Arcus Review 2026: Live Funding APR, Real Fees & Points Farming Math

Arcus is a perpetual-futures DEX built by dYdX Labs together with Robinhood, running on Robinhood Chain. It is a mixed venue by design: crypto majors including BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, DYDX, ZEC and XRP sit alongside tokenized US equities, ETFs and commodities — NVDA, TSLA, SPY, QQQ, GLD, SLV, USO and SGOV among them — all as perpetual contracts settling on-chain.

What is Arcus?

The lineage matters more than the usual marketing pedigree does. dYdX Labs built one of the longest-running and most heavily studied perpetual DEXs in the industry, and the engineering conventions show through in Arcus: a single bulk market endpoint that carries mark, oracle, funding, open interest and 24-hour volume together, hourly funding on a clean hourly grid, and a fee schedule exposed programmatically rather than buried in a PDF.

The Robinhood association explains the catalogue. A venue whose equity exposure is the point of the product needs 24/7 tokenized markets, and that is what the tokenized-equity half of the book delivers: exposure to US stocks and ETFs outside exchange hours, margined and funded like any other perpetual, with none of the settlement calendar that governs the underlying instruments.

One structural detail worth understanding before you trade it: Arcus marks markets ONLINE or OFFLINE, and roughly nine of fifty-one markets were OFFLINE when ORBIT measured the venue. ORBIT excludes OFFLINE markets from its catalogue entirely, because carrying a market that never quotes would seed a phantom listing — a contract that appears on the screener, shows a stale price and cannot actually be traded. What you see for Arcus on ORBIT is the tradeable subset, not the full nominal list.

This review covers what Arcus is, its live metrics, the features that matter for active traders, the honest state of its token and incentive situation, its unusually cheap fee schedule and where that number came from, custody and oracle considerations, the real risks, and how its hourly funding compares live against every other venue tracked on ORBIT.

Arcus key metrics (2026)

Arcus is a young venue with an institutionally serious pedigree, and its metrics reflect both facts: a compact, curated market list rather than a long tail, with liquidity concentrated in the majors. The figures below are pulled live from ORBIT so they never go stale. Pay particular attention to the per-market open interest in the second table — on a mixed crypto/equity venue the depth profile differs sharply between the two halves of the book, and the crypto majors are generally where a funding position can actually be sized.

Arcus key features for traders

The headline feature for a cost-sensitive trader is the fee schedule: 2.25 bps taker and zero maker at the base tier. That is cheaper on the taker side than essentially every centralized venue and competitive with the cheapest DEXs — and it matters disproportionately for funding arbitrage, where you pay taker fees four times across a round trip on two legs.

The second is the catalogue shape. Very few venues let you hold a crypto perpetual and a tokenized equity perpetual in the same margin account on the same chain, funded on the same hourly grid. For anyone building cross-asset relative-value positions rather than pure crypto carry, that combination is genuinely unusual.

• 0 bps maker fees: resting orders cost nothing at the base tier — the maker fee is literally zero, not a marketing rounding of a small number.
• 2.25 bps taker: verified from the venue's own fee-tier endpoint at level 0, with no volume discounts or token holdings assumed.
• Hourly funding on a clean grid: funding settles on the hour, and history buckets are exactly 3600 seconds apart — a predictable cadence for timing entries around settlement.
• Crypto and tokenized TradFi together: BTC, ETH, SOL and HYPE alongside NVDA, TSLA, SPY, QQQ, GLD and USO, all as perpetuals on one venue.
• 24/7 equity exposure: the tokenized equity markets trade continuously, without the session calendar that governs the underlying stocks.
• Deep books on majors: ORBIT measured BTC top-of-book around $8.7k with roughly $786k of 20-level bid depth and a touch spread near 0.01 bps — genuinely tight for a young venue.
• Live-tracked on ORBIT: funding is read from the venue's own bulk endpoint and shown beside every other venue on the Funding Screener.

Arcus points & airdrop

Arcus has not announced a token or a TGE, and there is no published points programme with a rate you could model. The venue carries a Pre-TGE status on ORBIT for exactly that reason: something may come, nothing has been specified.

The speculative case people make is straightforward and worth stating without endorsing it: a perpetuals venue built by dYdX Labs in partnership with Robinhood is a serious operation with serious backers, and early users of serious operations have sometimes been rewarded. That is a plausible thesis. It is not a published allocation, a snapshot date or a points rate, and it should not be treated as one.

What is concrete right now is the fee schedule, and it deserves more attention than the airdrop speculation does. Zero maker fees and 2.25 bps taker is a durable, quantifiable edge on every trade you place — unlike an unannounced incentive, it compounds today and does not depend on anyone's future generosity. For a high-turnover delta-neutral strategy that difference is frequently worth more than a speculative allocation.

Arcus is not wired into ORBIT's Points Calculator, because there is no announced allocation to model. That is the same standard applied to every pre-token venue: the calculator covers programmes that publish enough to be estimated honestly.

Arcus trading fees

Arcus charges 2.25 bps taker and 0 bps maker on perpetuals. On a round-trip — entry and exit, and across two venues if you trade delta-neutral — those fees are the first thing any spread has to overcome. ORBIT's backtester subtracts both legs' taker fees plus live order-book slippage, so the PnL it shows is net, not headline.

The provenance of these fee numbers is worth explaining, because it is unusual. Arcus's documentation deliberately declines to quote rates, telling integrators to read them from the API once live. So rather than guess or copy a figure from a third-party tracker, ORBIT reads GET /v1/feetiers directly: level 0 ("Base") returns taker_fee_ppm 225 and maker_fee_ppm 0, which converts to 2.25 bps taker and 0 bps maker. That is the base tier with no volume discounts and no token-holding assumptions, per ORBIT's standing rule on fee reporting. For a delta-neutral pair the number that decides profitability is still the full round trip across both venues plus live slippage, and ORBIT's backtester subtracts both from real book depth.

Funding rates on Arcus

Arcus settles funding every 1h. Funding is the payment between longs and shorts that anchors the perpetual to spot — and because every venue computes its own rate, the same asset can pay very differently on Arcus than on another exchange at the same moment. That gap is a tradeable, delta-neutral edge.

Is Arcus safe?

Arcus is non-custodial — you trade from your own wallet and the venue does not hold your margin — which structurally removes the class of failure where an exchange freezes withdrawals or becomes insolvent with client funds. As always, that substitutes a different risk profile rather than eliminating risk.

The pedigree is a genuine mitigant and should be weighed as one. dYdX Labs has operated perpetual-futures infrastructure through multiple market cycles, including violent ones, and that operating history is worth more than any audit badge. The engineering conventions visible in the API — programmatic fee tiers, explicit ONLINE/OFFLINE market status, consistent units — are the marks of a team that has run this kind of system before.

The dependencies that remain are the ones inherent to the design. Robinhood Chain is a young network, so liveness and settlement rest on infrastructure without years of adversarial history. And the tokenized-equity half of the catalogue depends on an oracle and on whatever mechanism backs the tokenized exposure — when you trade a perpetual on NVDA, you are trusting a price feed and a wrapper, not holding the share.

That oracle dependency is the specific thing to think about on this venue, because it applies precisely to the markets that make Arcus distinctive. Crypto perpetuals reference deep, continuously traded global spot markets. A tokenized equity perpetual trading at 3am references an instrument whose primary market is closed. That is a feature — it is why 24/7 equity exposure exists at all — but it means price discovery outside session hours is thinner and more oracle-dependent than the crypto book.

Arcus risks and considerations

1. No announced token or points programme. Pre-TGE status is not a promise. Any specific airdrop expectation for Arcus is speculation, not a published figure.
2. Young chain. Robinhood Chain has not accumulated the adversarial operating history that makes a settlement layer boring in the way traders want.
3. Oracle dependency on tokenized equities. Equity perpetuals reference a price feed and a wrapper rather than a share you hold, and outside US market hours the underlying primary market is closed.
4. OFFLINE markets exist. Roughly nine of fifty-one markets were OFFLINE at measurement. ORBIT excludes them, but the nominal catalogue size overstates what is actually tradeable.
5. Wide funding cap. The documented cap is ±4% per hour, which is permissive. ORBIT deliberately does not clamp published rates to it — hiding a real venue value would be worse — but an extreme reading on a thin market deserves scrutiny before you trade it.

How to get started with Arcus

1. Open Arcus and connect a wallet — it is non-custodial, so there is no centralized account-opening step.
2. Deposit margin and start small while you learn how the venue behaves, particularly around funding settlement on the hour.
3. Open the Funding Screener and find where Arcus's hourly funding diverges from another venue on the same asset. On mixed venues, check the crypto and tokenized-equity halves separately — they behave differently.
4. Verify the book can absorb your size with Size & Depth before committing. Arcus's majors measured genuinely deep; the long tail of the catalogue does not necessarily follow.
5. Confirm the net edge in the backtester — with 0 bps maker and 2.25 bps taker, the fee drag here is unusually low, which makes the slippage term the one that decides the trade.

Arcus vs dYdX

The most instructive comparison is dYdX, since the same team built both: dYdX is the mature, battle-tested venue with a live token and years of operating history, while Arcus is the newer product pairing that engineering lineage with tokenized equities and a materially cheaper base fee schedule. The other natural benchmark is Hyperliquid, the deepest on-chain perpetual venue and the default anchor leg for most DEX funding trades. For a delta-neutral pair the choice is not about which venue is better in the abstract — it is about which one is currently paying the wrong funding relative to the other, and whether both books can absorb your size.

Arcus is also frequently weighed against Hyperliquid — see the Arcus vs Hyperliquid comparison for the full breakdown.

Arcus review: verdict

Arcus is one of the more credible new venues to launch in this cycle: real engineering pedigree from dYdX Labs, a Robinhood partnership behind the tokenized-equity catalogue, tight measured books on the majors, and a base fee schedule — 2.25 bps taker, zero maker — that is genuinely among the cheapest available anywhere. For funding arbitrage that fee structure is the headline, not the airdrop speculation: low taker fees compound on every round trip, whereas an unannounced token is an unpriced maybe. The honest caveats are a young chain, an oracle dependency that bites hardest on exactly the equity markets that make the venue distinctive, and a nominal catalogue that overstates the tradeable one. Sized sensibly and checked against live depth, Arcus earns a place in the rotation on its measured costs alone — which is a much better reason to use a venue than hoping it airdrops.