The team behind dYdX has rebranded. They are now called Arcus, and they are building on Robinhood blockchain.
Arcus will live on the Robinhood Chain — an Arbitrum-based layer 2 that launched the same day. The goal? Give users access to perpetual trading and tokenized stocks, all fee-free on 95 different equities.
Robinhood crypto arm made an investment in Arcus. No word on how much.
The dYdX Foundation was quick to clarify: Arcus is a separate product on separate infrastructure. The original dYdX blockchain keeps running, still community-owned.
"Until now, traders have been shut out of the most valuable markets on earth — US equities, commodities, and indices — because of where they live, market hours, and institutions restricting access," Arcus said in a blog post. "We built Arcus to reduce these barriers."
Tokenized stocks will be usable as collateral for perpetuals. There is also talk of pre-IPO market access.
This is part of a bigger push from Robinhood to compete with platforms like Hyperliquid, whose token has climbed nearly 150% this year. Coinbase is doing the same — they added stock trading earlier this year and launched their own L2, Base, back in 2023.
Bitget Wallet and 1inch have already signed on to support the Robinhood Chain.
Big question is whether this actually opens up access or just shifts the gatekeepers. Time will tell.
