Today, we’re launching Arcus. 

Arcus is a next-generation decentralized exchange built jointly by dYdX Labs and Robinhood Crypto. It's designed from the ground up for trading tokenized equities and perpetuals on Robinhood Chain. 

Building Arcus alongside Eddie Zhang for the past year has been a full court press. Dynamic, determined, intensely productive. And, in that pressure, I got to watch Eddie up close. What I saw was a founder. Someone who makes everyone around them move faster and think bigger. He and the Pocket Protector team changed the culture and direction of dYdX in ways I didn't expect and am deeply excited about. 

I'm grateful to Eddie for helping us return to the core of building: making something people want. He's earned my trust as a founder and the dYdX team's trust as a leader. 

That's why today, we’re launching Arcus with Eddie as CEO and Founder. Arcus was incubated at dYdX Labs and I’ll be joining the board where I’ll drive strategy and long-term vision. An allocation of any future Arcus token will be reserved for the dYdX community. 

I am dYdX's founder and the largest DYDX token holder. I have more riding on this than anyone. That's exactly why I'm saying this clearly: the best move for me, for the team, and for the dYdX community is Arcus – with Eddie at the helm. ‍

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What Happened with v4 and What We Learned

The dYdX Chain achieved real decentralization. Fully open-sourced. Community-controlled. 200+ markets. 50+ validators running order books. 

But it also made clear the tradeoffs of running a decentralized chain. Performance and user experience suffered. The market clearly responded, with competitors capturing market share by prioritizing speed, simplicity, and liquidity. 

With Arcus, our sole focus is on building the best exchange for traders across speed, liquidity, and user experience. 

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‍What this Means for the dYdX Community 

We’ll prioritize access for those who participated in dYdX - trading, staking, validating, and engaging. 

Arcus gives us the opportunity to build something much larger and more valuable than what exists across globally digital asset trading today. ‍

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The Arcus Thesis 

Arcus is the product of the accumulated learnings of past versions of dYdX, months of listening to trader feedback, and key design improvements on where we believe the current generation of DEXs fall short. 

Our win thesis is grounded in three simple pillars: distribution, access, and community-ownership: 

• Distribution: We are joining forces with Robinhood Chain, an EVM-compatible layer-2 built by Robinhood, the premier retail trading platform with over 25 million users. 
• Stocks & Perps 24/7: Arcus offers 24/7 trading on 95 Stock Tokens and 35 RWA perps. 
• Community Owned: Arcus is built to be owned by the community of traders it serves. 

Join the Arcus perps waitlist today. Spot trading is live now.‍

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‍What's Next

‍We’re 100% focused on making Arcus the best trading experience in the world. We’re prioritizing access to Arcus for dYdX traders. 

dYdX v4 will continue to be supported and your funds and positions will remain fully accessible on dYdX Chain. ‍

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A Full Arc 

‍Since our acquisition of Pocket Protector last year, Eddie has been laser-focused on building the next generation of decentralized exchanges. 

Arcus is the culmination of that work: combining dYdX's experience innovating in DeFi markets with Robinhood Chain’s world-class expertise in creating financial products for millions of users. The result is an exchange that has everything traders deserve: perps, spot, 24/7 tokenized stock trading, performance, and decentralization. 

To everyone who has been part of this journey, thank you. 

Antonio 

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‍Arcus is a blockchain-based smart contract protocol that permits self-custodial peer-to-peer trading of Stock Tokens, cryptoassets and perpetual futures.  Arcus is not a regulated financial services provider, and it is not available in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and other restricted jurisdictions.

Stock Tokens are tokenised securities that provide economic exposure to a relevant underlying equity instrument or ETP through a contractual claim against the Issuer for a cash Redemption. Stock Tokens involve risks not present, or not present to the same extent, in traditional stock ownership, including private-key loss or compromise, limited redemption access, liquidity constraints, price or tracking divergences from the underlying, and uncertain or evolving regulatory treatment.

Trading Stock Tokens, cryptoassets or perpetual futures is risky and involves risks of loss, particularly when using leverage. DYOR. NFA.

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