Rhino.fi x Extended $1B processed through the Rhino Activation Stack

Turning cross-chain deposits into instant trading power

Extended is now the fastest growing perps dex, with $180b traded and no sign of slowing down. And as a core infrastructure partner, we’ve processed over $1b of deposits/withdrawals through Rhino.fi in less than 12months.

Thats over 300k txs processed, in under ~10seconds (on average), monitored 24/7.

When a perps dex is growing TVL fast and onboarding new users, the bottleneck is capital activation: moving onto the platform, instantly ready to trade, even when markets are ultra volatile.

We built the activation layer for Extended that makes that flow instant. Users can move funds in and out from anywhere and start trading without delays.

Extended's growth story

Extended is built by an ex-Revolut team and operates as a high performance perps dex on Starknet, with a roadmap built around unified margin and cross-asset collateral. They've shipped a broad product surface, perps across both crypto and TradFi assets and positioned themselves around speed, composability, and onchain settlement.

The growth is real. At the scale Extended operates ($40b over the past 30days) cross-chain deposit infrastructure stops being nice to have. It becomes mission-critical.

That creates one clear requirement: deposits can't feel like a separate journey. Capital needs to land activated, immediately usable for trading, not sitting idle in a wallet waiting for a manual step.

Build vs. partner: the real calculation

Extended could have built their own cross-chain activation layer. Teams do. But the honest cost is significant: integrating and maintaining multiple bridging and messaging systems, managing liquidity and collateral across chains, building monitoring and alerting, continuously optimising routes as conditions change, and operating all of it 24/7 through volatile markets (exactly when volume spikes and exactly when infrastructure tends to break).

The decision to partner with Rhino wasn't about capability. It was about what Extended wanted to be experts in. They chose trading infrastructure. We handle the rest.

"From day one, Rhino has acted as more than a bridge provider - they've been an infrastructure partner. Their Activation Stack allowed us to focus on building the best perpetual trading experience on Starknet, without becoming experts in multi-chain liquidity management. As our volumes scaled, Rhino scaled with us." — Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, CEO of Extended

The solution: the Rhino Activation Stack

We aim to provide Extended with deposits-and-withdrawals-as-a-service, which means not just providing a cross-chain API or bridge, but providing the full operational infrastructure and support to activate user funds ready to trade on Extended. The Rhino Activation Stack is a single integration that abstracts the underlying rails and evolves continuously as routes, chains, and conditions change.

What we built together

The first piece was multi-rail routing tuned for both everyday transfers and very large ones. In addition to our instantly available liquidity pools via our in-house solver, we integrated underlying protocols (CCTP, Starkgate, Layer0) to handle individual transfers up to $10M, with routing optimised over time based on live conditions and real flow data from Extended's users. The result is a single smart service for cross chain access and far less friction getting in and out including during periods when onchain infrastructure is under stress.

The second, and more important piece, was deposit-to-vault activation. Getting funds to StarkNet was never the final goal. The goal was making sure that when someone bridges, they don't just receive funds, they are instantly deposited into the relevant Extended vault, ready to trade. That's the difference between a bridge integration and an activation integration. One tells you funds arrived. The other makes them usable.

We also worked over time on cost optimisation across complex routing paths. Onchain deposits can involve multiple hops depending on origin, destination, and live conditions. Rather than leaving Extended to constantly re-engineer routes or explain to users why deposits are expensive today, we absorbed that work into the stack.

Finally, because perps volume spikes exactly when volatility spikes (and that's when infrastructure tends to break) we built serious operational muscle around round-the-clock monitoring, performance and load testing, and resilient transaction broadcasting across chains.

The result

Extended’s users have now deposited and withdrawn $1B through Rhino. For us, that number isn't just volume. It's proof that the Activation Stack model holds up when a product is genuinely scaling.

"Solving multi-chain capital activation at scale is one of the hardest problems in crypto infrastructure. Extended has been an incredible partner in pushing our product to handle larger flows, higher volatility, and deeper integration." — Will Harborne, CEO of rhino.fi

What comes next

This milestone is one marker on a longer roadmap. We're continuing to build deeper activation paths beyond simple deposits, more vault-aware and intent-aware routing, and further reliability improvements as all our clients scale into higher volumes and peak-load conditions.

If you're building an exchange, trading app, neobank, or fintech product and want to offer instant cross-chain deposits without building the infrastructure yourself, the Rhino Activation Stack is designed for exactly that.