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