Arcus vs Hyperliquid (2026): Fees, Markets, Liquidity and Access Compared

ArcusvsHyperliquid

Arcus is the newer exchange, and it is cheaper to trade on today. Hyperliquid is bigger on almost every other measure: order-book depth, market count, open interest and volume. If you are deciding where to put a perp trade this week, the choice mostly comes down to whether you value a lower fee over a deeper book, and whether you can get into Arcus perps at all.

I pulled both exchanges' live APIs on October 2, 2026 for this comparison, plus DefiLlama's volume data and an order-book snapshot across five venues. Every number below says where it came from.

Source: Hyperliquid, captured October 2, 2026, used under fair use for educational purposes

The short version

Arcus wins on what a trade costs today and on Stock Tokens; Hyperliquid wins on depth, market count and open access.

	Arcus	Hyperliquid
Base taker fee (perps)	0.0225% (beta)	0.045%
Base maker fee (perps)	0% (beta)	0.015%
Stock Token spot	190+ Robinhood Chain Stock Tokens, 0% Arcus fee (Arcus's count)	No Robinhood Chain Stock Tokens
Robinhood Wallet routing	Stock Token swaps in Robinhood Wallet route through Arcus	None
Fees after beta	0.045% / 0.015%	0.045% / 0.015%
Fee-tier window	30 days	14 days
BTC depth within 0.10% of mid	about $6.0M	about $64.6M
BTC depth within 0.50% of mid	about $7.1M	about $147.7M
Perp markets	67 listed, 60 online	178 native, plus 110 on trade.xyz
Equity perps scale	34 equity perps; total Arcus OI about $44.8M	trade.xyz: about $3.88B OI, $2.66B 24h volume
Perps access	Invite code or waitlist	Open in eligible regions
Max leverage	50x (SPY), 40x (BTC)	40x
Token	None (points program)	HYPE
30-day perp volume (DefiLlama)	$4.11B	$207.76B
Collateral	USDG	USDC
US persons	Barred (also Canada, UK, sanctioned regions)	Barred from perps

Sources: Arcus /v1/feetiers and /v1/markets (queried October 2, 2026); Hyperliquid fee docs; Hyperliquid's public info API (meta and metaAndAssetCtxs for the xyz dex, queried October 2, 2026); DefiLlama perps; order-book snapshot method in the liquidity section.

Fees: where Arcus wins today

Arcus's live fee schedule charges half of Hyperliquid's base taker rate and nothing for maker orders. The Arcus fee-tier API returned taker_fee_ppm: 225 and maker_fee_ppm: 0 for the Base tier on October 2, 2026. That is 0.0225% taker and 0% maker. Hyperliquid's fee docs list 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker at its base tier.

In dollars:

Arcus got here in two steps. It halved taker fees for the beta on July 20, 2026, then cut maker fees to zero for tiers 0 to 4 on August 4. Traders who join with a referral code also get what the Arcus app describes as 5% off trading fees, which takes the $10,000 example from $2.25 to about $2.14.

The discount is tied to the beta. When the beta ends, Arcus's standard schedule of 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker applies, and that is identical to Hyperliquid's base tier. Arcus says you will hear about the end of beta "in advance through @Arcus_xyz and the Arcus website," with no date given (Help Center).

Two smaller differences:

• Tier window. Arcus tiers use rolling 30-day perp volume. Hyperliquid uses 14 days. A 30-day window is more forgiving if your volume is lumpy.
• Equity perps specifically. Hyperliquid's own base rate is not what you pay on most of its stock perps. Those run on trade.xyz, a HIP-3 builder deployment that charges 0.090% taker in standard mode and 0.009% in growth mode. Arcus's 0.0225% beats the standard rate and loses to growth-mode markets.

The full tier table, rebates and worked examples are in the Arcus fees guide, and you can price your own size with the fee calculator. For Hyperliquid's side, our sister site HyperliquidGuide has a fees explainer covers its tiers and discounts.

Stock Tokens: something Hyperliquid does not offer

Arcus runs two products. Perps sit on an order book. Spot is a separate engine for Stock Tokens: tokenized US stocks and ETFs on Robinhood Chain, issued by Bitstamp, that land in your own wallet.

• Fee. Arcus charges no trading fee on Stock Token spot trades. Your cost is the market maker's spread inside the quote, which widens outside US market hours (Arcus blog).
• Catalog. Arcus says it lists "over 190" Stock Tokens (Oct 1 post). The live spot router lists 242 tokens on chain 4663, including ETFs, pTokens and some community tokens (router API).
• Hours. The most liquid names quote 24/7 and the rest 24/5 (Arcus).
• Robinhood Wallet. Since October 1, Robinhood Wallet routes Stock Token swaps through the Arcus API, and those swaps earn an Arcus points boost.

Hyperliquid's stock exposure is perps only, mostly through trade.xyz markets such as xyz:NVDA and xyz:SP500. Those are leveraged contracts with funding payments, not tokens you hold. If you want to own a token that tracks NVDA in a self-custodial wallet and also short NVDA with leverage, Arcus does both on one account. Spot needs no invite code in eligible regions, so it is the part of Arcus most readers can use today.

Robinhood Chain Stock Tokens carry no voting rights, and dividends are reinvested through a balance adjustment (Arcus docs). They are not the same thing as holding the share at a broker.

Liquidity: where Hyperliquid pulls away

On depth, the gap is large, and it matters more than the fee once your orders get big. I took a snapshot of BTC order books across five venues at 04:14 UTC on October 2, 2026, using each venue's public API.

Arcus's spread is tight and it has about $3M a side close to the mid. Past that, there is very little. The whole Arcus BTC book was roughly $3.4M of bids and $3.7M of asks at the time, so a market order of about $3.5M would have emptied one side. Hyperliquid had over twenty times that inside 0.50%.

The volume gap tells the same story. DefiLlama's perps dashboard put Hyperliquid at $207.76B of 30-day volume and $8.37B of open interest, against Arcus's $4.11B and $44.6M.

Stock perps widen the gap. Arcus was the thinnest of the venues I checked on both NVDA and SPY. Arcus NVDA had about $0.03M bid and $0.01M ask within 0.10%, against $0.34M and $0.56M on trade.xyz's xyz:NVDA. Treat this one with care: the snapshot was taken at 00:14 New York time, outside US trading hours. Arcus raises margin requirements and applies price bands when the underlying market is closed (docs), which can thin its equity books overnight. A daytime snapshot may look different.

Markets and leverage

Hyperliquid lists far more markets. Its public API returned 178 active native perps on October 2, 2026, plus 110 active markets on trade.xyz's HIP-3 deployment, which covers stocks, indices, commodities and FX. Hyperliquid's native max leverage in that response was 40x.

Arcus's markets API listed 67 perps (60 online): 25 crypto, 34 equities, 4 commodity ETFs and 4 index ETFs. Max leverage is 50x on SPY and 40x on BTC, with most single stocks at 10x. Two Arcus tickers trip people up: SPCX is SpaceX (both a perp and a Stock Token), and QNT is Quantinuum, not the Quant crypto token.

Scale is the bigger difference for stock traders. trade.xyz's markets did about $2.66B of 24-hour volume with about $3.88B of open interest on October 2, 2026. Arcus's total open interest across all 60 online markets was about $44.8M on the same day, with its largest equity market, NVDA, around $2.1M. Arcus also caps open interest per market on its stock perps (SPY $8M; NVDA, QQQ, GLD and HOOD $4M each). If you trade size in equity perps, Hyperliquid's builder markets are where the liquidity is today. More on how those work in HyperliquidGuide's HIP-3 explainer.

Order types and tools

Hyperliquid has more trading tools. Its trade screen on October 2, 2026 showed a TWAP tab and an announcement for a new trailing-stop order type. Arcus supports limit and market orders, time-in-force options (GTT, IOC, FOK and post-only ALO), reduce-only, and take-profit and stop-loss orders, including stop-market and stop-limit (order types). Its Help Center lists TWAP, trailing stops and OCO orders as "on the roadmap," and Arcus runs in net mode, so you cannot hold a long and a short in the same market at once. Isolated margin went live on Arcus in September 2026, alongside the default cross margin.

If you trade by hand with limits and stops, Arcus covers it. If your workflow depends on TWAP execution or trailing stops, Hyperliquid has them today.

Stock perps around the clock

Arcus quotes stock perps around the clock and publishes exactly what changes when the US market is shut. Outside US regular hours, Arcus's real-world asset rules raise initial margin by 50%, apply price bands, lock funding to SOFR plus 0.5% a year, and switch the mark price to a smoothed average. In practice your free collateral can drop at the US market close without a trade, which surprises people. Our 24/7 stock trading guide walks through a weekend on Arcus step by step.

Access: open vs invite-only

This is where many readers get stuck. Hyperliquid perps are open to anyone outside the regions its terms bar. Arcus perps are in a gated beta.

Since October 1, 2026, Arcus perps access comes from an invite code or the waitlist (Arcus). Traders earn one single-use code per $1M of qualifying volume. A referral link is a different thing: it gives you a fee discount and ties you to a referrer, and it does not unlock perps. Our invite code and waitlist guide walks through all three systems. For waitlist ranking, Arcus counted perps volume from dYdX, Hyperliquid and Lighter, so a Hyperliquid trading history has helped people get in.

Regions:

• Arcus bars persons in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and sanctioned regions under its Interface Terms. In practice the app blocks spot as well as perps for US visitors, and the Help Center adds Switzerland for spot. See Arcus not available in your country.
• Hyperliquid bars US persons under its terms, and its front end blocks actions from US IP addresses.

Arcus's terms prohibit any attempt to get around its restrictions. None of this is legal advice; read each platform's terms for your own situation.

Architecture and trust

Hyperliquid runs its own layer-1 blockchain, with the order book on chain and a general-purpose EVM layer (HyperEVM) alongside it.

Arcus is a hybrid. Per its architecture docs, a high-speed matching engine runs off chain and is operated by Arcus. A permissioned validator set re-checks every fill and posts state roots. Custody and settlement sit in contracts on Robinhood Chain, with an escape hatch if the operator goes offline. The docs are candid about the trade-off: "The core exchange operates in a centralized manner," and if the escape hatch triggers, trades since the last committed state root "would be 'busted.'" The rootchain contracts were audited by Trail of Bits and OpenZeppelin.

On both, you keep your own keys. The difference is where matching happens: on Hyperliquid's own chain, or in Arcus's off-chain engine with on-chain checks behind it. Arcus is built by dYdX Labs, the trade name of dYdX Trading Inc., in partnership with Robinhood Crypto, which is a strategic investor and not the owner. The full background is in What Is Arcus?.

Getting money in

Arcus perps are margined in USDG, a dollar stablecoin issued by Paxos. Hyperliquid's perps are quoted and margined in USDC, as the BTC-USDC ticker in the screenshot shows. On Arcus, deposits run through Fun: you can send crypto from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana, Bitcoin and other chains, connect a Coinbase account, or pay with a card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Arcus charges no deposit or withdrawal fee of its own, though card on-ramps cost about 2.1% (Help Center). You can sign in with an email address through an embedded Privy wallet or connect MetaMask, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, Phantom or WalletConnect.

One Arcus quirk to know before you deposit: Spot and Perps are separate balances in the same wallet. Withdrawing from perps first moves USDG to your Spot balance, and only then can you bridge it out.

Momentum, with a caveat

Arcus is growing fast from a small base. DefiLlama showed Arcus's 30-day volume up 112% on the prior 30 days, against a 4% dip for Hyperliquid, and Arcus ranked #7 of 209 perp protocols on 24-hour volume on October 2. Most of that jump came after September 27, which lines up with the end of points Season 0 and the start of Season 1 and invite codes on October 1. Points programs pull in volume, so I would wait a few weeks before reading that rank as lasting.

Token and points

Hyperliquid's HYPE token is live, and its points program ended in November 2024 (Hyperliquid docs). HyperliquidGuide covers HYPE in What Is the HYPE Token?.

Arcus has no token. Its Help Center says so directly ("Arcus does not currently have a token"). Arcus Points went live on October 1, 2026, and the Protocol Terms state that points do not entitle anyone to a token or airdrop. dYdX founder Antonio Juliano has written that "an allocation of any future Arcus token will be reserved for the dYdX community," which is a statement about a hypothetical token, not an announcement. Any "ARCUS" token you see trading is not official. Details in Arcus points, token and airdrop.

Which one should you use?

Pick Arcus if:

• Your orders are small to mid-sized (well inside $3M on BTC) and you want a taker fee half of Hyperliquid's base rate while the beta lasts.
• You want Stock Tokens in your own wallet next to equity perps, or you already use Robinhood Wallet.
• You are fine with an invite-gated perps beta and a schedule that could double when beta ends.

Pick Hyperliquid if:

• You trade size, especially in equity perps, where trade.xyz's open interest is many times Arcus's total.
• You want the widest market list and no access gate.
• You care about a live token economy (HYPE) today.

Plenty of traders will use both: Hyperliquid for size and breadth, Arcus for cheap fills on BTC and for Stock Tokens. If you are weighing Arcus against its closest same-chain rival, read Arcus vs Lighter. For the dYdX connection, see Arcus vs dYdX Chain.

To get started, open Arcus with code ARCUSGUIDE and follow our referral code guide to confirm the code attached.