eToro Drives DeFi Expansion
eToro Leads $12.5 Million Investment in Extended, Integrating On-Chain Futures into Zengo
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Key Points
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Extended was founded by former Revolut employees, underscoring the project’s fintech pedigree and focus on bridging traditional finance experience with on-chain trading.
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Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, Extended’s founder, said: “The first phase was building for DeFi natives,” and the next phase will require infrastructure and partnerships for onchain derivatives growth.
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Elad Lavi, eToro’s executive vice president of corporate development and strategy, highlighted growing user demand for seamless access to DeFi products, framing Extended and Zengo as key parts of this push.
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Rival brokerages are racing to offer perpetuals and tokenized assets, with Robinhood rolling out its own blockchain, expanding tokenized stock offerings, and planning to extend perpetual futures into commodities like gold and oil.
eToro has led a $12.5 million funding round for Extended, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange, marking the retail trading giant's boldest move yet into on-chain derivatives. The investment follows eToro's $70 million acquisition of self-custody wallet Zengo in April, and the two will now be combined into a single product. The Block and Decrypt reported that Extended's trading engine will be embedded directly into Zengo, letting users trade derivatives without giving up control of their assets.
Extended is no small bet. The exchange has processed over $245 billion in trading volume and supports more than 100 perpetual markets across crypto and other assets. Jump Crypto and Alber Blanc also joined the round, according to Crypto Briefing.
Zengo Gains On-Chain Derivatives Without Losing Custody
The core promise of the deal is simple. Extended's perpetual futures engine will run inside the Zengo wallet. Users can trade derivatives without handing their funds to a centralized exchange. That matters because most crypto derivatives trading still happens on platforms that hold user assets — a risk many investors learned about the hard way after the FTX collapse.
Elad Lavi, eToro's executive vice president of corporate development and strategy, said the move responds to "growing user demand for seamless access to DeFi products." According to TradingView, eToro plans to roll out broader DeFi tools onto its core platform over time, with Extended and Zengo as the first building blocks.
Extended Built by Ex-Revolut Team on Starknet
Extended was founded by former Revolut employees, giving it deep fintech roots. The exchange runs on Starknet, a layer-2 blockchain that offers fast, low-cost transactions. That technical foundation helps it handle large trading volumes without the fees and slowdowns common on Ethereum's main chain.
Founder Ruslan Fakhrutdinov said the company is shifting gears. "The first phase was building for DeFi natives," he said. The next phase, he added, will require new infrastructure and partnerships to drive on-chain derivatives growth to a mainstream audience — exactly what an eToro partnership provides.
Brokers Race to Become the 'Everything-Exchange'
eToro is not alone in this push. Robinhood is building its own blockchain, expanding tokenized stock offerings, and planning to add perpetual futures on commodities like gold and oil. Coinbase is also moving deeper into derivatives. The race is on to become what insiders call the "Everything-Exchange" — one platform covering stocks, crypto, and complex derivatives.
Perpetual futures — contracts with no expiry date — have become one of crypto's most popular products. Most of that volume still runs through centralized exchanges. Bringing perps into a self-custody wallet is a new step. According to Decrypt, eToro sees this as a way to win users who want both ease of access and control over their own assets.
What Comes Next for eToro's DeFi Buildout
The Extended integration into Zengo is just phase one. eToro has signaled it will keep adding DeFi products to its platform beyond perpetuals. The company went public on Nasdaq earlier this year and is under pressure to show growth beyond its core copy-trading product.
The strategy is clear: use Zengo as a DeFi hub, plug in best-in-class protocols like Extended, and funnel eToro's existing retail user base into on-chain trading. According to Value The Markets, the Extended deal is part of a wider effort to build Web3 infrastructure that can scale across eToro's global customer base.
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