Points Lab / Points estimator
Client-side

Arcus Points Lab

Independent research tool
POINTS ESTIMATOR

How many Arcus points
could you earn?

Arcus hands out points to its traders every week. Tell us roughly how you would trade and we will estimate your points, and what it may cost you to earn them.

  1. Pick a market

    Choose what you would trade: crypto like BTC or ETH, or a stock or gold.

  2. Describe your week

    How much money you keep on Arcus, how big your trades are, and how long you hold them.

  3. Read your estimate

    See roughly how many points you could earn, and what it might cost you in fees.

Treat every number as a rough guess. Arcus has not published how points are counted. This tool uses real market prices and a best-guess scoring recipe built from a handful of real accounts. It cannot promise what you will earn, and points have no confirmed cash value.

New to this? Plain-English glossary 9 terms
Points
Arcus’s reward for using the exchange. 250,000 are shared among all traders each week. Arcus has not said what they will be worth.
Collateral
The money you deposit on Arcus. In our data it earned points only while it backed an open position; money left idle earned nothing.
Leverage
A multiplier on your trade size. At 3×, $100 of your money controls a $300 trade. Bigger trades mean bigger gains and bigger losses.
Open interest (OI)
The total size of all open trades in a market. Big markets have a lot; small ones have less.
Spread
The small gap between the buying price and the selling price. You pay it every time you trade.
Funding
A small hourly payment between traders who bet up and traders who bet down. Depending on the market, you either pay it or receive it.
Basis points (bps)
A tiny percentage. 1 bps is 0.01%, so 2.25 bps is 0.0225%.
RWA
Real-world assets: stocks, gold and index funds you can trade on Arcus. Arcus says these earn a points boost.
Market order vs limit order
A market order trades immediately at the best available price and pays the higher “taker” fee. A limit order waits for your price and usually pays less. Arcus has not said that either earns more points.

Your week on Arcus

Four answers are enough. Everything else has a sensible default.

STEP 1 OF 2
$300 position · $1,800 weekly volume · 24 position-hours
Fees, direction and timing optional

The spread comes from Arcus’s live order book. Funding uses the current hourly rate, held constant, so real payments will differ.

How points are counted (our best fit) advanced

Arcus counts several things but has not said how much each matters. We tested these weights against four real accounts over four reward weeks: with a ×1.5 stock boost they describe all sixteen weekly results within about 1.2× typically (worst 1.4×). The other presets are alternatives the data cannot rule out.

Round trips get the remaining 5%. These are fitted to four accounts over three weeks, not Arcus’s real shares of the 250K weekly pool.

Calibration and referrals advanced

Our estimate compares your plan with a reference account: the average of sixteen weekly results from four real accounts, measured from Arcus’s public data and matched with their weekly points. That account kept about $590 at work for a full week and completed about 9 round trips, and in the latest reward week (paid 28 October) it would have earned about 2.6 points in a crypto market. The first week paid about 1.6× more for the same activity, and the level can move again as more people join.

STEP 2 · YOUR ESTIMATE FOR ONE WEEKROUGH GUESS
Estimated points
—

Calculating…

Where do these points come from?
If Arcus weighs things differently

The range covers three descriptions our data cannot tell apart. It does not cover changes in the overall level from week to week: the first week paid about 1.6× more for the same activity than the latest. It is not a promise: your real points could be lower, higher or zero.

What it could cost you

ONE WEEK
—

Costs need a live price spread and funding rate.

This counts fees, spread, slippage and funding only. It does not include money lost if prices move against you, which is the biggest risk. Negative funding means you would receive money, which is not guaranteed.

OPTIONAL · COMPARE MARKETS

Same week, different markets.

See how your plan scores in each market, next to its cost and size. This is a comparison, not advice to trade.

DATED SNAPSHOT15 October 2026 · current OI is not reward-week OI

Your plan compared across markets
MarketEst. pointsMarket size (OI)Spread / depthBoostWarningsChoose
Loading available markets…

With the best-fit weights the size of a market does not change your points; small markets only score higher under the “Rewards small markets” preset, and stocks and gold only because of the assumed boost. “Most points first (cautious)” ranks by the low end of the range. By default we hide markets under $250K of open trades or $100K of daily volume. Prices older than 60 seconds are dropped. “Depth” is only the very best price on each side. Whether a market earns a boost for you is up to Arcus.

Claims you may have seen, checked against real accounts 7 claims

Based on four accounts whose full histories we measured from Arcus’s public data over four reward weeks. Three is few, so “not supported” means the data disagrees with the claim, not that it is proven false.

“Keeping money on Arcus earns points”Only while you hold a position

Money left idle earned nothing: in week 3 two accounts that only kept money on Arcus earned 0.01 and 0 points. But the balance behind open positions explains points better than anything else we measured, including position size. A $3,000 balance backing positions all week earned about 200× more than $200 that was mostly idle.

“Bigger positions earn more”Unclear

Once the balance behind open positions is counted, position size adds little: it got 0% through week 3 and about 10% once week 4 was added. We cannot yet tell whether a tiny position would count the same, because every account we measured held real positions.

“More orders earn more points”Weak at most

Completed round trips add a small amount (5% of the best fit). Order count by itself, which seemed to matter with three small accounts, did not hold up once a large account was added.

“Positions in small markets earn more”Weakening

One large account earned about 5× more after moving from big index markets to a small one (META), but in week 4 it moved mostly to big markets (NVDA, AAPL) and earned the same. Another account’s small-market positions did not pay off. The best fit gives it 0%; the “Rewards small markets” preset shows what it would mean.

“Only trading volume counts”Not supported

One account traded $207,000 in week 1 and earned less than one that traded $16,000. Volume adds nothing once the balance behind positions is counted.

“Market orders (or limit orders) earn extra because of fees”Not supported

Fees differed up to 50× between accounts with similar points, and neither fees nor market-order or limit-order volume improved the fit.

“Stocks and gold (RWA) get a 5× boost”About ×1.5, not ×5

Arcus says a boost exists, not how big. Fitted with four weeks of data, holding in stocks, gold and index markets earns about 1.5× as much as crypto; ×5 fits clearly worse. Most of our stock data comes from one account, and we cannot tell whether the boost applies at all hours or mainly outside US market hours.

How the estimate works and what we do not know

Money at work, plus round trips

Money-at-work score = your balance × days kept × the share of the week a position worth at least $10 was open, compared with a reference account built from sixteen measured weekly results. Round-trips score = trades opened and closed, compared the same way. A third score, your position × hours as a share of the market’s size, gets weight only in the “Rewards small markets” preset. Holding in stocks, gold and index markets counts about 1.5× (fitted); an extra after-hours boost is left at ×1.

Weekly points = 2.6 × the weighted scores + any referral credit. The best fit is 95% money at work and 5% round trips with a ×1.5 stock boost, which describes all sixteen account-weeks within about 1.2× typically and 1.4× at worst when each week has its own overall level. That is looser than our earlier fits to three small accounts, because a large account showed those fits were too simple.

What our sample can and cannot tell us

Four accounts over four weeks, from $35 to about $3,000 on Arcus. In week 4 the model, written down before the points came in, predicted two active accounts within 1.2× and two idle ones at exactly 0. Idle money earned nothing, and the balance behind open positions matters more than position size, trading volume, fees or order type. We have not seen anyone hold a tiny position against a large balance, so we cannot say whether that would count in full.

The form was found by searching many combinations, so it is the best description so far, not Arcus’s formula. Still missing: more accounts of different sizes and markets, the size of the stock and after-hours boosts, and whether small markets really pay more.

Official points announcement ↗ · Market data definitions ↗ · Spread data ↗

Previous volume-only model & network research Advanced comparison
VOLUME-ONLY COMPARISON

Network volume model

This separate model assumes a proportional share of a hypothetical pool.

DATED SNAPSHOTChecked 29 Oct 2026 · rounded published figures · not liveDefiLlama ↗
PERP VOLUME · 24H ↗
$335.1M
Notional trading volume
PERP VOLUME · 7D ▥
$2.169B
WEEKLY POINTS POOL ✧
250K
Fixed · official Season 1 rule
PROGRAM ENDS BY ◷
H1 2027
Wednesday distributions · 3pm ET
i
A model, with the assumptions in plain sight. Arcus weighs trading quality, market making, retained deposits and referrals. Volume alone cannot predict official points. Token allocation and conversion are unconfirmed.
How it works ↗

Build your trading scenario

Enter daily or weekly volume, with room for the unknowns.

MODEL INPUTS
Volume period

$142,857.14 average per day · points are distributed weekly.

VOLUME SCORING ASSUMPTION 50%
0% · other activity100% · volume only

This split is an assumption. Arcus has not published category weights.

Trading costs basis points · 1 bp = 0.01%

Fee defaults are illustrative, not Arcus’s fee schedule. Enter your actual blended rates. Capital deposited is not a cost unless lost or spent.

Competition & scoring edit assumptions

No published RWA or overnight boost multiplier exists. The relative scoring factor is a sensitivity input, not an official multiplier.

ESTIMATED POINTSESTIMATE
691.2
691.2 new + 0 existing · 12 weeks · default example
Estimated first week57.6 pts
Modeled volume score share0.0461%
New activity cost / point$5.21
Your actual allocation can be lower, higher, or zero.

Modeled reward value

↗
$11,766
Total modeled value · including existing points
New activity costs$3,600
Net from new activity+$8,166
Explore valuation assumptions →

$1B FDV · 20% allocation · 11.75M eligible points. Default assumptions, all hypothetical.

✧

The denominator is the difference. More competing volume means fewer points. More total program points means less value per point.

One volume. Three scoring assumptions.

See how uncertain weights change the estimate. Other inputs stay the same.

SENSITIVITY, NOT CONFIDENCE INTERVALS

Separate markets, separate denominators.

The estimator above uses perpetual volume only.

MARKET DATA

Manage your volume source

DefiLlama’s derivatives API requires a paid plan. The bundled snapshot was checked 29 Oct 2026; the exact metric cutoff is unknown. Update it manually or connect a public, CORS-enabled JSON feed.

Public endpoints only. Do not paste API keys or URLs containing credentials. A paid key must stay in a trusted server; it cannot be protected in a static browser app.

{
  "total24h": 335100000,
  "total7d": 2169000000,
  "asOf": "2026-10-29T07:14:36Z"
}

One request at a time. 15-minute successful-data cache; at least 60 seconds between attempts. No background polling or automatic retries. Client-side requests still follow provider limits and CORS rules.