The dYdX team launched Arcus, a self-custodial decentralized exchange for 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks, in early July 2026. The exchange offers 95 stock tokens with zero spot commission and 35 perpetual markets with up to 50x leverage, built on Robinhood Chain. The launch triggered a 23% drop in the DYDX token as traders worried about revenue diversion from the original protocol.
What Arcus Offers
Arcus is a joint project between dYdX Labs and Robinhood Crypto, led by CEO Eddie Zhang, with dYdX founder Antonio Juliano on the board. It runs on Robinhood Chain, an EVM layer-2 with block times around 100 milliseconds, designed to handle thousands of orders per second. Spot trading is live across 95 Stock Tokens and indices, operating around the clock rather than only during New York market hours. The perpetuals side, covering 35 real-world-asset markets including equities, crypto, commodities, and indices, is still rolling out from a waitlist.
The exchange aims to provide a single self-custodial account for both spot tokenized stocks and leveraged perpetuals. Users can fund accounts with cash or crypto through a bridge, though KYC is required and the service is not available in the US, UK, Canada, or other restricted jurisdictions.
What Stock Tokens Actually Are
An Arcus Stock Token is not a share but a tokenized security providing economic exposure to the underlying stock through a contractual claim against the issuer, redeemable for cash. Robinhood's infrastructure issues the tokens and backs them 1:1, with a proof-of-reserves system to confirm that backing. Holders get price exposure tracking the real stock 24/7, genuine self-custody, and dividends and corporate actions passed through at the token layer. However, they do not get voting rights or the ability to redeem for actual shares, and the tokens can be frozen or seized under the issuer's rules.
Fees and the DYDX Token Drop
Arcus charges 0% commission on spot Stock Tokens, but the real cost is the spread baked into each quote from the RFQ model. Perps use a tiered maker/taker schedule with maker rebates paid over epochs, plus funding payments. On launch day, DYDX fell roughly 23% in 24 hours to around $0.138, adding to a rough stretch. Traders reasoned that revenue from tokenized-stock and perp trading would accrue to Arcus, not to DYDX stakers, and that the core team's focus was drifting away from the Cosmos-based dYdX Chain.
The dYdX Foundation quickly stated that Arcus and the dYdX Chain are entirely separate ecosystems with zero operational or economic impact on each other. The only connection is a reserved allocation of the future Arcus token for the dYdX community, which may incentivize users to keep accounts active.
Competitive Landscape
Tokenized equities are already a competitive market worth well over a billion dollars on-chain. Ondo Global Markets leads with roughly half the market and 200+ tokenized US equities and ETFs. xStocks (Backed Finance) did over $10 billion in combined volume within six months and passed 80,000 holders by mid-2026, with Kraken agreeing to buy the issuer outright. Robinhood's Classic Stock Tokens grew from about 200 to more than 2,000 tokens for users in the EU and EEA.
Arcus is not competing on catalog size. Its angle is the combination of spot and leveraged perps on the same assets in one self-custodial account, from the team with the strongest perp-DEX track record in crypto, on infrastructure funded by the broker that issues the underlying tokens. The roadmap includes plans to let users post tokenized stocks and crypto as collateral for perps, and to open pre-IPO trading for private companies like OpenAI.