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1. Arcus Collateral Feature Is Now Open to Every Perps Trader
Arcus, a Robinhood Chain exchange built by the team behind dYdX, opened its Multi-Asset Collateral feature on Thursday, November 5, to every trader with access to its perpetual futures. The change removes the $25 million trading-volume requirement that limited the Arcus collateral program since October, while keeping non-USDG deposits capped at $20,000 per trader and $2 million overall.
The company announced the change in a blog post. Until now, most traders had needed to post USDG, the exchange's dollar-denominated settlement asset, as margin. Under the new arrangement they can instead put up wrapped ether and a basket of tokenized stocks and borrow against them to fund their perpetual positions.
The feature is a notable test of whether tokenized equities can function as working collateral in a derivatives venue, rather than serving only as assets to be bought and held. The limits attached to it show how cautiously the exchange is widening access.
2. Which Assets Can Traders Post as Margin?
Traders can use ether, held in its wrapped form as WETH, and nine stock tokens alongside USDG. The stock tokens track SPY, QQQ, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla. SPY and QQQ are exchange-traded funds that follow the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100 respectively, so two of the nine give exposure to broad indexes, while the remaining seven are individual companies.
Arcus's press release groups the last seven of those names under the label MAG7, a shorthand for the largest technology-oriented US companies. Each of the assets carries a 50% initial loan-to-value ratio, meaning a trader can borrow up to half the value of the deposited tokens.
The practical effect is that a person who already holds tokenized shares of a company such as Nvidia does not have to sell them, or swap them into a stablecoin, in order to open a leveraged position. The shares stay in the account as collateral, and the exchange extends credit against them.
3. What Changed From the October Early Access?
The earlier version was a restricted rollout. Arcus began offering the feature on October 19 to accounts with more than $25 million in trading volume. The assets and the 50% ratio were the same as they are now, so the difference is who can use it rather than how it works.
According to the company's post on Thursday, traders do not need to change any settings to gain access. The feature simply becomes available to accounts that previously did not qualify. For a platform that is still young, a volume threshold of that size confined the early phase to a small group of large traders, which allowed the exchange to observe how the lending and liquidation logic behaved before opening the doors wider.
A perpetual futures contract, or perp, is a derivative with no expiry date that lets traders take leveraged long or short positions on an asset's price. Because positions can stay open indefinitely, exchanges require continuous margin, and the type of asset accepted as margin determines how flexible a trader can be with the capital they already hold.
Dropping the threshold is a sign that the company is satisfied with those early results, although it has not published performance data for the period. The caps on deposits suggest it still wants to limit its exposure while the feature is new.
4. How Do the Loans Work?
Borrowing is automatic. Once tokens are sitting in a perpetual futures account, any margin requirement or loss that USDG does not cover becomes a variable-rate loan. The loan shrinks as the margin requirement falls, so a trader who closes a position or adds cash reduces what is owed without taking a separate step.
On Thursday, the rate on those loans was 4.94% a year, according to Arcus's public lending feed. Because the rate is variable, it can change with conditions on the platform, and traders who carry a loan for a long time cannot assume the cost will stay the same.
Each account is limited in how much it can borrow. Arcus's public lending data shows a ceiling of $10,000 per account, and the exchange rejects orders that would push a loan beyond that limit. That ceiling is half of the $20,000 deposit cap, which is consistent with the 50% loan-to-value ratio: a trader who deposits the maximum can borrow up to the maximum.
5. How Do the Deposit Caps Limit the Feature?
The caps are the main constraint. Non-USDG deposits are limited to $20,000 per user and $2 million across the whole platform. Dividing the platform limit by the per-user limit gives 100, so as few as 100 traders each depositing the maximum would fill the overall allowance.
That arithmetic means the feature could reach capacity quickly if demand is strong. Once the $2 million platform cap is full, later depositors would presumably be unable to add non-USDG collateral until room opens up, whatever their individual limit. The company has not said how it would allocate space in that situation.
For a derivatives exchange, such caps are a conventional way to introduce new collateral types. Assets with more volatile prices, or tokens whose markets are thinner than those of established stablecoins, can lose value faster than liquidations can respond. Limiting the total amount at risk keeps any shortfall small while the system is tested.
6. What Happens if Collateral Prices Fall?
Falling prices are the scenario the exchange has to manage. If a drop in token prices or a growing loan pushes an account past a maintenance level set for each asset, or past the per-account cap, Arcus can liquidate it. It does so by closing the perpetual positions, by selling the tokens, or by doing both.
Liquidation is the mechanism that protects the exchange and other users from losses on borrowed funds. In a leveraged account, the lender needs the collateral to be worth more than the loan at all times. When that margin of safety erodes, the position is closed out automatically, usually before the account's value reaches zero.
Stock tokens introduce a wrinkle that crypto collateral does not. Equity markets operate on fixed trading hours, whereas an on-chain exchange runs around the clock, so price moves in the underlying shares can arrive in a burst when the stock market reopens. The materials describing the program do not address how Arcus handles that timing, and traders using stock tokens as margin should consider it in their risk planning.
7. What Does the Founder Say About Combining Spot and Perpetuals?
Eddie Zhang, the founder and chief executive of Arcus, argues in the press release that spot holdings and perpetual positions should not operate in separate silos. He says the feature lets traders put the value of their stock tokens to work whether they are looking to maintain an existing position, put on a new trade or hedge their exposure.
The hedging use is the clearest example. A holder of tokenized Nvidia shares who is worried about a short-term decline could open a short perpetual position while keeping the shares as collateral, offsetting some of the risk without selling. Previously that holder would have needed USDG to post the margin, which meant converting part of the holding.
The same logic applies to a trader building a new position. Instead of selling an index token to raise cash, the holder can leave it in place, borrow against it at the posted rate, and use the proceeds as margin. The trade-off is that the borrowed amount accrues interest and must be managed against the liquidation conditions described above.
The pitch reflects a broader view in derivatives markets that capital sitting idle is capital wasted. Allowing one asset to serve as both an investment and a margin deposit raises the efficiency of the trader's funds, at the cost of adding borrowing risk to a position that would otherwise be unleveraged.
8. Who Is Behind Arcus and Where Is It Available?
Robinhood Crypto is a strategic investor in Arcus. The exchange runs on Robinhood Chain and was built by the team that developed dYdX, a well-known decentralized derivatives platform. It is not available in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom, so the new collateral feature is restricted to users elsewhere.
The collateral feature follows a series of product steps. Arcus launched leveraged stock and crypto tokens in August. Then, beginning October 1, Robinhood Wallet started routing stock-token trades through Arcus. The multi-asset collateral program, which started on October 19 for large accounts, is the latest addition to that sequence.
Taken together, the steps show the exchange assembling a venue that links tokenized equities, crypto assets and derivatives in one place, with the backing of a large retail brokerage brand.
9. What Comes Next for Arcus?
The company has not announced a timetable for lifting the caps or adding more collateral assets. The details that would indicate its direction are the size of the platform-wide cap, the list of eligible tokens and the loan-to-value ratios, each of which Arcus can change in future announcements.
The first sign of how traders respond will be how quickly the $2 million platform allowance fills. If it does so within days, that would indicate demand for collateral flexibility, and it would put pressure on the exchange either to raise the limit or to explain how it will ration the space. Until then, the main practical step for traders is to review the loan rate, the 50% ratio and the liquidation conditions before depositing tokens.