For a long time, L2s earned most of their money from base-layer gas fees. Arbitrum's H1 2026 numbers show a second engine forming next to that one. $6.19M went to ArbitrumDAO in H1 2026 from four lines: 🔸 Arbitrum One fees 🔸 Timeboost 🔸 AEP licensing 🔸 treasury yield Gross margin on the protocol lines (One fees, Timeboost, AEP) ran above 97%, up from above 90% in 2025. Treasury yield is a separate line with its own economics. For context the @arbitrum network did 478M transactions in H1, about 18% of all lifetime activity in six months. Fees on One are cheap for users now, around $0.0074 on average. And all of the fee profit on One flows straight to the DAO treasury. The growth in DAO income is coming from the newer line. This is where the Arbitrum Expansion Program comes in. Any chain that settles outside One & Nova pays back 10% of its net protocol revenue → 8% to the DAO, 2% to the Developer Guild. In simple terms, other teams keep their own chain and Arbitrum earns a royalty on the activity, w/o running it. The AEP income in H1 came from other licensed chains. The DAO treasury also held $125M in non-ARB assets as of June 30. @RobinhoodCrypto Chain, live since July 1, is the first chain where that royalty is big enough to show up in the mix: 🔸 $360K in July AEP fees booked into DAO income, about 35% of that month's total 🔸 July pace points to Q3 DAO income 40%+ above Q2, per the Foundation 🔸 $3.75M in the chain's own user fees on Sept 1, a day it out-earned Ethereum mainnet & Base The DAO earns a share of the net, so its take tracks that 8% of what flows through. Even so, one chain already moved a third of July's income, and the direction is the signal here. Imo the loop is more chains on AEP → more licensing fees → DAO revenue tied to ecosystem activity across many chains. Partners like Robinhood bring the users, Arbitrum earns from what they do. Zooming out, this is the barbell the Foundation describes: One as the public, liquid chain, licensed enterprise chains as the other weight, one stack underneath. The metric I'm watching → licensing fees as a share of DAO income, and a second chain reaching Robinhood's scale so the mix keeps broadening. cc: @ajwarner90 @sgoldfed

From August 2021 through 2023, blockchains captured 90%+ of monthly crypto revenue. By mid-2026, that share dropped to 25%. The new breakdown: 🔸 Finance apps: exceeded 50% in most months 🔸 Consumer apps: steady meaningful share 🔸 Blockchains: down to ~25% 🔸 Physical and crypto infrastructure: rounding errors The economic center of crypto moved from the base layer to the apps running on it. Early cycles were infrastructure-focused because infrastructure was the only place value could accrue. Users paid L1 gas fees because there was nowhere else for the money to go. Ethereum's high fees, Solana's spikes, Bitcoin's security budget drove revenue. As blockchains became cheaper, more scalable, and more reliable, apps could finally support real users and capture their own revenue streams. Finance apps (perp DEXs, lending protocols, stablecoin issuers, trading tools) earn fees from trading volume, not just gas. Consumer apps (memecoin launchpads, wallets, social tools) turn engagement into sustained revenue as they find market fit. The internet followed the same arc. In the 1990s, ISPs and backbone providers made the money. By the 2010s, applications and platforms captured most of the value. Crypto is following that path, faster and with full transparency because everything settles onchain. You can't value L1s solely on the claim that they capture all fees anymore. App-layer protocols have proven that lean teams can generate hundreds of millions in revenue across: 🔸 @HyperliquidX -style derivatives platforms 🔸 @Pumpfun -style consumer platforms 🔸 The wider DeFi stack These products now capture economic surplus that once flowed almost entirely to validators and miners. That diversification is healthy. Crypto no longer depends on one revenue source or one narrative. The infra succeeded, which is why its revenue share fell. Finance and consumer apps now generate the majority. That's where the next decade of value compounds. h/t: @Blockworks