Arcus alternatives: what to use instead, and why

If you are in the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada, Arcus alternatives matter more to you than anything else on this site, because Arcus does not serve those three countries at all. The realistic options are Ostium, Hyperliquid, dYdX v4, tokenized stock issuers, or a regulated broker at home.

That is not a hedge. Arcus is unavailable in the US, the UK and Canada, and its terms exclude sanctioned persons and comprehensively sanctioned regions including Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. The age minimum is 18.

The operating entity is Arcus Labs Ltd, a Cayman Islands exempted company. Most English-language search traffic for a product like this comes from exactly the countries it blocks, which is why this page exists.

This site earns from Arcus referrals and nothing else. The Arcus links here carry our code, and we may receive a share of the perps fees a referred trader pays. Ostium, Hyperliquid, dYdX and the issuers below pay us nothing. Read the page knowing that.

First, do not route around the block

A VPN is the obvious idea and a bad one. It breaches the terms you accept at signup, which gives the venue grounds to close the account with a balance in it. It removes any consumer protection your own jurisdiction provides. And on a self-custodial venue it does not protect you from the one thing you most need protection from, which is losing access to a market where your collateral sits.

Our country eligibility page lists what Arcus actually publishes about who can sign up. If you are blocked, read on.

Ostium

Ostium is the nearest thing to Arcus on the perps side. It is a real-world-asset perpetuals DEX on Arbitrum covering equities, indices, commodities, forex and crypto, self-custodial, with USDC as collateral.

Arbitrum is the practical advantage. It has been running for years, bridging into it is well supported from almost everywhere, and the tooling is mature. Ostium’s documentation describes pricing and liquidity drawn from the underlying markets, and it uses rollover fees that it frames as reflecting real-world financing rates rather than a conventional crypto funding mechanism.

What it does not do is spot. There is no tokenized stock to hold, so there is nothing left if you stop trading. And it sets its own restricted jurisdictions, which you need to check on its own site rather than trusting any comparison page, including this one. We have not verified Ostium’s fees, leverage caps or country list, so no numbers for those appear here.

Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid reaches tokenized equities from two directions, which makes it the most flexible option on this list and the most work to assess.

It hosts xStocks spot markets, so Backed’s tokenized equities can be traded there. Separately, HIP-3 lets third-party builders deploy their own perpetual markets on Hyperliquid’s matching engine and settlement layer, including equity and index perps. Nansen’s explainer describes HIP-3 as live on Hyperliquid mainnet since October 2025, with each deployer choosing its own margining, order books, collateral and market parameters.

The upside is liquidity. Hyperliquid’s books are among the deepest in perps and a builder-deployed market inherits that infrastructure.

The catch is that a HIP-3 market is not Hyperliquid’s product. It belongs to its deployer, with that deployer’s oracle, parameters and risk management. Due diligence is per market, not per venue. If you go this route, work out who operates the specific market you intend to trade before you post collateral.

dYdX v4

dYdX v4 deserves a place here for a reason that has nothing to do with stocks: it is the same engineering lineage.

Arcus was incubated at dYdX Labs and is built jointly by dYdX Labs and Robinhood Crypto. Several outlets reported it as a dYdX rebrand. The primary sources say otherwise.

The dYdX blog states that dYdX v4 will continue to be supported and that funds and positions remain fully accessible on dYdX Chain, and the dYdX Foundation has said DYDX is and remains the governance and staking token of dYdX Chain. Our Arcus versus dYdX page goes through that in detail.

So dYdX v4 is a live, independent crypto perps DEX, not a legacy system. If what you want is a perps venue built by this team and you can live without equity markets, it is the direct answer. If you specifically want stock exposure, it is not, because its markets are crypto.

Check its own geographic restrictions before planning around it. They are set by dYdX, they change, and they are not ours to summarise.

Tokenized stock issuers

If what you wanted from Arcus was spot exposure to a US stock rather than leverage, you do not need a perps venue at all. You need an issuer’s token and somewhere to buy it.

Backed Finance issues the xStocks line. Its documentation says each xStock is collateralised one to one, that the underlying securities sit with regulated custodians under a bankruptcy-remote structure in segregated accounts, and that proof of reserves is published through its own portal. Dividends are reinvested into additional units of the same asset rather than paid as cash. The tokens convey no shareholder rights such as voting.

Retail redemption exists with a $5,000 minimum, and most holders simply trade secondary markets. Secondary trading runs 24/7 while issuance and redemption run 24/5 in line with the underlying market. Ondo and Swarm occupy similar ground.

The limits are real. The tokens are not marketed, offered or solicited in the United States or where that is prohibited, so the geographic problem does not disappear. And ESMA warned in September 2026 that issuing multiple tokenized versions of the same stock fragments liquidity, that ownership of the underlying stock sits off-chain with no on-chain single source of truth, and that these wrappers add intermediaries and therefore risk. Our tokenized stocks explainer covers that structure properly.

The unglamorous alternative

For a reader in the US, the UK or Canada, the honest answer is usually a regulated broker at home.

Fractional shares are widely available. You get an actual registered shareholding, dividends with tax paperwork, voting if you want it, and investor protection schemes behind the account. What you give up is 24/7 trading and the ability to run 50x leverage, and on the second of those the giving up is arguably the point: leveraged positions can be liquidated and most leveraged traders lose money.

If 24/7 access is genuinely what you need, rather than something that sounds appealing, then the perps venues above are where it exists. If you just want to own Nvidia, a broker does that better and with less that can go wrong.

Comparison

	Arcus	Ostium	Hyperliquid	Issuers (Backed, Ondo)	Home broker
Spot stock tokens	Yes	No	Via xStocks	Issues them	Real shares
Stock perps	Yes, up to 50x	Yes	Via HIP-3	No	Usually no
Serves US, UK, Canada	No, all three blocked	Check their site	Check their site	Not offered in the US	Yes, domestically
Custody	Self-custodial	Self-custodial	Self-custodial	Regulated custodians	Broker
Shareholder rights	None	None	None	None	Yes
Pays this site	Yes	No	No	No	No

If you turn out to be eligible

Plenty of readers arrive here assuming they are blocked and are not. If you are outside the US, the UK, Canada and the restricted jurisdictions in the terms, Arcus spot is open to you: Stock Tokens at a 0% Arcus fee during beta, settled wallet to wallet, with the cost in the quote and the spread. Perps are a separate matter, gated behind an invite code minted at one per $1 million of qualifying volume, as the invite code page explains.

Stock Tokens are not shares: no voting rights, no dividend claim as such, not necessarily redeemable, and the price can diverge from the real stock. Leveraged positions can be liquidated. Nothing on this site is financial advice.

Related reading: what Arcus is, whether Arcus is legit, the fee breakdown, stock perps compared with spot tokens and the glossary.