What Are pTokens?

Every token on Vectis is paired to a pToken. If you've never heard the word, this is the two-minute version.

Tokenized Leverage

Crypto's mantra is "tokenize everything". Arcus, the Robinhood-backed perps DEX, took it literally and tokenized leverage.

A pToken wraps an Arcus perpetuals account into an ERC-20 on Robinhood Chain, so shares of that leveraged position trade freely on spot venues. Buy pHOOD3x and you hold a 3x long on Robinhood stock. Buy sBTC3x and you hold a 3x short on Bitcoin. No margin account, no funding to manage, no liquidation slider. It's a token.

Leveraged ETFs have done this in traditional finance for years. Crypto never really had the equivalent until now. Arcus explains the design in their own words here: pTokens: a new primitive on Arcus.

Why it matters

Perps are powerful and a nightmare to onboard someone into: market structure, order types, margin, a console that barely works on mobile, and a slider that zeroes out experienced traders. A pToken collapses all of that into one action: find the contract, click buy.

That simplicity changes what leverage can be used for.

• It's shareable. A perps account is a walled garden. A pToken is one asset held by many, which fits the social-trading meta that FOMO and Robinhood itself are building.
• It's sane. Modest, fixed leverage is a safer product than a slider that goes to 100x.
• It's programmable. You can't build much on top of someone else's perps account. You can build almost anything on an ERC-20.

That last point is the whole reason Vectis exists.

The five so far

Arcus has released five pTokens:

• pHOOD3x — 3x long HOOD
• pBTC3x — 3x long BTC
• pBTC — 1x long BTC
• sBTC3x — 3x short BTC
• sBTC — 1x short BTC

You can mint them in the Arcus vault, or buy them on Uniswap like any other token: paste the contract, pay in ETH or USDG, done.

Why we pair memecoins to them

One of the most overlooked facts in memecoins: your coin moves with whatever it's paired to. If the quote token drops 50%, you're down 50% before your coin moves an inch. If it doubles, you've doubled.

Pair a memecoin to a pToken and that effect is leveraged. $VECTIS is paired to pHOOD3x, so holders carry the coin's own upside plus a 3x view on Robinhood stock. On top of that, 3% of every trade is paid back to holders in the pToken itself, every 15 minutes.

Memecoins on steroids, and a far more fun way to express the pToken trade. As Arcus adds pTokens, the combinations here grow with them.