Arcus restricted countries: who can and cannot use it

Arcus is not available in the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada. The protocol terms also exclude sanctioned persons and comprehensively sanctioned regions, naming Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. The minimum age is 18. There is no published workaround for a blocked country.

The Arcus restricted countries list is short on names and long on consequences, because it removes much of the English-speaking world from a product built on US equities. This page covers how to check your own position and what is left if the answer is no.

The three countries that matter most

Per the Arcus help centre eligibility article, Arcus is not available in the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada. This is a product-wide restriction. It is not a perps-only gate and it is not a temporary beta limitation that the documentation promises to lift.

That is worth stating twice because of how the product reads from outside. Arcus lists tokenized Tesla, Apple, NVIDIA, Amazon, Palantir, SPY and QQQ. Everything about it looks aimed at someone who follows the US market.

The one group that cannot touch it is people in the United States. If you arrived here from a search for tokenized Tesla or 24/7 stock trading and you are in any of the three, the practical answer is that this platform is not an option, and the alternatives page is more use to you than the rest of this site.

Sanctions, age and the rest of the list

Beyond the three headline countries, the protocol terms exclude sanctioned persons and comprehensively sanctioned regions, naming Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. Users must be at least 18.

Two details about how to read that.

• The named regions are examples within a broader category, so a region not on the list is not automatically fine.
• The terms are a living document. They are governed by Cayman law and were last updated 30 June 2026, the day before launch.

A restricted list that was accurate when this page was written can change without any announcement reaching you.

Arcus does not publish its reasoning for the specific country choices. The shape is familiar for securities-linked products offered to retail users across borders, but the documentation gives the restriction without an explanation, so anything beyond that is guesswork and this page will not pretend otherwise.

How to check your own eligibility

Three steps, in this order.

1. Read the eligibility article in the Arcus help centre. It is the plainest statement of which jurisdictions are out.
2. Read the restricted jurisdictions section of the protocol terms at arcus.xyz/legal/protocol-terms, and note the last updated date at the top. The terms are the binding version; the help centre is the summary.
3. Confirm at sign-up. The restriction is applied at the point of access, so the authoritative answer for your situation comes from the product itself, not from a guide.

If you want to understand what you would be signing up for before you spend time on it, what Arcus is covers the product and the trust page covers the entity, the audits and the gaps.

On routing around the block

People ask about VPNs. This page will not help with that, for a straightforward reason: the restricted jurisdictions clause is part of the agreement you accept in order to use the protocol, so getting past a geographic check means using the platform in breach of the terms you agreed to, with your own money sitting inside it. Arcus publishes no enforcement policy, which means you have no published assurance about what happens to a position or a balance if the breach is identified. That is a bad place to be, and there is no upside that makes it worth it.

What happens on the waitlist, and why it does not help

The history matters because old pages still describe it. A perps waitlist opened on 6 July 2026, and spot trading volume counted toward your queue position. Invite codes went live on 1 October 2026, and Arcus is explicit about how they work: codes are minted at a rate of one per $1 million of qualifying perps volume, your own plus your direct referrals’, they never expire, and they cannot be transferred, sold or reassigned. Arcus states that the only way to get a code is from someone already trading on Arcus.

Follow that through from a restricted country and it closes on itself. You cannot trade spot, so you cannot build the volume that once moved you up a queue, and you cannot accumulate the $1 million that mints a code. Arcus does not publish a separate policy for waitlist or invite entries from restricted regions, so joining a list from a blocked country is not a documented route in.

Anyone offering to sell you a code is also operating outside the published rules, since codes are non-transferable by design. The invite code page has the full mechanics and the scam patterns to watch for.

The same logic applies to Arcus Points. Season 1 began on 1 October 2026 with weekly distribution on Wednesdays, and points are earned through activity you cannot perform from a restricted country. Arcus also describes points as a participation metric only, with allocation at its sole discretion, and there is no Arcus token: the help centre says so verbatim. Any site telling you to farm an Arcus airdrop from a blocked country is selling you something that does not exist.

If you are eligible

Then the restriction stops being your problem and the ordinary questions start. Spot Stock Token trading is open, perps are not unless you hold a code, you fund in USDG through a wallet, a crypto deposit, a Coinbase connection or a fiat route, and you need a small amount of ETH bridged onto Robinhood Chain to pay gas. How to use Arcus runs through the sequence and the deposit guide covers the funding routes and their fees.

What the alternatives page offers

If Arcus is closed to you, the useful question is which part of it you wanted.

For tokenized equity exposure, the issuer-led model is the one to understand first, and tokenized stocks explained covers how a token backed by a real share actually works, who holds the security and why the price can drift. Arcus Stock Tokens are issued by Bitstamp Global Ltd, a BVI-registered virtual asset service provider, rather than by Arcus itself, and other issuers like Backed Finance, Ondo and Swarm run comparable structures.

For venues, the alternatives page covers Ostium, an RWA perpetuals DEX on Arbitrum spanning equities, indices, commodities, forex and crypto with USDC collateral, and Hyperliquid, a perps L1 that hosts xStocks spot markets and lets builders deploy equity and index perps. dYdX v4 remains live on dYdX Chain from the same team that built Arcus, though it is crypto perps rather than equities. The platform comparison sets them against each other.

One caveat that applies to every name above. Each venue sets its own restricted jurisdictions, and the fact that it is not Arcus does not mean it is open to you. Check on the venue itself, in its own terms, before you move money anywhere.

This is high-risk trading wherever you do it. Leveraged positions can be liquidated and most leveraged traders lose money. Tokenized stocks are not shares: no voting rights, no dividend claim as such, not necessarily redeemable, and a price that can diverge from the underlying.

Nothing on this page is financial advice, and this site is not connected to Arcus. If you want the balanced assessment of the product itself, the review has it.