Ethereum’s layer-2 strategy is catching heat again after DeFi researcher Ignas pointed to a blunt gap in how fees are split. Robinhood, the well-known trading platform, recently posted more than $6 million in fee revenue in a single day. Ignas said only around 10% of that went to Arbitrum, an Ethereum L2 scaling solution. The share that actually made it down to Ethereum’s base layer, he said, was "pitifully small."
Ignas compared it to Uber in its early days, back when the company subsidized rides to grab market share. His take: Ethereum may be doing something similar, using L2s to pull traditional finance firms into its ecosystem. Then later. Once those businesses are stuck with high switching costs, Ethereum could slowly raise the "rent" it charges. But Ignas said the current Ethereum roadmap does not show a clear strategy for making that shift. "Or am I misunderstanding?" he asked.