dYdX Launches Arcus, a DEX Pairing Stock Tokens With Perpetuals on Robinhood Chain

dYdX Labs launched Arcus on Wednesday, a decentralized exchange that combines tokenized stock trading with perpetual futures. Founder Antonio Juliano announced the launch on X, built jointly with Robinhood Crypto.

Arcus runs on Robinhood Chain, the EVM-compatible layer 2 that Robinhood opened to the public earlier the same day. Spot trading across 95 stock tokens is live now, letting users trade tokenized equities around the clock instead of only during market hours. Perpetuals covering 35 real-world-asset markets remain in a waitlist phase, dYdX said in its launch post.

Eddie Zhang, whose trading startup Pocket Protector was acquired by dYdX Labs, runs Arcus as chief executive. Juliano is joining its board, according to the dYdX blog post announcing the launch. The stock tokens give holders contractual economic exposure to the underlying equity rather than direct share ownership, the post said, the same tokenization structure Robinhood uses across the rest of Robinhood Chain.

dYdX, the decentralized perpetuals exchange that runs its own Cosmos-based appchain, holds $92.4 million in total value locked, per DefiLlama. Its DYDX token traded around $0.1451, according to CoinGecko. dYdX Chain v4 keeps operating alongside Arcus, with existing funds and positions unaffected, the blog post said.

Robinhood Crypto supplies the trading infrastructure and distribution to Robinhood's user base for Arcus, but the brokerage has not issued its own statement naming Arcus or dYdX as of publication.

dYdX said a future Arcus token will reserve allocation for people who traded, staked or validated on dYdX, prioritizing the existing dYdX community over new entrants when the token launches. No launch date for that token or for the Arcus perpetuals waitlist has been set.