Besides allowing users to trade with ETH, wBTC and USDT as margin, multi-asset collateral on @extendedapp also unlocks simple cash-and-carry strategies: long spot, short perp and gain exposure to funding payments. As always, returns depend on funding rates, which are variable and change over time.
6 months of building. what's next?
TLDR: We focused on putting in place the product, partnership and governance foundations for the next phase of Extended. TradFi partnership, hundreds of new crypto and RWA markets, spot trading and further decentralisation are coming. Our approach to growth remains unchanged: no KOL round, no paid promotions, no paid PR, no podcast sponsorships and no paid market-making arrangements.
Over the past 6 months, the team at @extendedapp has been focused on a fairly simple objective: building the product, infrastructure and partnerships required to support the next stage of growth.
A lot of the work happened behind the scenes but we are now getting to the point where the pieces are starting to come together.
Product
Some of the key items are already live:
- Multi-asset collateral, allowing users to post wBTC, ETH and USDT alongside USDC. Besides expanding the collateral universe, it also unlocks simple cash-and-carry strategies directly on the platform.
- Full email onboarding, including gasless deposits and withdrawals. While not particularly exciting on its own, it unlocks fiat on/off-ramp integrations that are required to onboard non-native users.
- Significant improvements to UI stability, responsiveness and overall user experience, driven largely by user feedback collected over the past months.
Several important pieces are coming next:
- Spot trading, which we view as a table-stakes component of a complete exchange experience and an important UX improvement to multi-asset collateral.
- Opening up our lending infrastructure beyond the exchange itself, allowing users to deposit wBTC, ETH and USDT, borrow USDC and deploy capital elsewhere.
- New trading infrastructure that will unlock hundreds of additional crypto and RWA markets. Internally, this is the product initiative we are most excited about.
Growth
Over the same period, we have spent a lot of time thinking about how Extended should grow.
One principle remains unchanged: we do not pay for KOL promotions, PR, podcast sponsorships or market-making arrangements. This applies equally to cash, tokens and points.
Its a slower path and not the easiest one but over time we have become increasingly convinced that sustainable growth is built on product quality, distribution and community rather than financial incentives.
We have also completed a number of less visible but equally important initiatives:
- Finalised the legal and commercial framework for our first tradfi partnership, which unlocks some of the product initiatives mentioned above and establishes a foundation for future institutional integrations.
- Secured the majority of the long-term partners who will help operate, secure and govern Extended. We are proud of the quality of the organisations that chose to support the vision and will be sharing more details separately.
- Spent considerable time with our largest users and major ecosystem participants to gather feedback and ensure alignment around the long-term direction of the protocol.
- Remained committed to our original targets for early community rewards, despite certain things taking longer than anticipated.
This month is an important one for Extended. It will conclude the team's efforts over the past 6 months and mark the beginning of the next phase: further decentralisation, ecosystem expansion and the transition to a community-owned protocol.
What multi-asset collateral unlocks for @extendedapp's roadmap:
- Alongside multi-asset collateral, we have built spot trading infrastructure (all non-USDC liquidations already route through the native spot market), leveraged spot and a lending protocol.
- As the next step, we will open spot trading to users and expand lending beyond the Extended ecosystem to support broader DeFi use cases.
- Reasonably soon, we will multiply the number of crypto and TradFi markets available on Extended, while keeping liquidity and execution quality as top priorities and upgrading spot trading to support leverage.
While multi-asset collateral is only one part of the broader vision, it is foundational to Extended’s goal of building one margin account across all markets: hundreds of crypto and TradFi perpetual markets, leveraged spot, an open lending protocol, yield products (XVS), and other trading products.
Multi-Asset Collateral is now live on Extended
From today, wBTC and ETH are accepted as collateral alongside USDC and XVS (Extended yield-bearing collateral). EURC and USDT are coming soon.
How it works
The system operates on a native money market, with the vault acting as the primary lender. When trading losses push your USDC balance negative and that deficit is covered by non-stablecoin collateral, you are borrowing USDC.
Borrowing rates depend on two factors: overall vault utilisation and utilisation against each specific collateral asset. For example, if demand to borrow USDC against ETH is lower than against BTC, borrowing against ETH will be cheaper.
When a user holds multiple collateral assets, borrowing is automatically allocated starting with the lowest-rate asset and moving upward, minimising the effective cost with no manual input required. We are not aware of this being implemented anywhere else in DeFi.
Example. User is down $175K on a perp and borrowing $175K USDC against a mixed book:
$50K USDT @ 1% - $500
$50K ETH @ 5% - $2,500
$75K BTC @ 10% - $7,500
Total annualised interest: $10,500. Effective rate: ~6%. Borrowing the same amount entirely against BTC would cost $17,500 annually, or 67% more.
What this means for Extended Vault
The vault is the primary lender for the entire system. All interest paid by USDC borrowers flows to vault depositors as Extra Yield, on top of the trading fees already distributed.
This creates a second, structurally independent yield stream for XVS holders. The vault earns by serving as the backbone of the margin system.
From our conversations with TradFi brokers, it’s clear that moving to 24/7 is quickly becoming table stakes.
To get there, most are looking at two routes: launching perps (either in-house or via partners) or extending CFDs to 24/7 and hedging the exposure externally.
When discussing the second approach, hedging CFD exposure with perps (instead of futures, leveraged spot, etc.), two structural differences stand out:
1. Deterministic liquidation vs operational margining. In TradFi, margining is rule-based but involves operational processes and potential grace periods, while in perps liquidation is fully deterministic and continuous, ensuring individual account and system-wide solvency without credit assumptions.
2. Managing funding vs rollover / borrow costs. Perp funding is realized more frequently (hourly / 8-hour), and can be significantly more volatile as it reacts in real time to positioning imbalances, compared to the smoother, benchmark-driven cost of carry in futures and financing markets.
None of those are blockers to a wider institutional adoption of perps, but rather observations on how traditional players are already adapting their ways of working to benefit from perps and DeFi.
Extended end of Q1 update
[TLDR]
- Multi-asset collateral launching soon
- TradFi expansion accelerating (>25 markets live, partnership coming, focused on distribution via TradFi brokers)
- Becoming more institutional-ready (pricing methodology, trading workflows)
- Building decentralised, high-throughput sequencing
[Product]
The team has completed development of multi-asset collateral margin. It is now in the testing phase on testnet and undergoing smart contract audits. We expect to launch at the end of April or early May, with support for wBTC, ETH, USDT and potentially EURC as collateral, subject to underlying liquidity.
In Q1, we also doubled down on our TradFi offering, expanding to 25+ equities, indices, FX markets and commodities with competitive liquidity. We are currently finalising an agreement with a major TradFi broker, which will both broaden our offering and help bring in flow.
The other priority for the team is making Extended more institutional-friendly across both product and trading:
- Improving the definition and transparency of fair reference pricing for TradFi markets, with a consistent and clear methodology: spot-based references for equities and FX, and futures-derived pricing for commodities and energy
- Introducing and better communicating institutional-grade features such as MPC wallet workflows, API key-only trading, and our sub-account architecture
In addition:
- With multi-asset collateral, we have built native spot markets (required to process liquidations of non-USDC balances). These will be released shortly after the cross-asset rollout.
- The team is progressing towards decentralising sequencing via an application-specific chain built on a high-throughput implementation of full BFT consensus (targeting ~50ms block times and hundreds of thousands of transactions per second).
This architecture introduces an app-chain layered on top of our existing zk-enabled stack, enabling decentralised matching and related services while preserving existing security guarantees. More details and timelines will be shared soon. Importantly, this design enables Extended tokenomics and revenue accrual to the token.
[Growth and community]
Our strategy remains consistent:
- Stay open to feedback
- Continuously iterate on the product
- Encourage organic usage
- Do not do paid marketing or paid deals
- Focus on long-term sustainability and value creation
Over the past quarter, we have gained stronger conviction that demand for perpetuals is increasing among traditional players, driven by 24/7 trading, higher leverage and deeper liquidity. As a result, we are doubling down on business development with TradFi brokers (fintechs and trading platforms). This is a long-term effort, but we believe it will be a key driver of sustainable growth.
We also have several important integrations with trading terminals coming up, both retail and institutional.
[Team]
Over the past quarter, we hired 3 new team members and are now a team of 14. As we move towards decentralising sequencing, we expect to grow to 18-20 people in the coming months.
[Market and exchange metrics]
Nothing unexpected: January saw all-time highs across key metrics, followed by a broader market slowdown in February and March. All Extended metrics are public: https://t.co/ApTdGaTEOM
From our perspective, short-term market conditions are less important than long-term trends. What matters is that the market we are building in continues to grow and there is room for new players. We strongly believe this is the case:
- price discovery for TradFi assets is likely to increasingly shift towards perpetuals. More on this here: https://t.co/PyefvylBIJ
- DeFi continues to gain share versus CeFi
- Regulatory clarity is improving across both the US and Europe
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Extended was among the first perp DEXs to launch commodities and index perps in Spring 2025.
The next step is equities.
Extended is launching its first six equity perpetual pairs. Equity perps have not yet truly scaled onchain for one reason: liquidity. Extended is building to solve it - with further updates to follow.