eToro Puts $12.5M into Onchain Derivatives: Brokers Are Racing into DeFi

While Bitcoin consolidates near $60,000 and retail investors sit on the sidelines, traditional financial players are placing bets on the next infrastructure layer. eToro — one of the world's largest social trading platforms with 38 million users — led a $12.5 million funding round in Extended, a decentralized perpetual futures platform that has processed $245 billion in cumulative trading volume since launch, The Block reports.

Extended: $245 billion in volume in 10 months

Extended was founded by former Revolut crypto executives: CEO Ruslan Fakhrutdinov and CTO Dmitrii Krasovskikh. The platform launched in August 2025 under the name X10 on Starknet — an Ethereum Layer 2. It offers perpetual futures with up to 100x leverage across 100+ markets — including crypto and tokenized stocks — without users having to hand over their assets to a centralized custodian. In effect, it is a fully decentralized derivatives exchange, CryptoBriefing notes.

The deal: $12.5M, Zengo, and Jump Crypto

eToro led the $12.5 million round; co-investors include Jump Crypto and Alber Blanc. Together with a previous $6.5 million raise in 2025, Extended has accumulated roughly $19 million in total funding. The key element of the deal is a strategic partnership: Extended's perpetual futures engine will be integrated directly into the Zengo wallet.

Zengo is the self-custodial wallet eToro acquired in April 2026 for roughly $70 million. Its distinguishing features: MPC (Multi-Party Computation) technology that eliminates the need for a seed phrase, plus built-in swaps, staking, and dApp access. Once the Extended integration is complete, Zengo users will be able to trade onchain derivatives while retaining full custody of their assets.

"This is part of a broader strategy to bring DeFi products to our users" — Elad Lavi, EVP at eToro.

The most important thing here isn't the round size — it's the trend. The two largest retail brokers, Robinhood and eToro, are simultaneously building DeFi infrastructure: Robinhood launched its own blockchain and tokenized stock trading, while eToro is going through the Zengo acquisition and now the Extended investment. The logic is the same: users want onchain yield and flexibility, and brokers don't want to cede that traffic to pure DeFi protocols, CoinDesk explains.

The context is telling: eToro's crypto profits fell from $46 million in Q1 2025 to $13 million in Q1 2026. Traditional spot trading is generating less and less — derivatives and DeFi look like the next margin frontier.

Takeaway

eToro's investment in Extended is not a one-off deal — it's a symptom of a structural shift: the line between a traditional broker and a decentralized protocol is disappearing fast. For users, this is good news: competition for their liquidity should drive better products, lower fees, and self-custodial trading becoming the norm rather than the exception.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.