Trading platform eToro has led a $12.5 million strategic investment in Extended, an on-chain perpetual futures exchange founded by former Revolut employees, tying the deal to its recent acquisition of self-custody wallet Zengo.
eToro invests in Extended to link perps with Zengo
eToro announced the funding on July 2, with Jump Crypto also taking part in the funding round, according to The Block. The investment is related to eToro’s acquisition of Zengo in April, a self-custodial wallet that uses multi-party computation (MPC) cryptography to eliminate the need for seed phrases to access a user’s funds. When the deal was made, Zengo’s valuation is estimated at $70 million.
Extended is founded by former Revolut executives and launched public trading in late 2024. It runs on StarkWare’s StarkEx scaling infrastructure, a validity-rollup technology that allows for high-throughput, low-cost trading while settling transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, according to The Block.
Though Extended has not disclosed metrics publicly (e.g., trading volume; open interest; total value locked; active users; post-funding valuation), the backing of eToro and Jump Crypto indicates that investors are confident in the company’s infrastructure and long-term growth potential — rather than any size measures that may be publicly reported.
Extended’s perpetual futures engine will be integrated into the Zengo wallet, giving users the ability to trade on-chain derivatives while keeping custody of their assets.
Commenting on the announcement, Extended founder and CEO Ruslan Fakhrutdinov described the investment as a significant milestone for the company.
Having eToro, Jump and Alber Blanc join Extended as investors and partners marks an important milestone for Extended. We look forward to working together and will share more about what this means for Extended in due course.
This partnership will enhance Extended’s distribution through eToro’s ecosystem, and help both companies expand access to on-chain markets.
eToro bets on on-chain derivatives for retail users
According to eToro’s announcement, its investment in both Extended and Zengo is critical to achieving eToro’s goal of meeting the “growing demand for seamless to decentralized finance (DeFi) products” and expanding their Web3 ecosystem.
Yoni Assia (CEO of eToro) has indicated that placing these funds into this project is part of a broader initiative to create a DeFi ecosystem for eToro.
It’s starting to become an extended DeFi family! Following our acquisition of ZenGo, proud to lead Extended’s new funding round. Another step forward in our strategy to bring seamless DeFi access to retail investors worldwide!
Beyond the financing itself, the investment reflects a broader strategic shift among retail brokerages. Rather than building heir own infrastructure for trading DeFi derivatives, many traditional brokerage firms now partner with firms that have already established on-chain trading engines to offer these products.
The traditional broker will contribute customer-facing products, regulatory compliance expertise, and distribution capabilities. This approach allows traditional brokers to enter the rapidly growing perpetual futures market without having to develop an entirely new decentralized trading stack on their own.
The investment of eToro in Extended confirms the growing trend of traditional brokers becoming involved in the DeFi derivatives market. On July 1, Robinhood launched its perpetual futures offering through Lighter as part of its broader European crypto expansion, allowing eligible users to access on-chain perpetuals alongside tokenized stocks.
Earlier this year, Coinbase expanded its international derivatives business by introducing 24/7 perpetual futures tied to U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), extending perpetual contracts beyond cryptocurrencies. Together, these initiatives suggest competition among digital brokerages is evolving beyond spot crypto trading toward integrated platforms combining tokenized assets, self-custody wallets and around-the-clock derivatives trading.
Once considered a small niche within the crypto trading markets, perpetual futures are now quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments of the crypto trading markets and will continue to grow among online retail brokerage firms.
Numerous trading platforms that provide for the trading of other asset classes are continuing to pursue the development of perpetual futures products, which indicates an increasing demand for the creation of continuously open trading venues for tokenized and other real-world asset classes. The race among retail brokers to offer these products signals that on-chain derivatives are moving from crypto-native platforms toward mainstream distribution.
Crypto revenue slowdown raises the stakes
The investment comes as eToro’s crypto business has slowed significantly from its 2025 peaks. In Q1 2026, eToro reported a total of $13 million in profit generated from crypto and can now account for approximately 5% of total net trading profit, $258 million from all sources, according to The Block. This is down substantially from $46 million for the same quarter in 2025.
This funding also represents a shift in the competitive landscape among brokerages. Firms are switching from competing mainly on the basis of fees for trading cryptocurrencies to investing in the infrastructure needed to provide an all-inclusive user interface and experience for offering self-custody assets as well as tokenized and decentralized derivatives through one point of contact.
As more brokerages adopt this model, infrastructure providers such as Extended could become critical backend partners powering consumer-facing financial platforms.
Zengo will test mainstream access to DeFi perps
The Extended integration will test if traditional brokerages can successfully provide access to retail users into on-chain derivatives through self-custody wallets. If a decentralized wallet such as Zengo can provide a customer-friendly means to trade perpetual futures, it will serve as a meaningful link between eToro’s 40 million registered users and the DeFi trading infrastructure.
The partnership will also give us insight into the future direction of competition in digital brokerages. Instead of only offering the ability to trade crypto through spot trading, digital brokerages are beginning to combine the ability to trade crypto through wallets, tokenized assets, and perpetual derivatives in one ecosystem.
Therefore, the question now will be if this model will work. However, that may rely less upon the demand for perpetual futures (which account for the majority of all crypto derivatives trading) but rather upon whether the platforms that utilize self-custody wallets can create a sufficiently simplified user experience to allow for a greater number of mainstream investors to enter into on-chain markets.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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