Arcus tokenised perpetual positions are now live on Robinhood Chain, converting open perp exposure into transferable ERC-20 tokens and letting holders post tokenised equities as collateral without closing their positions. The protocol, built by the team at dYdX Labs, extends an infrastructure that has quietly grown into one of the more active new chains in DeFi.
How pTokens Work
Each pToken represents a pro-rata ownership stake in an underlying Arcus perpetuals account at a fixed market and leverage level, according to ETF Express. Traders can buy or sell pTokens like spot assets without managing a perpetuals account, handling collateral, or monitoring margin directly.
Initial products include pBTC3x and pHOOD3x, offering 3x leveraged exposure to Bitcoin and Robinhood’s HOOD stock token respectively, alongside pBTC variants for 1x long and short Bitcoin exposure. Initial markets span Bitcoin, Solana, and HYPE, with 35 real-world-asset perpetual markets that were in waitlist phase at the July 1 launch, according to The Defiant.
For collateral, Arcus announced multi-asset support covering selected Robinhood Stock Tokens: SPY, QQQ, and MAG7 tokens are eligible for posting against perpetual positions, according to BigGo Finance. Those stock tokens, like the 95 spot equity tokens that went live at the July 1 launch, give holders contractual economic exposure to the underlying equity rather than direct share ownership.
‘Traditional markets have spent decades making sophisticated investment strategies easier to access through products like leveraged ETFs. We believe the next step is making those strategies native to blockchain infrastructure,’ Arcus CEO Eddie Zhang said.
Zhang previously ran a trading startup called Pocket Protector, which was acquired by dYdX Labs. dYdX founder Antonio Juliano is joining the Arcus board, while Robinhood Crypto came in as a strategic backer with access to Robinhood’s user base as part of the arrangement, according to Unchained. Arcus is a separate product from the independent dYdX Chain, which continues operating with existing funds and positions unaffected.
Robinhood Chain TVL and the Arcus Tokenised Perpetual Positions Context
Arcus has recorded more than $2 billion in cumulative trading volume since launching on Robinhood Chain, with average daily volume exceeding $100 million.
The snippet cited Robinhood Chain TVL at $596 million based on earlier DeFiLlama data; the current DefiLlama reading puts chain TVL at approximately $1.016 billion, with a stablecoins market cap of approximately $1.035 billion and USDG dominance at 66.25%. The Robinhood Chain Bridge holds a separate $801.77 million in TVL on Ethereum, up 67.5% over the prior 30 days, representing 9.8% of the canonical bridge category across 85 protocols.
Robinhood Chain is an EVM-compatible Arbitrum Orbit-based Ethereum layer-2 running 100-millisecond block times with ETH as its native gas token and no proprietary native token at launch, according to Yahoo Finance. The chain posted 324,000 daily active users on 21 July, briefly overtaking Coinbase’s Base in that metric, though The Defiant reported that memecoins rather than tokenised stocks were driving most of that volume at the time.
Transaction fee activity has since accelerated. Robinhood Chain recorded a single-day fee record of $6.04 million, surpassing both the prior record of approximately $4.6 million and the approximately $3.6 million in total fees collected across all of July, its first month after mainnet launch, according to crypto.news.
Arcus cited a Nasdaq statistic that 52% of global financial institutions expect to be actively managing live tokenised collateral by end of 2026 as context for the pToken launch, according to ETF Express. Whether Arcus captures a meaningful share of that institutional shift will depend on how quickly the 35 RWA perpetual markets clear waitlist status and whether the SPY, QQQ, and MAG7 collateral support draws yield-seeking equity holders on-chain rather than simply recycling existing DeFi capital.
