the gas required for activation to the theoretical maximum by calling ArbOwner.setWasmActivationGas(2^64 - 1), making new activations economically unfeasible. Activated Stylus contracts are unaffected and can continue to execute and renew, and the deployment and execution of Solidity contracts are also unrestricted.The newly added BoLD protection allows anyone to pause the settlement from Arbitrum One to Ethereum when two conflicting and accepted answers appear in the same dispute step, which may delay unconfirmed withdrawals to allow the Security Committee to deploy fixes. Officials pointed out that the currently discovered Stylus-related vulnerabilities mainly affect the activity of the chain, such as denial-of-service attacks, and do not jeopardize user funds.

Arbitrum released data indicating that the overall network revenue in September exceeded 5 million dollars, reaching 5.45 million dollars, setting a historical record.Data shows that most of its revenue comes from Orbit authorization fees, amounting to 4.75 million dollars, which may be related to the booming trading on the Robinhood chain during that month.

The Arbitrum Foundation announced the launch of the Arbitrum Security Program, providing smart contract audit subsidies for teams building projects on the Arbitrum platform, covering applications on the testnet, mainnet projects, projects migrating from other blockchains, and exclusive Arbitrum chains.

Arbitrum announced a per-transaction priority bidding mechanism to replace the original Timeboost mechanism.According to the disclosed allocation plan, 97% of the revenue generated from priority fees and paid Fast Feed subscriptions will be allocated to the DAO treasury, while the remaining 3% will be distributed to the Arbitrum Developer Guild.

Geoff Kendrick, the Global Head of Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered, stated that ARB is expected to reach $10 by the end of 2030. This prediction is based on a reference price of $0.14, which is approximately 48 times the current price of $0.21; its annual targets also include $0.5 in 2026, $1.5 in 2027, $3.5 in 2028, and $6.5 in 2029.Arbitrum's monthly revenue is expected to reach $5 million, more than five times the growth before the launch of Robinhood Chain. Robinhood Chain launched its public blockchain mainnet on July 1, based on the Arbitrum platform, targeting tokenized assets and decentralized finance applications; according to the Expansion Program, 10% of the protocol's net revenue is returned to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 8% going to the ArbitrumDAO treasury and 2% supporting the Arbitrum Developer Guild.ARB is the ERC-20 governance token used for voting on ArbitrumDAO proposals, and currently does not represent ownership of on-chain assets, nor does it have a mechanism for directly capturing Arbitrum revenue. Standard Chartered pointed out that the slowdown in the tokenization process, competitive blockchains, and the lack of a direct value capture mechanism for ARB are the main risks facing this prediction.

Standard Chartered Bank has initiated coverage of Arbitrum's ARB token, predicting it will rise from approximately $0.14 to $10 by the end of 2030, citing revenue from networks like Robinhood Chain.The bank also warns that ARB holders cannot directly share in Arbitrum's revenue, and there are risks such as a slowdown in the tokenization process and competition from peers.

According to The Block, Standard Chartered Bank has initiated coverage research on the Arbitrum (ARB) token for the first time, giving a target price of $10 by the end of 2030, which is approximately a 70-fold increase from the current price.Geoff Kendrick, the global head of digital asset research at the bank, stated in a report to clients that ARB is expected to outperform Bitcoin and Ethereum during the forecast period. Standard Chartered also predicts that Ethereum will reach $4,000 by the end of 2026 and $40,000 by the end of 2030, while Bitcoin will reach $100,000 by the end of 2026 and $500,000 by the end of 2030.Kendrick pointed out that Arbitrum is acting as an enterprise-level infrastructure provider, helping traditional financial institutions migrate assets on-chain. According to the Arbitrum expansion plan, the network can receive a rolling fee equivalent to 10% of net protocol revenue from external chains using its tech stack. After the launch of Robinhood Chain on July 1, Standard Chartered estimates that Arbitrum could earn about $5 million in AEP fees in September; the average daily fee revenue for Robinhood Chain in the first two weeks of September was $2.8 million, and Arbitrum's monthly total revenue has increased more than fivefold compared to the levels before the chain's launch.

Arbitrum's investment strategy director Brendan Ma stated: Arbitrum's weekly revenue has risen to third globally, with treasury revenue exceeding 4.3 million dollars in the past 30 days, of which over 50% came from the previous week. Revenue in Q3 to date is approximately 140% higher than Q2, with sources including Arbitrum One transaction fees, Robinhood Chain AEP licensing fees, and treasury income.Arbitrum leads in the number of RWA deployments, exceeding 4,500, with AUM reaching 1 billion dollars. The 30-day transaction volume grew by 124% to 395 billion dollars, and tokenized stocks doubled to over 200 million dollars. Arbitrum One's cumulative transaction volume exceeded 2.8 billion transactions, with Chain GDP reaching 1.8 billion dollars, a year-on-year increase of 22%, and perpetual contract positions peaking at 1.8 billion dollars.In terms of the ecosystem, Carbon's cumulative transaction volume exceeded 100 million dollars, T3tris TVL reached 13.4 million dollars, and USD.AI TVL reached 500 million dollars. Venmo, Stripe, Shopify, and Cash App have supported USDC or PYUSD-related functionalities on Arbitrum.

The Watchdog Committee of the Arbitrum ecosystem (composed of Entropy Advisors and others) submitted a proposal to the governance forum on September 3, requesting a permanent ban on the projects Good Entry, Limitless, and APX Finance, as well as their founders, prohibiting their participation in all future ArbitrumDAO initiatives. The committee determined that these three projects engaged in grant abuse within the STIP and LTIPP incentive programs, involving a total amount of 457,553 ARB (approximately $76,000).Specifically, Good Entry received 200,000 ARB in the first round of STIP, of which 142,839 ARB flowed to 1,032 ineligible users, and there is evidence of self-farming by associated addresses, with the team refusing to cooperate with the investigation; Limitless exchanged all 75,000 ARB for USDC and cross-chain to Base, being classified as suspected theft; APX Finance was approved for 525,000 ARB, of which 239,714 ARB involved issues related to funds being held in the treasury, delayed distribution, and witch cluster problems. APX later merged with Astherus and rebranded as Aster, with approximately 70% of its assets located on the BNB Chain.According to the proposal, the three projects may defend themselves in the forum post before September 10. If the explanations are not accepted and the funds are not returned, the committee will initiate three separate Snapshot votes to decide whether to permanently ban the relevant projects and founders.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, since the launch of Robinhood Chain 70 days ago, the total on-chain revenue has reached 42.58 million USD, approximately 17,171 ETH, with an average daily revenue of about 608,000 USD.Among them, Robinhood Chain received 90% of the revenue, which is 15,454 ETH, approximately 38.32 million USD; Arbitrum, as the technology provider, received 10% of the revenue, which is 1,716 ETH, approximately 4.26 million USD.

According to DefiLlama's on-chain cross-chain net flow data, Robinhood Chain had a net outflow of 306.19 million USD last week, ranking first among all chains in terms of outflow scale, far exceeding Hyperliquid (-179.51 million USD) and Polygon (-145.33 million USD).In terms of net inflow, Arbitrum leads with 184.14 million USD, followed by BSC (+142.38 million USD), Plasma (+120.38 million USD), Ethereum (+112.9 million USD), and Avalanche (+102.43 million USD).

Co-founder of Arbitrum Steven Goldfeder and co-founder of Solana Toly engaged in a debate over on-chain transaction fees, MEV protection, and the single sequencer model.Steven stated that one cannot simply compare surface-level fees. Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain actively prevent front-running and most harmful MEV, while some chains that claim lower fees have higher MEV costs, including front-running against retail investors. He expressed a preference for paying clear fees upfront rather than incurring hidden losses from front-running, sandwich attacks, and other issues for the sake of lower fees.Toly countered that Arbitrum currently has a less favorable bid-ask spread and higher fees. The 10% cut taken from transaction fees alone translates to a cost in basis points that exceeds the loss rate from sandwich attacks, which he estimates to be about 10 times that of the latter, not accounting for the impact of the spread. He emphasized, "A single sequencer that pursues shareholder value maximization can never outperform permissionless competition."

Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder stated that there is a misunderstanding in the market regarding the supply of ARB, often including the tokens held by the DAO in the locked supply.He pointed out that the token unlock for ARB investors and team members is nearing completion and will be fully unlocked by March next year. Currently, the portion of tokens that have not yet been unlocked accounts for approximately 7.7% of the total supply.The Arbitrum DAO treasury currently holds 2.84 billion ARB, but these tokens are not traditional locked tokens; they are controlled by circulating token holders, and their transfer must be approved by a vote from other token holders.

The founder of Arbitrum, Steven Goldfeder, and Solana co-founder, Toly, engaged in a debate over the fee model of Robinhood Chain. Toly claimed that the 10% revenue share paid to Arbitrum by Robinhood Chain is sufficient to cover four times the transaction fees on the Solana chain, suggesting that if deployed on Solana, user gas fees could significantly decrease. In response, Goldfeder stated that Robinhood could retain about 90% of gas revenue under the Arbitrum architecture, thus choosing Arbitrum to "be the landlord, not the tenant."Toly countered that Robinhood could charge fees at the application front end while utilizing a lower-cost underlying network; Goldfeder, however, indicated that a large amount of on-chain activity does not go through the Robinhood front end, and if it were merely a "tenant" of the underlying network, Robinhood would not be able to capture the revenue generated from these peripheral activities.According to market news, Robinhood evaluated both Solana and Arbitrum during the product initiation phase and ultimately chose Arbitrum, which allows for independent chain deployment.

Arbitrum issued a clarification stating that Robinhood Chain did not experience downtime today. Due to the impact of L1 market Blob behavior, Robinhood Chain experienced delays in batch publishing, but user-initiated transactions were not affected by the delays.Arbitrum stated that some infrastructure service providers relying on data streams from Robinhood Chain experienced temporary performance impacts due to a high number of subscribed data sources. Currently, Robinhood Chain continues to operate normally.

According to DeFiLlama data, the daily Gas fees of Robinhood's Ethereum Layer 2 network, Robinhood Chain, surged approximately 82 times within 11 days, surpassing all other blockchain networks to become the chain with the highest daily Gas fees. This network is built on the Arbitrum Orbit technology stack and has been live for only about two months.Data shows that the average daily Gas fees of Robinhood Chain climbed from about $56,000 on August 23 to approximately $3.75 million on September 1, continuously breaking historical records for several days. The fee surge is primarily driven by speculative trading of Meme coins, with the weekly trading volume on the on-chain DEX exceeding $1 billion at one point, where the token issuance platform Pons contributed the majority of the trading volume. As of September 1, the average transaction fee on this chain rose to $0.33, while Base was only about $0.0026 and Solana was about $0.013 during the same period.The high fees have also brought considerable revenue to Robinhood Chain. According to the protocol agreement, 10% of its net revenue must be allocated to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 80% going to the Arbitrum DAO and 20% to the developer fund; in comparison, Arbitrum One's Gas fees on the same day were less than $15,000. The official Robinhood wallet still offers Gas subsidies for eligible transactions, which will continue until September 29.

According to The Block, Arbitrum DAO achieved revenue of $6.19 million in the first half of 2026, mainly from Arbitrum One transaction fees, Timeboost ranking auctions, licensing fees for sidechains using Arbitrum technology, and treasury management income, with a protocol revenue gross margin exceeding 97%, holding $125 million in non-ARB assets at the end of the period.The report shows that during this period, the network processed 478 million transactions, with a monthly average transfer volume of stablecoins exceeding $70 billion, the number of holding addresses increased to 10.5 million, and it ranked first in the number of on-chain RWA deployments. In its first month after launching the mainnet in July, Robinhood Chain paid $360,000 in licensing fees to the Arbitrum Expansion Program, accounting for 35% of the DAO's revenue for that month.

The derivatives protocol Variational on the Arbitrum ecosystem has announced the launch of its swaps market, initially including gold (XAU) and the Nasdaq 100 index (US100) markets. Swaps are similar to perpetual contracts in that they provide exposure to the underlying asset, but differ in terms of liquidity sources and holding costs: the holding cost for swaps is based on the USD borrowing interest rate, with long positions currently paying an annualized rate of 4% to 6%, and short positions receiving an annualized rate of 2% to 3%, replacing the more volatile funding rates.The swaps market charges no trading fees, with an initial open contract limit of approximately $10 million per market. The team plans to increase the limit to over $50 million in the coming days, and the initial protocol can support an open contract size of over $1 billion. The team stated that in the coming months, they will continue to raise limits, launch more swaps and perpetual contract markets, introduce trading APIs, and promote around-the-clock liquidity.