How to Trade on Arcus: Complete Beginner's Guide (2026)

Arcus is a self-custodial exchange on Robinhood Chain where you can trade tokenized US stocks and ETFs ("Stock Tokens") on spot, plus perpetual futures on crypto, equities, index ETFs and commodity ETFs. It is built by dYdX Labs, with Robinhood Crypto as a strategic investor, and it is separate from dYdX Chain, which keeps running. If you want the background first, read what Arcus is and how it relates to dYdX.

This guide walks the whole path in the order the app asks for it, from the region check to your first withdrawal. Every number below comes from Arcus's own docs, Help Center or public API, checked on 2026-10-02.

The route at a glance

Step 1: Check that your region is eligible

Do this before anything else, because nothing later in the process overrides it. Arcus's Interface Terms and Protocol Terms bar anyone located in or resident in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, plus comprehensively sanctioned countries and regions such as Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. The Help Center's spot page adds Switzerland to the list for Stock Token trading.

The app checks where you are connecting from and blocks spot and perps for restricted regions. The terms also say plainly that using a VPN or similar tool to get around a restriction is prohibited, and wallets that break the rules can be blocked. If the app tells you it isn't available where you are, read Arcus not available in your country? for what that means and what your options are. Nothing here is legal advice.

Step 2: Sign in

Open Arcus and click Sign in. You get two paths, per the Help Center's wallet page:

• New to crypto wallets: sign in with email or Apple. Privy creates an embedded wallet in the background. It is non-custodial, recovers through your sign-in instead of a seed phrase, and you can move to your own wallet later.
• Already have a wallet: connect MetaMask, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, Phantom, or any mobile wallet through WalletConnect. Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets connect through MetaMask.

The first sign-in is a connect plus one signed message. Neither puts a transaction on-chain or costs gas.

Step 3: Join with code ARCUSGUIDE (before you trade)

This is the step people regret skipping. Arcus's app shows "Receive 5% off on all trading fees" to traders who join under a referral code, and its API changelog for 2026-07-22 records a "5% referral fee discount for referred users."

Two ways to bind it:

1. Open app.arcus.xyz/ref/ARCUSGUIDE and sign in. The code attaches automatically.
2. If you already have an account, go to Rewards → Referrals, type ARCUSGUIDE, and hit Enter Referral Code.

The window closes. Arcus's referral post says you can only add a code "early on", and once your volume passes the threshold "that option closes for good. You can't add or remove your referrer after." The API reference puts that cutoff at a rolling 30-day volume under $1M. Full details are on our ARCUSGUIDE referral code page.

Step 4: Fund your account with USDG

Everything on Arcus is priced, margined and settled in USDG, the Global Dollar stablecoin issued by Paxos. Whatever you deposit is converted to USDG on the way in.

Click Deposit. The first choice is where the money lands: USDG (Spot) for Stock Tokens or USDG (Perps) for perpetuals. You can move it between the two later, so pick the side you'll trade first. Then choose a route. Deposits are handled by Arcus's partner Fun:

Sources: Help Center pages on deposit routes and fiat fees. Arcus adds no deposit fee of its own. The full breakdown, including bridges, FX and what to do when a deposit stalls, is in how to deposit and withdraw on Arcus.

One wrinkle: Arcus's own pages disagree on gas. The docs describe most spot swaps as gasless, while the Help Center says you need a small amount of ETH on Robinhood Chain for some spot actions. Keeping a dollar or two of ETH there saves you a failed transaction.

Step 5: Buy your first Stock Token

Spot is the part of Arcus that works for everyone in an eligible region on day one, so it is the best place to learn the app. Click Spot in the left rail and pick a token. NVDA is a good first choice: it is large-cap tech, the group Arcus says quotes through the weekend.

1. In the swap box, set From to USDG and To to the Stock Token.
2. Enter an amount. The Help Center sets the range at $10 minimum and $1,000,000 maximum per order.
3. Read the lines under the box: exchange rate, network fee, platform fee, settlement and quote slippage (0.50% by default).
4. Sign. On your first trade in a new token you sign twice: once to authorize that token, once for the trade itself.

There is no order book on spot. Arcus asks its market makers for a price (a request for quote, or RFQ), routes across its own makers and outside venues, and settles the best quote on-chain. What you sign is an intent with a minimum you'll accept, so the fill can come in slightly better than the estimate and never worse than your slippage floor. Arcus charges no trading fee on Stock Tokens. Your cost is the spread inside the quote, and it widens outside US market hours.

Settled and unsettled. Your balance may show part of a purchase as unsettled. Arcus's settlement explainer says the price is locked at confirmation, delivery is often instant, and when a maker has to source the token it lands in about 3 to 15 minutes. Until then your USDG sits in an escrow contract, and you can't sell or transfer the unsettled part. If you see "no quotes available," try a smaller size or wait a moment. Our 24/7 stock trading guide covers weekend quotes and which names trade around the clock.

Step 6: Get perps access

Click Perps and you will most likely see this gate:

Perpetuals are still in a gated beta. There are two ways through:

• An invite code. Since 2026-10-01, traders earn one invite code per $1M of qualifying perps volume and can hand them out. Click I have an Invite Code, paste it, and access comes through within about 30 seconds according to the API reference. Codes are single-use, so treat anyone selling them with suspicion.
• The waitlist. Connect your X account and a wallet at waitlist.arcus.xyz. Prior perps volume on dYdX, Hyperliquid and Lighter, your Arcus spot volume and your referrals all move you up.

Your ARCUSGUIDE referral link does not unlock perps by itself. It gets you the fee discount, and spot works straight away. The full breakdown of codes, cohorts and the stale Help Center page is in Arcus invite codes and the perps waitlist.

Step 7: Enable trading

Once you have access, the perps screen asks you to Enable Trading. Tick the Terms of Use box, confirm, and sign one more message. Per the Help Center, that signature creates the key the web app uses to send your orders. It costs nothing, and from then on placing, modifying and cancelling orders carries no per-action gas. The same signature also unlocks creating your own referral code and seeing your invite codes under Rewards.

Step 8: Move USDG from Spot to Perps

If you deposited to Spot, use the Spot / Perps toggle to move USDG across. The Perps balance is the collateral behind every perp position you open.

Step 9: Place your first perp order

Pick a market from the selector. On 2026-10-02 the markets API listed 67 perp markets, 60 of them online, across crypto, single stocks, index ETFs and commodity ETFs. Maximum leverage is set per market. Stock, ETF and commodity perps get a lower ceiling while their home market is closed:

Source: initialMarginFraction and offHoursInitialMarginFraction from GET /v1/markets, 2026-10-02. The minimum order notional on all of these was $5.

Choose a margin mode first. Every position is cross margin by default, which means your whole Perps balance backs every position. Isolated margin, live since September, walls off the collateral for one market so a loss there can't drain the rest of your account. You can't switch a market from cross to isolated while a position is open in it, so decide before you enter. For a first trade, isolated at 2x to 3x is the sane setting.

Pick an order type. Arcus's order-type docs and Help Center list:

• Market: fills now against the book, with a protective price bound so it can't run away.
• Limit: fills at your price or better and rests on the book until it does.
• Stop-market and stop-limit: trigger on the mark price, then send a market or limit order.
• Take-profit and stop-loss: reduce-only trigger orders you attach at entry or to an open position, also mark-price based.

Time-in-force options are good-til-canceled (the docs call it good-til-time), immediate-or-cancel, fill-or-kill and post-only. Post-only is how you guarantee the maker rate, which is 0% at the base tier during the beta, against 0.0225% for takers (fee tiers, 2026-10-02). There is no TWAP, trailing stop, OCO or hedge mode yet. Our Arcus fees explained page and the fee calculator cover the full schedule.

Then set size, pick Long or Short, check the liquidation price the ticket shows, attach a stop-loss and take-profit, and confirm.

Two quirks to know before your second trade. Arcus runs in net mode, so a short on a market where you're already long reduces or flips that long rather than opening a separate hedge. And modifying a resting limit order to a larger size at the same price costs you your place in the queue, per the order-type docs. If you'd like a dry run first, the testnet hands you $1,000 in test USDG to practice with.

Know the off-hours rules for stock perps. When the underlying market is closed (US evenings, weekends, holidays), Arcus's real-world asset docs switch those markets to a different regime:

• Initial margin rises 50%, so the same position needs more collateral to open.
• Funding locks to a fixed SOFR plus 0.5% annual rate.
• Trading and the mark price are kept inside price bands around the last session's closing price. The bands widen step by step (0.5x, 1x, 2x, 4x) only under an hour of sustained pressure.
• The mark price becomes a 2.5-minute moving average of the order book.

Crypto perps have none of this; they trade the same at every hour.

Watch funding while you hold. Funding is a payment between longs and shorts, charged every hour into your margin balance. Per Arcus's funding docs, the base rate is 0.01% per eight hours on crypto perps and SOFR plus 0.5% a year on stock, ETF and commodity perps, with a premium on top when the perp trades away from its index. The hourly rate is capped at 4% in either direction. Arcus's docs say dividends on stock perps reach longs through funding, though the Help Center describes cash dividend credits as still to come. Live rates are on our funding rates tool.

Step 10: Manage risk and know how liquidation works

Arcus measures position health with a margin ratio: account equity against maintenance margin. When the ratio hits 100%, the liquidation engine starts closing positions against the book, partially where it can, just enough to bring you back above maintenance. If the book can't absorb it, a backstop liquidity layer takes over the account, the insurance fund covers any deficit, and auto-deleveraging against profitable traders is the last resort. The Help Center says no fee is currently charged on liquidation orders, but a backstop takeover zeroes the account's positions and margin.

The habits that keep you out of that:

• Start at 2x to 3x. The ceiling in the table above is a limit, not a target.
• Put a stop-loss on every position. It closes you on your terms, well before maintenance margin is touched.
• Expect your buying power to drop at the US close. The docs warn that free collateral falls at the session boundary on stock perps with no trade on your part, because initial margin goes up. Maintenance margin doesn't change, so this alone won't liquidate you, but you can't add to a position until the session reopens.
• Use isolated margin for anything experimental. A bad trade on one market then can't eat into the others.

If you think a liquidation was wrong, Arcus asks you to email support@arcus.xyz with your wallet address, the position and the timestamp.

Step 11: Withdraw

Withdrawals take two steps, and the first one surprises people:

1. Withdraw from Perps moves USDG to your Spot balance, which is your own wallet on Robinhood Chain. It takes seconds, and the destination can't be changed.
2. Withdraw from Spot bridges out to another chain and asset. The bridge fee, gas estimate and amount received show before you confirm.

A withdrawal fails if open positions or resting orders are using that collateral as margin, so close or cancel first. Once confirmed, a withdrawal can't be canceled. Check the destination chain and address before you sign.

Mistakes that cost beginners money

• Skipping the referral code. It can't be added after your volume passes the cutoff, and it can't be changed later.
• Treating a referral link as perps access. You still need an invite code or a waitlist slot.
• Trying to sell a Stock Token a minute after buying it. Unsettled quantity stays locked until delivery completes.
• Opening stock perps at max leverage on a Friday afternoon. Initial margin rises at the close, and the weekend runs on price bands and a fixed funding rate.
• Expecting Withdraw from Perps to reach an exchange. It always lands in Spot first.
• Buying an "ARCUS" token. Arcus has no token, and anything trading under that name is unofficial; see what is confirmed about points and airdrops.

My advice: make one small spot trade, then open a small perp at low leverage with a stop attached. Once you've watched a fill, a funding payment and a withdrawal go through at small size, the rest of the app holds few surprises.