Arcus Points: seasons, boosts and the airdrop question

Arcus Points are a loyalty metric, not a token. Season 0 ran from 1 July to 30 September 2026 and Season 1 began on 1 October, with points distributed weekly on Wednesdays at 3pm EST. Arcus calls them “a participation metric only, with allocation at the sole discretion of Arcus”.

That last phrase is the whole story, and it is worth reading twice before you build a strategy around it. Arcus has not promised a reward, has not published a conversion rate, and has not said there will ever be anything to convert into. Points are a scoreboard that Arcus controls and can interpret however it likes.

Before anything else: Arcus is not available in the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada, plus other restricted jurisdictions named in its Terms. Points are earned on an Arcus account, so if you cannot open one, none of this applies. The countries page covers eligibility.

The two seasons so far

Season 0 ran from 1 July 2026, the day Arcus launched alongside Robinhood Chain mainnet, through 30 September 2026. It overlapped the perps waitlist period, when spot volume counted toward queue position, so early activity was being measured in two systems at once.

Season 1 started on 1 October 2026. That date was busy: invite codes went live the same day, and Robinhood Wallet integrated the Arcus RFQ API for Stock Token swaps. Arcus has not published an end date for Season 1, a target size, or any rule for how Season 0 and Season 1 relate to each other.

What Arcus has published is cadence. Points are distributed weekly, on Wednesdays at 3pm EST. If your points balance looks wrong on a Monday, the explanation is usually that the week has not been credited yet.

How Arcus Points are earned

Arcus names four activities that generate points:

Trading. Volume across spot and perps. This is the main channel and the one most people mean when they talk about farming points.

Market making. Providing quotes rather than taking them. On perps that means resting limit orders on the order book, which also happens to be the cheapest way to trade right now because maker fees are zero for most tiers during beta.

Retained deposits. Keeping a balance on the platform rather than cycling it in and out. Arcus has not published how retention is measured or over what window.

Referrals. Activity from traders who signed up with your code also feeds your points, on top of the fee share described on the referral programme page.

None of these have published formulas. There is no points-per-dollar figure anywhere in the Arcus material, which means any site showing you an expected points yield has invented it.

The current boosts

Arcus has published three multipliers, without numbers attached:

• Trading RWA markets and Stock Tokens, rather than crypto pairs
• Trading outside US market hours
• Swaps routed through Robinhood Wallet

The second one is the interesting one, and it lines up with how the venue actually works. Arcus trades 24/7 while the underlying US market does not, so overnight and weekend liquidity is thin and spreads widen. A boost for trading in those hours is Arcus paying for the inconvenience of being the person who shows up when nobody else will.

That is also when a spot trade costs you most in spread, so the boost is not free money, it is compensation for a worse fill. Work out which is larger before you shift your schedule.

The first boost makes sense from a product angle: Arcus is positioning around tokenized equities and real-world assets, not crypto perps, so it pays for the volume that proves the thesis. The Stock Tokens guide explains what those instruments actually are, which is worth knowing before you concentrate activity in them.

The discretionary caveat, in full

Arcus describes Arcus Points as “a participation metric only, with allocation at the sole discretion of Arcus”. No airdrop has been promised. The help centre states, verbatim, “No, Arcus does not currently have a token.”

Those two statements together rule out most of what gets written about Arcus Points elsewhere. dYdX has separately said that “an allocation of any future Arcus token will be reserved for the dYdX community”, which is language about a contemplated token, not an announced one. The token page goes through that distinction, and also warns about a Solana SPL token using the ARCUS ticker that price aggregators index and that is not an official Arcus asset.

If you farm points, farm them on the understanding that the reward is zero until Arcus says otherwise, and that Arcus has reserved the right to decide what the metric means after the fact.

Points and the perps gate

A practical limit on points farming: perps need an invite code. Codes are minted at one per $1M of qualifying perps volume, counting your own volume plus your direct referrals’, and they never expire but cannot be transferred, sold or reassigned. The invite code page explains the mechanics and the scams around them.

Spot is open to eligible countries with no code. So for most new accounts the available points channels are spot trading, retained deposits and referrals, and the boosts that pay best are the Stock Token and off-hours ones. If you want perps, the route is the perps guide and a volume threshold, not a sign-up form.

What a sensible approach looks like

Treat points as a byproduct of trading you would do anyway. The cost of manufacturing volume is real and immediate: taker fees, spread, gas in ETH on Robinhood Chain. The reward is undefined and discretionary. That is a poor trade on its own terms, and it stays a poor trade however many multipliers get added.

If you are already trading tokenized equities and happen to be eligible, points cost you nothing extra and the off-hours boost may overlap with when you were going to trade anyway. That is the honest case for paying attention to them.

Risk, stated plainly

Perps on Arcus run up to 50x leverage depending on the market, and a leveraged position can be liquidated, which means losing the margin behind it. Most leveraged traders lose money, and chasing a points multiplier is a bad reason to add leverage. The liquidation guide covers how that actually happens.

Stock Tokens are not shares: no voting rights, no dividend claim as such, and no guaranteed redemption for real stock. Nothing on this page is financial advice.