How to use Arcus: sign up, fund and place a trade

Here is how to use Arcus from nothing: confirm your country is allowed, create a wallet with an email or social login, fund the account so it holds USDG, bridge a little ETH to Robinhood Chain for gas, then place a spot Stock Token trade. Perps need an invite code.

That last sentence is the part most walkthroughs skip, and the eligibility check is the part people discover too late. Arcus is not available in the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada, which is where most English-language searches for it come from. If you are in one of those three countries, nothing below applies to you, and the country and eligibility rules are worth reading before you spend any time on setup.

Before you start: check that you are eligible

The help centre has an “am I eligible” page, and the answer for the US, the UK and Canada is no. The protocol terms add other restricted jurisdictions, exclude sanctioned persons and comprehensively sanctioned regions including Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, and set a minimum age of 18. Arcus Labs Ltd is a Cayman Islands exempted company and the terms are governed by Cayman law.

Whether identity verification is required at any point is not something Arcus states either way, so treat it as an open question rather than assuming one answer.

How to use Arcus, step by step

1. Check that your country is allowed. Arcus is unavailable in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, plus other restricted jurisdictions named in the Terms, and the help centre’s eligibility page is the reference rather than any third-party list.
2. Open arcus.xyz and sign in with an email address or a social account. Onboarding runs on Privy embedded self-custodial wallets, so a wallet is created for you without a seed phrase step. Arcus says it never holds your funds or keys, which means recovery of that login is your responsibility, not support’s.
3. Pick a funding route. There are four: connect an existing wallet, send crypto from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana or Bitcoin, connect an exchange account, or pay with fiat. Everything converts to USDG, the Paxos Labs stablecoin that Arcus uses as its quote and collateral currency.
4. Fund the account. Fiat has a minimum of about $3 and a fee that depends on the method, roughly 2.1% for cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay and about 0.5% for SEPA. Crypto deposits have a minimum of about $3 and cost whatever the sending network charges.
5. Get a small amount of ETH onto Robinhood Chain. Gas on Robinhood Chain is paid in ETH, not in USDG, so a balance of only USDG leaves you unable to sign a transaction. Bridge a little ETH across before you try to trade.
6. Choose a market and open it. Spot Stock Tokens cover names like Tesla, Apple, NVIDIA, Amazon and Palantir, plus index products such as SPY, QQQ and SOXX, and commodity and crypto markets. Spot quotes come from market makers through an RFQ system rather than an order book.
7. Place the spot trade. Set the size, read the quote you are offered, check the implied spread rather than assuming the mid price, and confirm. Arcus charges 0% in fees on spot Stock Tokens, so the cost is inside that quote.
8. Check what you actually hold. A Stock Token is a token issued by Bitstamp Global Ltd, not a share, and settlement is wallet to wallet on-chain. Withdrawing later to a Robinhood Chain wallet takes seconds; other destinations bridge.

The ETH for gas requirement, which catches people

Robinhood Chain is a permissionless Arbitrum-based Ethereum L2 operated by Robinhood, and its mainnet went live on 1 July 2026. Like other L2s, it charges gas in ETH. The help centre is explicit that you need a small amount of ETH there, bridged in, to transact.

This is awkward because every funding route converts your money into USDG. You can deposit $200 by card, see $200 of spendable balance, and still be unable to place a trade because there is no ETH in the account to pay for the transaction. Arcus does not publish a recommended amount.

Treat it as a separate, small purchase you make once, then top up occasionally. If something refuses to sign and no error explains why, gas is the first thing to check, and the funding guide covers the bridging routes in more detail.

Placing a spot Stock Token trade

Spot runs on RFQ: market makers quote you a price, you accept or you do not. That design is why Arcus can charge 0% and still operate, because the cost is expressed as spread inside the quote. Arcus says slippage widens outside US market hours, which matters given the whole point of the product is 24/7 trading. A Tesla quote at 3am is unlikely to be as tight as one at 3pm New York time.

Two things to internalise before the first order.

• Stock Tokens carry no voting rights and no dividend claim as such, they cannot necessarily be redeemed for the underlying share, and the token price can diverge from the real stock price.
• The issuer is Bitstamp Global Ltd, a BVI-registered VASP that holds the underlying securities, with Arcus acting only as the venue.

The Stock Tokens page goes through what that means for you.

Why perps are a separate story

Everything above gets you spot. Perpetual futures on Arcus run on a central limit order book, offer leverage up to 50x depending on the market, and sit behind an invite code. Arcus is blunt about it: “the only way to get a code is from someone already trading on Arcus”. Codes are minted at one per $1 million of qualifying volume, counting your own volume plus your direct referrals’, and they cannot be transferred, sold or reassigned.

Before codes there was a waitlist, opened on 6 July 2026, where spot volume counted toward queue position. If someone offers to sell you a code, they are offering something the rules say cannot change hands. The invite code guide covers how the supply actually works, and the perps overview covers margin, leverage and collateral once you are in.

What it costs, in short

Spot Stock Tokens carry a 0% Arcus fee, with the real cost in the RFQ spread and in gas. Perps taker fees start at 0.045% at the base tier, halved to 0.0225% during beta, and maker fees are zero for tiers 0 to 4 during beta. Both beta schedules are temporary, described by Arcus as lasting for the duration of beta, so do not build a plan around them. The fee breakdown has the full tier table.

Risks worth naming before you start

This is high-risk trading. Leveraged perps positions can be liquidated, and most leveraged traders lose money. Stock Tokens are not shares, so the usual shareholder protections do not apply, and the price can come apart from the stock it tracks.

Arcus is self-custodial, which means a lost login or a mistaken approval has no helpdesk reversal. There is no Arcus token: the help centre says plainly that Arcus does not currently have one, and Arcus Points are described as a participation metric only, with allocation at the sole discretion of Arcus. Nothing here is financial advice.

If any step above fails silently, the troubleshooting notes list gas, eligibility and bridge problems as the usual causes, and the withdrawal guide covers getting money back out.