TLDR
- eToro spearheaded a $12.5 million investment in Extended, a blockchain-based perpetual futures platform
- This investment connects to eToro’s previous $70 million purchase of the Zengo self-custody wallet
- Extended’s founders came from Revolut and the platform has facilitated over $245 billion in trades
- The integration will bring Extended’s derivatives trading engine into Zengo’s wallet infrastructure
- Competing platforms including Robinhood and Coinbase are simultaneously expanding their onchain trading capabilities
eToro has spearheaded a $12.5 million investment round in Extended, a blockchain-native platform specializing in perpetual futures trading. The funding round also attracted participation from Jump Crypto and Alber Blanc.
Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, who previously led cryptocurrency operations at Revolut, established Extended alongside former colleagues from the same company. The platform went live in the final months of 2024, leveraging StarkWare’s StarkEx scaling technology as its foundation.
By June, Extended had facilitated trading volume exceeding $245 billion and offers access to more than 100 perpetual contract markets.
How This Fits eToro’s DeFi Strategy
This strategic move comes on the heels of eToro’s $70 million purchase of Zengo, a self-custody cryptocurrency wallet, which was revealed in April. Zengo’s infrastructure utilizes multi-party computation technology, eliminating the requirement for conventional seed phrase backups.
eToro’s roadmap includes embedding Extended’s perpetual futures trading capabilities directly within the Zengo wallet interface. This integration would enable users to execute onchain derivative transactions while maintaining full custody of their digital assets.
Elad Lavi, who serves as eToro’s executive vice president overseeing corporate development and strategy, noted increasing user appetite for decentralized finance functionality. He positioned both the Zengo purchase and the Extended investment as fundamental components of the company’s strategic direction.
Looking ahead, eToro aims to incorporate DeFi offerings into its primary brokerage service.
During the first quarter of 2026, eToro generated $13 million in cryptocurrency-related profits, representing approximately 5% of its overall net trading profit of $258 million. This marked a decline from the $46 million recorded during the corresponding quarter in 2025.
Brokers Race to Build Onchain
eToro isn’t operating in isolation. Coinciding with this announcement, competing brokerage Robinhood unveiled its proprietary blockchain network, broadened its tokenized equity offerings, and announced intentions to introduce perpetual futures contracts for commodities including gold and crude oil.
Coinbase has similarly moved into the perpetual futures arena. Even Kalshi, a prediction market platform, has recently entered this competitive landscape.
Perpetual futures contracts, once confined to cryptocurrency circles, are now being applied to equities, commodities, and various real-world assets by trading platforms.
Extended has outlined plans for its next development phase, which encompasses spot trading capabilities, tokenized real-world assets, and support for multiple asset types as collateral.
Ouriel Ohayon, serving as managing director at Zengo, observed that traditional capital markets are progressively merging with digital asset infrastructure, predicting that future trading environments will operate continuously without interruption.
The strategic initiatives undertaken by eToro, Robinhood, and Coinbase signal a widespread industry shift toward creating unified platforms capable of handling both conventional and cryptocurrency-based financial instruments under one roof.
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