The Arbitrum Foundation has published its sixth annual transparency report, declaring 2025 a landmark year in which traditional financial institutions moved decisively onto its network. The foundation reported that the total value secured (TVS) on Arbitrum reached $20 billion last year. Stablecoin supply grew 80% year-on-year and reached a peak of $10 billion in October 2025. Lifetime transactions exceeded 2.1 billion, with the second billion processed in under twelve months. As of March 16, 2026, Arbitrum had $16.64 billion in TVS, making it the largest of any general-purpose Ethereum L2 network, according t o la yer two (L2) data tracking platform, L2BEAT . Arbitrum leads all Ethereum L2s in terms of total value secured (TVS). Source: L2BEAT Coinbase-backed Base comes second with over $11.5 billion in TVS. Why are institutional players building on Arbitrum? US retail brokerage, Robinhood , has been one of the major institutional players building on Arbitrum. Robinhood launched tokenized US equities and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for European customers directly on Arbitrum One to about 2,000 tokenized assets within six months. The firm also developed a dedicated blockchain, Robinhood Chain, built on Arbitrum. Asset managers also jumped on the Arbitrum train, with major firms like Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, and Spiko expanding tokenized financial products on the network. This contributed to a sevenfold increase in real-world asset (RWA) value to more than $800 million by the end of 2025. The Arbitrum Foundation has attributed part of that growth to its DAO-approved Stable Treasury Endowment Program, which channeled on-chain capital into yield-bearing instruments and attracted further institutional interest. The report also highlighted that its Chain ecosystem is growing with more than 100 chains going live or in development. The developments helped to strengthen its role as both a shared liquidity layer and a modular stack for deploying bespoke blockchain infrastructure. Under the Arbitrum Chain Expansion Program, each new chain contributes 10% of its net protocol revenue back to the ecosystem, a design the foundation calls an economic flywheel intended to compound long-term growth. The foundation also cited several infrastructure advances as contributors to network reliability and developer reach. According to the transparency report, over a thousand projects were building on Arbitrum by the end of 2025. Is Arbitrum’s economic model now self-sustaining? By year-end 2025, the Arbitrum DAO was generating income from four distinct sources, which were transaction fees, Timeboost sequencing auctions, treasury management returns, and revenue sharing through the Arbitrum Expansion Program. Timeboost alone returned more than $6 million to the DAO in its first year of operation. The foundation stated that the DAO balance sheet held more than $150 million in non-native assets by year-end, a diversification designed to reduce dependence on the value of Arbitrum’s native token. So far, it seems to have carried last year’s success into 2026 as it continues to build institutional pipelines and the financial architecture to defend its position at the top of the Ethereum L2 space. ARB token is up 10% over the last week. Source: CoinMarketCap Arbitrum’s ARB token is trading near breakeven range in the last 24 hours and is up more than 10% over the past week to trade near $0.11 at the time of writing. If you want a calmer entry point into DeFi crypto without the usual hype, start with this free video.
