Extended said in its announcement that eToro led a $12.5 million strategic funding round, with Jump Crypto also joining. The raise is tied to a partnership under which eToro plans to integrate Extended’s perpetual-futures engine directly into Zengo, the self-custody wallet eToro acquired earlier in 2026, so users can trade onchain derivatives while retaining custody of their assets.
Extended describes itself on its official site as a platform that “replaces siloed markets with a unified margin system,” letting traders use crypto and TradFi assets as collateral, with up to 100x leverage, full self-custody, and verifiable execution. The exchange was built by an experienced team of former Revolut employees, a pedigree tracking with the broader neobank-founders-in-crypto pattern.
That non-custodial architecture runs on StarkWare’s StarkEx, a validity-proof Layer-2 engine designed to run a decentralized perpetuals exchange that gives users self-custody and settles transactions trustlessly, batching trades off-chain while validating them through a smart contract on Ethereum. That is a structural choice, not a cosmetic partnership.
Zengo, Custody, and the Compliance Perimeter
Folding Extended’s engine into Zengo puts a regulated, publicly traded brokerage in the position of routing users toward self-custodial onchain leverage products it does not directly hold. MiCA’s crypto-asset service provider rules and US derivatives oversight both turn on who custodies client assets. A broker distributing access to a non-custodial engine, without holding the position itself, sits in a different compliance lane than one running its own custodial derivatives book.
Extended is self-custodial by design, so the open question is where eToro’s own regulatory perimeter ends once it becomes the entry point, not the custodian, for 100x-leverage derivatives trades. eToro is not alone chasing that structure.
Robinhood has pushed its own onchain and tokenized-asset expansion, and both firms are racing to become an “everything exchange” pairing a regulated front end with non-custodial derivatives rails. A single account increasingly spans custodial equities, custodial crypto, and non-custodial onchain derivatives, each governed by a different rulebook.
Extended’s Scale and eToro’s Crypto Slide
Extended has processed more than $245 billion in cumulative volume across more than 100 perpetual markets, as of June 2026. eToro’s own crypto business is moving the other direction: eToro’s net crypto trading contribution, meaning net trading income from cryptoasset derivatives plus crypto revenue less the cost of crypto revenue, was approximately $15.4 million in Q1 2026, down from approximately $49.0 million a year earlier, according to results eToro published on its investor relations site.
Read against that decline, the Extended deal looks less like more custodial crypto trading and more like a pivot toward owning the onchain infrastructure layer. eToro Group EVP of corporate development and strategy Elad Lavi framed the investment as a response to user demand for DeFi access and a step in expanding eToro’s Web3 ecosystem.