The team behind dYdX just launched a new exchange that lets you trade Tesla stock and a 50x leveraged perpetual contract from the same self-custodial wallet. Arcus, which went live on July 1 on Robinhood Chain, is what happens when a DeFi trading powerhouse and a retail brokerage giant decide traditional finance needs to live onchain.
The platform already processed nearly 285,000 transactions in its first week, racking up $33 million in trading volume and $15 million in total value locked.
What Arcus actually does
Here’s the pitch: around 95 tokenized stock tokens available for fee-free trading, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No waiting for the NYSE to open. No settlement delays. Just onchain representations of equities that trade whenever you want them to.
Then there’s the spicier side. Arcus also offers 35 real-world asset perpetual futures contracts with leverage up to 50x. In English: you can take outsized bets on traditional assets using DeFi infrastructure, with no intermediary holding your funds.
