ether.fi Adds Tokenized Stocks, New Fiat Rails And Aave-Backed Borrowing

ether.fi is adding tokenized stock trading, portfolio-wide borrowing and global fiat transfers to its app, moving the liquid staking protocol further into retail banking products. The company announced the changes Thursday as part of what it calls its Summer release.

The launch continues a shift ether.fi has been making all year. The protocol removed restaking from weETH last week, leaving less than 1% of its assets restaked with EigenLayer, and has spent 2026 building the card, credit and payments stack it first described as a "defibank" in April 2025.

Staking is still almost all of the balance sheet. ether.fi's staking arm holds $3.34 billion, DefiLlama data shows. Its Optimism borrowing market holds $160.2 million against $23.3 million of active loans, up 11.8% over 30 days, and the vault backing the Cash card holds $124.5 million.

"Our goal is to replace the traditional bank for most users and give them tools and benefits that were previously available only to institutions and high-net-worth individuals," ether.fi CEO Mike Silagadze said in a statement.

Borrowing Against Everything

The release says an integrated Aave market on Optimism lets users borrow against their entire portfolio at rates "currently around 4%" to spend on the Cash card or buy other assets. USDC on Aave v3 Optimism carries a borrow rate of 3.82%, Aavescan data shows.

The dedicated Aave instance ether.fi has asked for is still in governance. ether.fi filed a temp check on July 1 to deploy an Aave V4 whitelabel instance on OP Mainnet that it would operate end-to-end, and it passed. An ARFC followed on July 14, setting out next steps that require an AIP vote for final confirmation.

Terms in the proposal give Aave's DAO 20% of instance revenue, which ether.fi projects at $1 million to $1.2 million a year, with up to $175 million in assets at launch and a $500 million target by year-end. Delegates posting as Abel189 and MconnectDAO gave conditional support on July 26. MconnectDAO cited reputational risk to the DAO, collateral factors of up to 95% on complex collateral types, and limited onchain accountability for the independent risk admin, and asked for a documented performance review before license renewal.

The ARFC states that ether.fi Cash currently runs on a custom, non-pooled borrow market on OP Mainnet, with about $25 million in active borrows across more than 16 collateral assets. The release does not say whether the market now live in the app is that one, the existing Aave v3 deployment, or the instance still in governance.

Kraken Owns The Stocks

Tokenized equities in the app come through xStocks, alongside metals and crypto assets, with holdings kept in an ether.fi vault protected by social recovery.

xStocks is issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited and distributed through Payward entities. Kraken acquired Backed Finance in December 2025. Its documentation lists availability on "Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Mantle, TON, Ink, and other EVM-compatible networks," without naming Optimism, where ether.fi's card and credit products settle. xStocks passed $500 million in onchain volume in August 2025, a figure analysts at the time called symbolic against the volumes routinely cleared on Solana decentralized exchanges.

Stock and metals trading is not available in the United States and certain other markets, according to the release. Everything else ships to all users Thursday.

Thirty Currencies, Named Accounts

New on- and off-ramps support more than 30 additional currencies and payment methods including Cash App, Apple Pay and Interac, with named accounts for deposits. The Cash card pays 3% back on purchases at every tier, with monthly caps of $2,000 for Core, $10,000 for Luxe and $50,000 for Pinnacle, plus an invite-only VIP tier, per ether.fi's terms. ATM withdrawals carry a 2% fee at every tier.

Half A Million Members

ether.fi describes itself as the first and largest non-custodial crypto neobank, with more than half a million members and a $2 billion annual transaction run-rate.

Onchain data supports part of that. ether.fi's card has settled $723.4 million across 9.07 million transactions and 98,683 addresses since November 2024, Paymentscan shows, with July setting a record at $100.3 million, or about 13% of the $748.7 million in sector-wide card volume Paymentscan tracked that month. That pace annualizes to roughly $1.2 billion, below the $2 billion the company cites. The gap would close if the run-rate counts swaps, deposits and withdrawals alongside card spending.

ether.fi last disclosed user figures in February 2026, when it put accounts at 300,000 and active cards at 70,000 and total spending since launch at $265 million. Paymentscan publishes no custodial classification, and the "largest non-custodial" ranking is ether.fi's own.

Buybacks Written Into Contracts

The release introduces programmatic ETHFI buybacks written into protocol contracts and funded from every product and revenue line. ether.fi has run buyback programs since 2024, including a withdrawal-revenue program approved in April 2025, after which the token doubled the following month, and a $50 million treasury program approved in November 2025 that triggers only while ETHFI trades below $3. Current documentation describes weekly buybacks from eETH withdrawal fees and monthly buybacks from Stake, Liquid and Cash revenue, with proceeds going to sETHFI holders.

ETHFI trades at $0.37, down 3.2% over 24 hours and up 1.3% on the week, with a market capitalization of $361.8 million, CoinGecko data shows. The token is 95.6% below its March 2024 high of $8.53. Ether trades at $1,888.

ether.fi is hosting an analyst call on the release Thursday at 10 a.m. ET.