eToro’s $12.5M Extended Bet Isn’t Just a DeFi Play — It’s a Panic Move to Save Its Collapsing Crypto Revenue

Posted on by

(SeaPRwire) –

By: Lucas Caldwell
Stop buying the PR line that eToro’s Extended investment is just a casual DeFi experiment. This is a targeted move to stop its crypto revenue free fall before it loses more market share to competitors that already beat it to perpetual futures. Last quarter, its crypto profits dropped 71% year over year, from $46 million in Q1 2025 to just $13 million in Q1 2026. That is not a small performance blip, that is a core revenue stream collapsing fast.

eToro led the $12.5 million Extended funding round, with Jump Crypto and Alber Blanc joining as participating investors. Extended launched in late 2024, founded by former Revolut crypto head Ruslan Fakhrutdinov and other ex-Revolut staff. Built on StarkWare’s StarkEx scaling engine, it processed over $245 billion in trading volume as of June 2026, and supports more than 100 active perpetual futures markets.

The investment ties directly to eToro’s $70 million April 2026 acquisition of self-custody wallet Zengo, which uses multi-party computation technology to eliminate the need for traditional seed phrases. eToro will plug Extended’s perpetual futures engine directly into Zengo first, letting users trade onchain derivatives without giving up custody of their assets. It plans to roll the same DeFi products out to its main brokerage platform later.

This is not a solo race by any measure. The same day eToro announced this deal, rival broker Robinhood launched its own custom blockchain, expanded its tokenized stock offerings, and confirmed it will roll out commodity perpetual futures for gold and oil soon. Coinbase already has a fully operational perpetual futures offering, and prediction market platform Kalshi also entered the space in recent weeks. Everyone is chasing the same user base that wants 24/7 cross-asset trading access.

Perpetual futures stopped being a crypto-only niche product years ago. Platforms now list contracts tied to equities, commodities, and almost every other real-world asset class you can name. Extended already has public plans to expand into spot trading, tokenized real-world assets, and multi-asset collateral support in its next development phase. Every player is racing to build a single platform that handles both traditional and digital financial products with zero friction for end users.

The first mainstream retail broker to ship fully integrated self-custody cross-asset perpetual futures will lock in at least 35% of global retail trading revenue by 2028.

Author bio: Lucas Caldwell, a tech opinion leader with millions of followers on X/Twitter covering crypto, DeFi and web3 business strategy.