What Is Extended DEX? How to Use It After the Arc Migration and XTEN Announcement: Fees and Airdrop

Extended is a perpetual futures (perp) DEX run by a team of former Revolut staff. Alongside crypto, you can trade US stocks, gold and FX with the same USDC margin.

On October 22, 2026, it moved the chain it uses to settle trades from Starknet to Arc, a blockchain developed by Circle.

Weekly points distributions have already ended. A final distribution follows the end of the final competition running until November 3, and the native token XTEN is scheduled to launch in November.

Extended's trading screen shows a chart on the left, the order book in the middle and the order panel on the right. Once you connect a wallet, you can place orders from this screen.

Image: screenshot of Extended's trading screen (captured October 27, 2026)

Extended's team says its aim is to connect crypto trading infrastructure with traditional financial markets. In fact, on October 27, just over 40% of 24-hour volume came from RWA markets such as stocks, gold and FX. Rather than a crypto-only perp DEX, it is an exchange that is heavily used as a place to trade stock and gold price moves with USDC.

The company is led by Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, who served as Head of Crypto Operations at Revolut. In July 2026 it closed a $12.5 million strategic round led by eToro, with participation from Jump Crypto and others. eToro has also outlined a plan to build Extended's perp engine into Zengo, the self-custodial wallet it acquired.

For anyone who used Extended in its Starknet days, the biggest change is the settlement chain. On October 22, Extended moved settlement from Starknet to Arc, an L1 Circle developed for financial markets. The migration is positioned as the first phase of a strategic partnership with Circle.

About $120 million in deposits moved over, and accounts, positions, orders, trade history and points carried over automatically. Trading did not stop during the migration, and you log in with the same wallet and keys as before.

What you can deposit, on the other hand, has changed. USDC is handled as native USDC on Arc through Circle's transfer protocol (CCTP), and BTC collateral is now cirBTC, issued by Circle. Because Arc does not support USDT or wBTC, deposits of both were halted on every chain on October 8.

For sub-accounts that still held more than $1 of USDT or wBTC, neither converted nor withdrawn, by the October 21 deadline, orders were cancelled and positions were closed at the mark price with no fee. The USDT and wBTC were then returned to the login wallet; users with EVM wallets received them on Ethereum. If you log in after a long break and find your positions gone, this is probably what happened.

Fees depend on whether you add an order to the book (Maker, a limit order) or take an order already on the book (Taker, such as a market order).

For example, if you buy $10,000 of BTC with a market order and close it with a market order, fees come to $5 round trip. On stock or gold markets, the same amount costs $2. The rate for resting limit orders on the book is currently 0%, so placing orders you are not in a hurry to fill as limit orders lets you avoid fees.

Makers can also earn rebates, but only if they account for at least 0.5% of all limit-order volume filled on the exchange over the past 30 days. This is a condition built around market-maker-scale volume. For an individual, the real cost of each trade comes down to the Taker rate plus the price drift on market fills (slippage).

If you hold a position through the hourly settlement time, you also pay or receive funding, separate from trading fees. Funding keeps the perp price close to the spot price: when the rate is positive, longs (buyers) pay shorts (sellers), and when it is negative, the reverse.

For BTC-USD over the month from September 27 to October 27, the rate was positive at about 0.0013% per hour for 60% of the time and negative for about 12% of the time. At that level, holding a $10,000 long for a full day costs about $3, more than half the round-trip trading fee ($5). The rate is capped; for BTC and ETH the cap is 0.25% per hour ($25 per $10,000).

For anyone who has been collecting points hoping for an Extended airdrop, October's announcements changed the picture significantly.

What Was Announced About XTEN

On October 23, Extended announced that its native token's ticker would be XTEN and that it would launch in November 2026. 300 million of the 1 billion total XTEN supply (30%) is allocated to eligible participants in the points program.

No payment is required to receive it, and XTEN is set to arrive in your own self-custodial Arc wallet. A whitepaper aligned with the EU's crypto-asset regulation (MiCA) has been filed with the regulator and is scheduled to be published on October 31. The tokenomics, including the breakdown of the remaining 70%, will be shared after the whitepaper is published.

How to claim will be announced later, together with separate terms. The announcement post itself states that it is not a claim notice. Any site advertising an "XTEN claim" before Extended officially announces the process is not official.

Extended's Weekly Points Distributions Have Ended

Weekly points distributions ended on October 6. Of the 70 million points in the total allocation, about 69.24 million have already been distributed. The final distribution will take place after the ongoing Final Arc competition ends.

Points cannot be transferred or traded, and are described as something that may be taken into account in a future token distribution. How many XTEN one point will be worth, and how they will be distributed, has not yet been officially decided.

Final Arc Competition Rewards and Rules

You can still join the final competition, "The Final Arc Trading Competition," which runs until 00:00 UTC on November 3 (9:00 a.m. the same day in Japan). Rewards come in two forms, prize money and points, and both are provided by Extended itself. There is no guarantee they will count toward any Arc or Circle points or tokens.

Image: screenshot of the competition banner on Extended's trading screen (captured October 27, 2026)

Prize rankings are based on a score that multiplies PnL by volume and average open interest over the period. If your PnL is negative, your score is negative too, so simply increasing volume will not get you to the top.

Xpoints, by contrast, are shared out by volume and position size regardless of PnL. Volume counts crypto market-order fills in full, stock, gold and similar market-order fills at half, and limit-order fills at 10%. Accounts with raised API rate limits are not eligible.

In other words, earning more Xpoints means trading more with market orders or holding positions longer. Either way, fees and losses from price moves are locked in with every fill. If you hold positions longer, the hourly funding payments add to this. Meanwhile, the value of the points you receive has not yet been determined.

As of October 27, here is how Extended compares in size with the major perp DEXs.

Extended's volume is on par with GRVT and edgeX, and just under 7% of the market leader Hyperliquid. What stands out is how small its open interest is. It is the lowest of the five, and volume is about 2.6 times open interest. On Hyperliquid the same ratio is about 0.5, which suggests that on Extended, short-term trading that repeatedly buys and sells makes up a larger share than holding positions for long periods.

However, these figures are from during the Final Arc competition, which counts volume toward the score. Whether volume holds at the same level after November 3 will be the next clue to its strength once competition-driven trading is stripped out.

If you trade crypto in large size, Lighter, with about 4 times the volume, and Hyperliquid, with about 14 times, have far more orders on the other side.

Before you start, check whether you can use it from Japan.

Can You Use It From Japan?

Extended does not allow use from 14 countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and Japan is not on that list. The list can be updated at any time, so it is safest to check the official restricted-countries page before depositing. There is no identity verification (KYC); you create an account just by connecting a wallet and signing.

Connecting a Wallet and Creating an Account

You can use an EVM wallet such as MetaMask, or a Starknet wallet.

1. Open app.extended.exchange, click "Start Trading" in the top right and connect your wallet
2. The first signature creates your Extended account and a signing key for trading (the key is stored in your browser)
3. The second signature confirms you own the account, and you are ready to trade

One wallet can hold up to 10 trading accounts, each with its own separate margin.

Depositing on Extended

You can deposit three assets, USDC, cirBTC and ETH, and with an EVM wallet you can deposit and withdraw each from the following chains.

USDC deposits under $4 million per transaction are credited in about a minute, even from Ethereum or Arbitrum. If you created your account with a Starknet wallet, both deposits and withdrawals are limited to Starknet.

Placing an Order

1. Choose the market to trade from the market name (such as BTC-USD) in the top left of the screen
2. In the order panel, choose "Market" or "Limit." A limit order that rests on the book and waits to fill gets the free Maker rate
3. Set the leverage in the top right of the panel (10x by default for BTC-USD) to the multiple you want
4. Enter the size in BTC or USD. If needed, set take-profit and stop-loss prices under "Take profit / Stop loss," then press buy or sell

The minimum order size for BTC-USD is 0.0001 BTC, so you can try an order on BTC from about $8.

The higher the leverage, the smaller the price move that triggers liquidation. On Extended, liquidation begins when your account equity (USDC balance plus unrealized PnL, etc.) falls below the total maintenance margin of your positions. For BTC-USD, maintenance margin is 1% of position value for positions up to $4 million. If your account holds only the margin for that position, a 10x long becomes eligible for liquidation after a drop of about 9%, and a 50x long after a drop of about 1%.

Margin is shared across all positions in an account, so unrealized losses in a different market also move you closer to liquidation. To isolate the impact of liquidation, hold positions in separate trading accounts. You get two warnings (margin calls) before liquidation, but the only way to avoid it is to add margin yourself or reduce your position.

Withdrawing From Extended

USDC withdrawals are capped at $10 million per transaction ($4 million on BNB Chain) and arrive in about 5 minutes. However, the amount you can actually withdraw at any moment depends on your account's margin status, separately from the per-transaction cap.

Depositing Into the Vault

The Vault lets you deposit USDC to earn yield. When you deposit, you receive a share called XVS, and you can use 90% of its value as trading margin as well.

Image: screenshot of Extended's Vault screen (captured October 27, 2026)

You can deposit from as little as $5, and each deposit cannot be withdrawn for 24 hours afterward. XVS cannot be withdrawn off the exchange; it can only be moved between sub-accounts. If you keep it in the same account you trade from, XVS is sold before your positions during a liquidation.

The yield comes from liquidation fees, interest on Extended's internal lending and a share of trading fees. On October 27, the screen showed a trailing 30-day APR of about 6.6%. Yield is not guaranteed, however, and if the Vault absorbs liquidation losses during a sharp market move, you can lose some or all of the principal you deposited.

Extended is a perp DEX where you can trade crypto and traditional financial markets with the same USDC margin, and since October 22 it has settled on Circle's Arc. Weekly points distributions have ended; next come the Final Arc competition until November 3, the final distribution after that, and the launch of XTEN scheduled for November. While 30% of total supply is set aside for points participants, the conversion from points and how to claim are still undecided. Estimating how much you will receive will therefore have to wait until the whitepaper is published on October 31 or later.

Sources

1. Extended official docs, "Migration from Starknet to Arc" (2026)
2. Extended official X, "XTEN ticker announcement" (2026)
3. Extended official X, "XTEN at a glance" (2026)
4. Extended official X, "Settlement on Arc goes live" (2026)
5. Extended official docs, "Points Program" (2026)
6. Extended official docs, "The Final Arc Trading Competition" (2026)
7. Extended official docs, "Trading Fees and Rebates" (2026)
8. Extended official docs, "Overview & Vision" (2026)
9. Extended official API, "markets" (2026)
10. Extended official docs, "Account Creation" (2026)
11. Extended official docs, "Deposits and Withdrawals" (2026)
12. Extended official docs, "Restricted Countries" (2026)
13. Extended official docs, "Terms of Use" (2026)
14. Extended official docs, "Vault" (2026)
15. CoinGecko derivatives exchange ranking (2026)
16. The Block, "eToro leads strategic round" (2026)
17. The Block, "Perp DEX from former Revolut team" (2025)
18. Extended official docs, "Funding Payments" (2026)
19. Extended official API, "BTC-USD funding history, September 27 to October 27" (2026)
20. Extended official docs, "Liquidation Logic" (2026)
21. Extended official docs, "Margin Schedule" (2026)
22. Extended official docs, "Trading Accounts and Modes" (2026)