@rf_extended

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.

What's unique about Extended’s native money market. With multi-asset collateral now live, @extendedapp users can deposit ETH and wBTC (with USDT and EURC coming shortly) and use them as margin to trade perpetuals. When a user's USDC balance goes negative, borrowing is triggered automatically with the Extended Vault serving as the primary lender. The key difference is how borrowing rates work. Traditional crypto money markets typically operate through isolated lending pools, where interest rates depend only on utilisation of a specific pool. Collateral risk is managed separately through haircuts and borrowing limits. Extended's setup is fundamentally different. The Vault lends against multiple collateral assets simultaneously, while borrowing demand emerges dynamically from unrealised PnL. In this environment static global borrowing caps are not practical. As a result borrowing rates depend on two dimensions: - overall vault utilisation - utilisation against a specific collateral asset. This means borrowing USDC against ETH can be cheaper than borrowing against BTC if system-wide exposure to ETH is lower. The second layer is how borrowing is allocated. When a user has multiple collateral assets, the system automatically routes borrowing through the lowest-rate collateral first, minimising the effective cost of capital. Example: if a user has a negative USDC balance backed by both ETH and wBTC collateral, and ETH borrow rates are lower than BTC, the system will allocate borrowing against ETH first before routing the remainder against BTC, continuously reducing the effective cost of capital. The result is a system where: - users automatically receive the cheapest borrowing allocation across their collateral portfolio - Extended maintains granular risk control over exposure to different collateral assets backing borrowed USDC - vault depositors earn additional yield directly from trading activity.

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.