How well do L1s/L2s monetize per tx? And which one has the likeliest path to multi-billion dollar ARR?
This is a good chart for understanding the trade-offs and use-cases of different L1/L2s as revenue-generating networks. I used Q2 2026 numbers, and for Base and Robinhood Chain I used the last 2 weeks, so Robinhood's numbers are most likely inflated and will probably sit closer to Base and Hyperliquid over time.
Ethereum L1 is actually a wonderful business, you monetize at 30+ cents per tx, people are willing to pay for high-value/high-security tx but it doesn't scale beyond tens/hundreds of TPS.
Solana sits at the other end of the spectrum: it monetizes at 0.52 cents per tx, but Solana can likely scale to 10k+ TPS, so it has more than 2 orders of magnitude more scaling headroom than ETH.
Hyperliquid does similar TPS to L2s, close to hundreds of tx per second, but it obviously monetizes at the application layer and takes bips of transaction volume, so overall it brings substantial economics per tx. Hyperliquid says it can scale to 200k order/cancel messages per second, but from a realized-trades perspective it's probably in the low thousands, likely 10-25k TPS.
L2s are actually pretty good businesses. Looking at Robinhood Chain over the last week, they monetize roughly 35+ cents/tx. Base is closer to single-digit cents per tx. Jesse has often talked about 1 gigagas/s as the ultimate goal, so if L2s can scale to that, it's roughly low thousands of TPS for complex DeFi transactions and 20-30k TPS for simple ETH transfers.
So how many TPS do you need to become a multi-billion dollar ARR business? And command tens or hundreds of billions in market cap value?
L1/L2 Monetization: TPS Needed for $1B / $5B / $10B / $25B ARR (at current revenue-per-tx run-rate)
Robinhood Chain — 38.50¢/tx → 82 / 412 / 824 / 2,059 TPS
Ethereum (L1) — 31.03¢/tx → 102 / 511 / 1,022 / 2,555 TPS
Hyperliquid — 19.97¢/tx → 159 / 794 / 1,588 / 3,970 TPS
Base — 1.44¢/tx → 2,202 / 11,010 / 22,021 / 55,052 TPS
Solana — 0.526¢/tx → 6,029 / 30,142 / 60,285 / 150,712 TPS
Looking at this table, Solana has a clear path at these low monetization rates to scale to multi-billion dollar ARR, it needs 60k TPS for $10B ARR. Ethereum currently doesn't scale to even high hundreds of TPS, so it's hard to see the L1 monetizing much further.
L2s are great businesses for more centralized companies, it's a business that can clearly scale to $1B+ ARR, which is just huge for Robinhood or Coinbase long term in terms of earnings potential.
Will be interesting to see how monetization rates per tx evolve over time. The big question for me: can we see an L1 scale to hundreds of thousands or 1M+ TPS at rates around single-digit cents per tx? Something reasonable.
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