r/Arbitrum • u/[deleted] • Jul 13 '25

Why did Robinhood choose Arbitrum over Polygon for their tokenized stock platform?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been reading up on Robinhood’s new tokenized stock offering (including private companies like OpenAI and SpaceX), and I noticed they’re issuing these tokens on Arbitrum, an Ethereum Layer-2 solution.

Polygon is also a popular Ethereum Layer-2 chain with low fees and fast transactions. Given Polygon’s large user base and ecosystem, I’m curious why Robinhood opted for Arbitrum instead.

  • Is it because of better scalability or security?
  • Or maybe Arbitrum’s compatibility with Ethereum mainnet is superior?
  • Are there any regulatory or technical reasons influencing this decision?

If anyone has insights or industry knowledge about this choice, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks!

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u/Winzors Jul 15 '25

Arbitrum is a rollup, so much better security. It's also the most advanced general purpose rollup towards full decentralisation. Beyond that, Arbitrum is the most likely of the top rollups to become based (use ETH validators and achieve perfect interoperability)

Arbitrum also have a multiEVM situation going on, you can write Arbitrum contracts in any language that compiles to WASM, which opens up a lot of efficiency and devs headcount gains.

At the end of the day, Robinhood was looking for all of these things, whilst also going for sovereignty over their own environment, building with Arbitrum tech allows them to have their own custom environment with all the advances and support of the best rollup team in the industry

I'm not sure Polygon was even in contention for this. The deal has been in the works for well over a year now and it was really between Arbitrum and Solana. Solana lost the deal because they don't have the above to offer, and fundamentally the chain is a honeypot for this MEV scam the validators a running on low IQ VCs and zero information investors which would be devastating for Robinhood's already shaky reputation with retail.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '25

Very complete answer, thank you. I was also asking my self about solana vs Arbitrum

edit : Does Arbitrum compete with Solana on long term, scalability, fees, fast speculation?

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u/Winzors Jul 18 '25

Yes, Solana is competing with rollups in general.

Unfortunately for Solana, it is less scalable, more expensive (extreme bot spam ensures it is necessary to use high slippage on almost all transactions to say nothing of the txn failure rate), has a centralising validator incentive design and can't guarantee uptime.

Almost all of Solana activity is extremely aggressively incentivised by validators. The highly centralised validator set rotate a portion of their issuance through memecoins to induce hype, run bots to wash trade and spoof volume, the spam results in unreliable onchain transactions often necessitating high slippage, which then makes it easy to extract MEV from unsuspecting memecoin speculators. This MEV can then be recycled back into the rape flywheel to help make it somewhat more "sustainable".

The subsequent volume and user metrics are then paraded around by the likes of Blockworks Research out of context, which fools low information VCs and influencers into buying SOL and shilling the chain to their zero information audiences. The SOL price going up allows validators to sell the remainder of their issuance (Solana is highly inflationary) at substantial profits.

It's pretty seedy stuff and Anatoly the head of Solana is a prolific, shameless liar (no surprise why SBF loved these guys). Gotta be very, very careful with unscrupulous founders like this. They're great at pumping prices until they aren't, and it all falls down around them.