# Arcus Points Calculator

Estimate how many Arcus points you could earn in a week and what it may cost, using live Arcus market data. Plain-English inputs, clearly labelled guesses.

Independent research tool; not affiliated with Arcus. No wallet connection, API keys or server-side calculations. Interactive inputs require JavaScript; research is available as static HTML.

## What it does

You describe one week: the market, money kept on Arcus, leverage, hours each trade is held and number of trades. The estimator returns a points range and a cost estimate (fees, spread, slippage, funding). Market prices, open interest (OI), funding and bid-ask spreads load from Arcus's public read-only API; nothing about the user is sent.

## What Arcus has said

Arcus announces 250,000 points per week, distributed Wednesdays at 3pm Eastern Time. Trading quality, market making, retained collateral and referrals matter, and RWA (stock, commodity and index) perps have boosts, including outside US extended hours. The score formula, category weights, boost sizes, token allocation and conversion are unpublished.

## How the estimate works

Points are estimated mainly from money at work: balance × days, counted only while a position of at least $10 is open (95% of the best fit), plus completed round trips (5%), with holding in stock, gold and index markets counting about 1.5× (fitted). Each is compared with a reference account built from sixteen weekly results of four accounts measured from Arcus's public API and matched with their weekly points; the reference account earned about 2.6 points in a crypto market in the latest week (paid 28 October 2026), or about 4.2 points per $1,000 kept at work for a full week. The fit describes all sixteen account-weeks within about 1.2× typically and 1.4× at worst when each week has its own overall level; its week-4 predictions, written before the points came in, held for all four accounts. Idle money, volume, fees, order type and order count add nothing. The form was found by searching many combinations, so it is a lead, not Arcus's formula. The range spans three presets (best fit 95/5, small markets pay more, more trades pay more), not week-to-week level changes.

## Claims checked against measured accounts

"Keeping money on Arcus earns points": only while it backs an open position; idle deposits earned 0.01 and 0 points in week 3. "Bigger positions earn more" is not supported once the balance behind them is counted. "More orders earn more points" is weak at most. "Small markets earn more" is unclear: one account's points rose about 5× after moving to a small market, another's did not. "Only volume counts" and "market or limit orders earn extra because of fees" are not supported. "RWA has a 5× boost": about ×1.5 fits best; ×5 fits clearly worse. Four accounts is few; these are leads, not rules.

## Older volume model

A separate volume-only model remains under Advanced: weekly points = weekly pool × volume category share × weighted personal volume / (other weekly volume + weighted personal volume). It is illustrative, not Arcus's formula. Protocol research checked 2026-10-06. Arcus rules rechecked 2026-10-29. DefiLlama rounded perpetual-volume snapshot: $335.1M over 24h and $2.169B over 7d (observed 2026-10-29T07:14:36Z; exact metric cutoff unknown; not live). Spot and routed aggregator volume are separate and must not be added to perps.

[Arcus points announcement](https://arcus.xyz/blog/introducing-arcus-points)
[DefiLlama Arcus](https://defillama.com/protocol/arcus)