Arcus fees: what spot, perps and funding actually cost

Arcus fees split in two. Spot Stock Token trades carry a 0% Arcus fee, with the cost built into the RFQ quote instead. Perps charge a tiered taker fee, 0.045% at the base tier and 0.0225% during beta, and maker fees sit at zero for most tiers while the beta schedule lasts.

That headline hides more than it reveals, because the money you actually lose on a trade is rarely the published fee. On spot it is the spread a market maker quotes you. On perps it is funding and the beta schedule eventually ending.

On the way in it is a card processor taking 2.1%. And before any of that, you need ETH on Robinhood Chain to pay gas, which is the step that stops most new accounts.

One thing to settle first: Arcus is not available in the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada, plus other restricted jurisdictions named in the Terms. If you live in one of those three, the fee schedule below is academic. The restricted countries page covers who is eligible and how the block works.

Spot Stock Token fees: 0%, and where the cost hides

Arcus charges no trading fee on spot Stock Tokens. That is a real zero, not a promotional rate with a footnote, and Arcus has written about it directly in its zero-fee announcement.

The reason it can be zero is the mechanism. Spot Stock Tokens trade through a request-for-quote system: you ask, market makers quote, you accept or you do not. The maker’s margin is the spread between the quote and the underlying price. You pay it, you just never see it itemised.

Two things widen that spread.

• Size. A larger order gets a worse quote, because the maker has to hedge more.
• Timing. Arcus markets run 24/7, but the real US stock market does not, so a quote at 3am on a Sunday is being made by someone who cannot hedge cleanly until Monday.

Expect slippage to widen outside US market hours. If you are price sensitive and your trade is not urgent, trading during US hours is the cheapest change you can make.

What you own also matters more than what you pay. Stock Tokens are issued by Bitstamp Global Ltd, not by Arcus, and they carry no voting rights and no dividend claim as such. They cannot necessarily be redeemed for real shares, and the token price can drift from the real stock price. The Stock Tokens guide goes through that in detail.

Arcus perps taker fees by tier

Perps are different. They trade on a central limit order book, and takers pay. From 20 July 2026 Arcus halved the taker schedule for the duration of beta. Both columns below come from the Arcus announcement.

Tier	30-day perps volume from	Standard taker	Beta taker
0	$0	0.045%	0.0225%
1	$5M	0.038%	0.019%
2	$20M	0.032%	0.016%
3	$100M	0.027%	0.0135%
4	$400M	0.023%	0.0115%
5	$1B	0.020%	0.010%
6	$3B	0.019%	0.0095%

Tiers track rolling 30-day perps volume and move automatically in both directions. Look at the volume column honestly before you plan around a lower tier: tier 1 needs $5 million of perps volume in thirty days, which at 10x leverage is still half a million dollars of margin turned over repeatedly. Most individual accounts live at tier 0 and should budget for 0.0225% today and 0.045% later.

Arcus’ own worked example

Arcus published the arithmetic itself. A $100,000 market order at the base tier cost $45 under the standard schedule. Under the beta schedule it costs $22.50.

Two notes on that number. It is one side of a round trip, so opening and closing doubles it. And it is notional, not margin, so a $10,000 account at 10x leverage generates that $100,000 of notional in a single trade.

Fees scale with leverage even though your capital does not. The perp fee calculator exists to run your own numbers rather than Arcus’ example.

Perps maker fees, and the zero that will not last

From 4 August 2026 Arcus took maker fees to zero for tiers 0 to 4 during beta. The standard schedule those rates replace was 0.015% at tier 0, 0.012% at tier 1, 0.008% at tier 2, 0.004% at tier 3 and 0.000% at tier 4. Tiers 5 and 6 are paid rather than charged: a rebate of 0.002% at tier 5 and 0.003% at tier 6.

If you can work with limit orders instead of market orders, maker pricing is currently the single largest saving available on the platform. The order types guide covers what Arcus supports at launch, which is the limit on how clever you can be here.

The beta caveat, stated plainly

Both the halved taker schedule and the zero maker schedule are described by Arcus as applying “for the duration of beta”. No end date has been published. Treat both as temporary.

This matters in two ways. If you are modelling a strategy whose edge survives only at 0.0225%, it does not survive. And if you are weighing the referral programme as an income stream, remember that a 0% spot fee and a 0% maker fee generate nothing to share, so referral revenue currently comes from perps takers alone.

Deposit fees by funding method

Arcus charges no deposit fee of its own. The payment rails do, and the spread between them is wide:

• Cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay: about 2.1%
• SEPA bank transfer: about 0.5%
• Revolut Pay: about 1.1%
• PayPal, Skrill, AstroPay and Paysafecard: higher than the above

The minimum deposit is about $3, and everything converts to USDG, the Paxos Labs stablecoin Arcus uses as collateral and quote currency. On a $5,000 deposit the gap between SEPA and a debit card is roughly $80, which is more than three round trips at the base perps tier. The deposit guide walks through each route.

Bridging and gas on Robinhood Chain

Two costs sit outside Arcus entirely.

Bridging carries third-party network and bridge fees that vary by route. Arcus adds nothing to them and shows a breakdown before you approve, but no basis-point figure is published because there is not a single number to publish. Crypto deposits are supported from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana and Bitcoin, and the cheap route changes with network conditions.

Gas is paid in ETH on Robinhood Chain. Not USDG, not the token you deposited. You need a small ETH balance on that chain, bridged in, before anything happens.

Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum-based L2, so individual transactions are cheap, but a zero ETH balance means a stuck account rather than an expensive one. This is the most common reason a new account cannot place its first trade, which is why it appears on the troubleshooting page too.

What Arcus does not publish

Being honest about the gaps: CoinGecko lists a deposit and withdrawal basis-point schedule that appears on no Arcus page, so treat it as unconfirmed. Withdrawals to a Robinhood Chain wallet take a few seconds with no minimum and no protocol cap, but withdrawals to other chains bridge, and the cost depends on the route. The referral claim minimum and payout asset are not published either.

Before you trade

Perps on Arcus offer leverage up to 50x depending on the market, and a leveraged position can be liquidated, which means losing the margin behind it. Most leveraged traders lose money. Stock Tokens are not shares: no voting rights, no dividend claim as such, and no guaranteed redemption.

Perps access is also gated by an invite code earned at one per $1M of qualifying volume, so the perps fee table is not something everyone can act on yet. Nothing on this page is financial advice.