Arcus Review: dYdX Team's 24/7 Stock and Perp DEX on Robinhood Chain

Arcus is a perpetual futures and stock-token exchange on Robinhood Chain, built by the team behind dYdX in partnership with Robinhood. It trades 24/7, including stocks on weekends, and in three months of beta its perps reached about half a billion dollars of daily volume. Perps are still invite-only. This review covers what you can trade, how the fees and the points program work, how to get access and the risks to weigh first.

Disclosure: links to the Arcus waitlist in this article are ArbiLayer referral links. Using them costs you nothing and supports the site. All figures were read on October 8, 2026 unless another date is given.

Arcus at a glance

Sources: arcus.xyz, CoinCodeCap, Fintech Byte.

Who built it

Arcus comes from Arcus Labs, which calls itself the next chapter for the team that built dYdX. Eddie Zhang is CEO, and dYdX founder Antonio Juliano is involved as a board member. dYdX Chain keeps running separately; Arcus is a new product, not a migration. Robinhood is the launch partner: the stock tokens traded on Arcus are issued by Robinhood Crypto and backed 1:1, and the exchange lives on Robinhood's own chain.

What you can trade

Stock tokens (spot). More than 80 US and international stocks and ETFs, including TSLA, NVDA, PLTR, AMZN, GOOGL, AAPL and MU, index funds such as SPY, QQQ and SOXX, and commodity ETFs for gold, silver and oil. They trade around the clock, so you can react to news on a Saturday. Stock tokens carry no voting rights and cannot be redeemed for the underlying share; they can be held in your own wallet and used in other Robinhood Chain DeFi apps.

Perpetual futures. Cross-margined perps on equities, indices, commodities and crypto (BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, ZEC, DYDX and more), with up to 50x leverage. Perps also trade 24/7, which makes Arcus one of the few places to hedge a stock position when the Nasdaq is closed. If that is your use case, read what happens to crypto stock futures when Nasdaq closes first: off-hours prices drift and funding can swing.

pTokens. Arcus also wraps a perp position into an ERC-20 token at a fixed leverage, for example pBTC, pBTC3x and pHOOD3x. Holders don't manage margin themselves; the token tracks a managed position. It is a new product, so treat it as experimental.

Fees

Stock-token spot trading has no commission. Prices come from request-for-quote (RFQ) market makers, so the real cost is the spread inside the quote; compare it with the price on other venues before a large trade.

Perps use a tiered maker/taker schedule, with maker rebates paid out in epochs, plus funding payments between longs and shorts. During the beta Arcus has advertised zero maker fees and discounted taker fees. Check the current schedule in the app, because beta pricing will not last. Deposits and withdrawals can carry bridge or FX costs depending on how you fund the account.

Numbers so far

According to DefiLlama, Arcus had about $42.0M in TVL on October 8, 2026, $497M of perp volume in 24 hours, $2.86B over 7 days and $8.29B cumulative, with $59.3M in open interest. Fees over the last 30 days were about $986K. For a three-month-old beta that is already a meaningful venue, although still far smaller than the largest perp DEXs. You can follow Arcus volume next to other perp DEXs on the best perp DEXs ranking and the Arcus exchange page.

How to get access to Arcus perps

Spot trading is open to users in eligible countries without a waitlist. Perps are gated:

1. Invite link or code. Since October 1, 2026 invite codes replaced the old whitelist: anyone with a code can sign up and trade perps right away. Arcus users earn a code for every $1M of perps volume, and codes don't expire.
2. Waitlist. Connect a wallet and an X account. Your place depends on your past perps volume on venues such as dYdX, Hyperliquid and Lighter (real-world-asset volume counts extra) and on referrals. You can connect several wallets to combine your history.

Join Arcus through ArbiLayer's invite link →

Arcus is not available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or other restricted jurisdictions, and identity verification (KYC) is required.

Arcus Points

Arcus started its points program on October 1, 2026, the official announcement explains it in full:

• Season 0 (July 1 to September 30) rewarded private-beta users with a special allocation. Rankings are visible on the points dashboard; the point amounts will be revealed later.
• Season 1 distributes a fixed 250,000 points every week, on Wednesdays at 3 PM ET, until no later than the end of H1 2027.
• Points are earned from trading (how you trade, not only volume), market making (tight, deep, consistent quotes), retained deposits and referrals.
• Boosts apply to stock tokens and other RWAs, to RWA perps traded outside regular US hours (overnight, weekends and holidays) and to swaps routed through Arcus in Robinhood Wallet.
• Wash trading, self-matching and similar gaming reduce or remove points.

Arcus has confirmed a token with an allocation reserved for the dYdX community, but it has not said how points relate to it. Treat points as a participation metric, not a promised airdrop.

Risks to weigh

• Beta product. Perps have been live for about three months and roll out by cohort; expect changes to fees, markets and rules.
• Chain centralization. Robinhood Chain runs a single sequencer operated by Robinhood. See our Robinhood Chain overview for what that means.
• Stock-token limits. No voting rights, no redemption for the actual share, and the issuer and chain have freeze powers described in the help center. Read that section before depositing a large balance.
• Hidden spread. "Zero fee" spot still costs the RFQ spread.
• Off-hours pricing. Weekend stock prices are set by the market on Arcus with no Nasdaq reference; gaps at the Monday open can trigger liquidations on leveraged positions.
• Access. KYC and regional restrictions apply, and perps need an invite.

Arcus vs other perp DEXs

Arcus is built around real-world assets: stock tokens on spot, stock and commodity perps, 24/7 trading and boosts for trading RWAs off-hours. Hyperliquid and Lighter are crypto-first venues with much larger crypto order books. If you mainly trade BTC and altcoins, compare fees and depth on Hyperliquid vs Arcus and Lighter vs Arcus. If you want to trade or hedge stocks around the clock from a self-custodial wallet, Arcus is one of very few options today. For the wider picture, read TradFi in crypto: tokenized stocks and stock perps.

Verdict

Arcus is the most serious attempt so far to bring stock trading on-chain around the clock: an experienced team, Robinhood as issuer and chain operator, zero-commission spot and perps that already do hundreds of millions in daily volume. The trade-offs are a young beta, invite-gated perps, regional limits and a chain run by a single company. For traders outside the restricted countries who want 24/7 stock exposure, or who are farming Season 1 points, it is worth getting in early.

Get Arcus perps access with ArbiLayer's invite link →

This review is information, not investment advice. Leveraged trading can lose more than your margin.