EToro Assembles On-Chain Derivatives Stack as Brokerages Race Into DeFi Perpetuals

Published by James Harris on July 3, 2026July 3, 2026

eToro led a $12.5 million round into Extended, an on-chain perpetual futures exchange built by former Revolut executives, with Jump Crypto also participating. The deal is directly tied to eToro’s acquisition of Zengo, the MPC-based self-custody wallet it bought in April for an estimated $70 million valuation, and Extended’s perpetual futures engine will be integrated directly into that wallet.

The structural logic here is worth parsing. eToro is not building a DeFi derivatives stack from scratch; it is assembling one by acquisition and partnership, using Zengo for custody and Extended for execution. Extended runs on StarkWare’s StarkEx validity-rollup infrastructure, which settles on Ethereum while handling the throughput demands of perpetuals trading. That is a meaningful technical choice: validity rollups offer stronger settlement guarantees than optimistic rollups, which matters when users are holding leveraged positions. The timing also lands one day after Robinhood launched its own on-chain perpetuals offering through Lighter as part of its European expansion, and Coinbase expanded its international derivatives business to include perpetuals tied to US stocks and ETFs. Three retail brokerages moving into on-chain derivatives within the same window is a pattern, not a coincidence.

Extended has disclosed no trading volume, open interest, or user figures, which means this is entirely a bet on infrastructure and founding team pedigree.

The competitive pressure this creates extends beyond the platforms involved. Hyperliquid, which has built a significant on-chain perps following, recently made its markets visible inside TradingView to reach a broader trading audience. The entry of distribution-heavy retail brokerages into the same product category changes that dynamic: eToro and Robinhood bring compliance infrastructure and existing user bases that pure on-chain venues have to build from zero. The question is whether self-custody actually matters to retail users who have historically preferred the convenience of custodial accounts, or whether the Zengo integration genuinely lowers that friction enough to shift behavior. Regulatory clarity, or the absence of it, will shape that answer as much as product design will, and institutional friction around crypto’s legal status has a way of producing prolonged uncertainty rather than clean outcomes.

eToro CEO Yoni Assia described the investment as part of a broader initiative to build a DeFi ecosystem for retail investors. Extended founder Ruslan Fakhrutdinov said the company will share more about what the partnership means in due course, which suggests the full product integration timeline has not yet been made public.