Ethereum is becoming the security layer for a growing share of onchain activity, but the Layer 2 networks built on top of it are keeping most of the economics for themselves. For the L2s that have already broken out, sustained activity is turning into sizable revenue, while Ethereum is collecting only a small cut.
Revenue is piling up on a handful of chains
According to Growthepie data cited by PANews, revenue across the Ethereum ecosystem reached $52.19 million so far this month. The top four chains were Robinhood Chain, Ethereum mainnet, Base and Polygon, with roughly $39.06 million, $7.32 million, $3.62 million and $1.44 million in revenue, respectively. Together, they accounted for 98.5% of total ecosystem revenue. Robinhood Chain ranked first, with revenue up 1266% month over month, and contributed the bulk of the ecosystem’s total on its own.
Over the past seven days, only a small number of chains generated revenue in the hundreds of thousands of dollars: Robinhood Chain, Ethereum mainnet, Base, Polygon and Arbitrum. Combined, they made up 97.6% of the total.
On both a monthly and weekly basis, liquidity and revenue capture inside the Ethereum ecosystem are concentrated in a small group of leading chains, while many L2 projects are being pushed to the margins. The traffic siphon effect is also becoming more visible. The more active the trading and the more frequent the user participation, the easier it is for those chains to convert activity into revenue and widen the gap with other L2s.
L2s are earning millions while Ethereum gets a tiny share
The core issue is that rising L2 revenue has not translated into comparable income for Ethereum. Growthepie data shows that over the past 30 days, the three chains that paid the most in L1 fees to Ethereum mainnet were Robinhood Chain, Base and World Chain, but the amounts were only about $18,000, $10,000 and $3,700.
That is negligible next to the millions, and in some cases tens of millions, generated by the leading L2s.
Robinhood Chain is the clearest example. It has been one of the most active and highest-revenue L2s in recent weeks, and it also paid the most L1 fees to Ethereum among L2 networks. Even so, the “rent” it paid to Ethereum was almost irrelevant compared with its own revenue. On Sept. 4, for example, Robinhood Chain’s daily revenue reached $8.36 million, while the fee it paid to Ethereum at the same time was only about $722.
As blobs have gone live, settlement costs paid by L2s to Ethereum have fallen further, pushing margins even higher. Over the past 30 days, profit as a share of revenue reached 100% for Robinhood Chain, 99.8% for Base and 99.6% for Arbitrum.
For the leading L2s, that makes Ethereum’s security and settlement service look like very cheap infrastructure. They can pay very little for settlement, use Ethereum’s security to support large-scale onchain activity, and still keep almost all of the revenue on their own networks.
Cheap access to Ethereum security has reopened the value capture debate
L2s are capturing a growing share of economic value, while Ethereum, as the underlying settlement layer, is taking in relatively limited revenue. That has brought renewed attention to Ethereum’s value capture model.
Some market participants have argued that if an L2 can obtain Ethereum’s security, finality and composability by paying only a small amount of “rent,” then a public blockchain project may have less reason to build a sovereign standalone L1. Choosing an L2 architecture could be the cheaper option.
DeFi researcher Ignas raised a similar question. He said this business structure — where the platform makes substantial money while the settlement layer gets almost none — may be a real issue for Ethereum. In his view, Ethereum may be using low rent to bring TradFi into the ecosystem first, then planning to raise its take once user switching costs become high enough. If the official roadmap really contains a strategy of attracting a large number of L2s first and monetizing L1 later when switching becomes harder, that could be positive for ETH. But he said the current Ethereum roadmap does not show such an approach.
Crypto KOL 0xTodd looked at the issue through the lens of security budget. He said the Ethereum network is currently issuing about 1,700 ETH per day on average. At the price level used at the time, that was equal to about $3,050 in newly issued ETH value per minute. He described that issuance as a kind of security budget borne by the Ethereum ecosystem to maintain base-layer security. By comparison, the weekly fees paid by an L2 the size of Robinhood Chain to Ethereum were said to equal only about 1.8 minutes of Ethereum’s ETH issuance cost, yet that chain could still rely on Ethereum’s large validator network for underlying security.
Researchers say the question is not whether Ethereum should scale with L2s, but how it should price that growth
ARK Invest Director of Digital Asset Research Lorenzo Valente compared Ethereum, Solana and Hyperliquid to McDonald’s, Chipotle and In-N-Out, respectively. In his framework, Ethereum resembles a “franchise plus landlord” model. It expands the ecosystem through the rollup path with relatively low capital intensity while providing security and settlement services to a large number of L2s. The problem, he argued, is that after EIP-4844 went live, blob space prices dropped sharply and L1 captured almost no value from L2 activity.
That does not mean L2 expansion has no value for Ethereum.
Crypto researcher Lan Hu said that after the Dencun upgrade, blob capacity expanded faster than actual L2 demand, pushing data availability, or DA, prices lower on a sustained basis. As a result, the L2 business model has increasingly become “block space revenue minus cheap DA costs,” with most execution-layer profit retained by the L2 itself. By contrast, some L2 technology stacks have already started using revenue-linked sharing models, including the OP Superchain and the Arbitrum ecosystem, while Ethereum L1 still mainly charges based on data bytes and batch-related dimensions.
From that perspective, he said, L2 expansion is broadly beneficial to Ethereum’s ambition to become the world’s settlement layer. But that does not mean Ethereum should provide a security premium at extremely low cost for the long term. To improve value capture, he said Ethereum may need more than a recovery in blob or DA demand and a rise in data-space rent from negligible levels to something more meaningful. It may also need protocol-level pricing mechanisms tied more directly to the economic scale of L2s.
The options he listed included requiring L2s to make mandatory contributions based on net protocol revenue, setting a minimum settlement fee linked to proof frequency, or forcing more high-value state to remain on L1. He also said ETH’s role inside L2 networks may need to deepen. Beyond serving as the default gas asset on networks such as Base, OP, Arbitrum and Robinhood, ETH may also need to become an irreplaceable collateral asset, fee payment asset and forced-exit asset, which would strengthen Ethereum’s ability to capture economic value across the L2 ecosystem.
In the end, the issue facing Ethereum is not whether it should develop through L2s. The harder question is how to balance a larger settlement layer with stronger value capture for itself. The more prosperous L2s become, the stronger Ethereum’s network effects as the underlying settlement layer may be. But if L2 growth does not convert into economic value for Ethereum at the same time, the market still has to answer how much real value that prosperity can ultimately bring to ETH.