Ether.fi Turns Its App Into a Neobank With Stocks, Loans and a Cash Card
Ether.fi started as a liquid staking protocol. Its latest update looks a lot more like a bank app that happens to run on crypto rails.
The protocol’s non-custodial “Summer” app just added tokenized stock and metals trading through xStocks, full-portfolio borrowing via an integrated Aave market on Optimism at rates around 4%, and expanded fiat on- and off-ramps covering more than 30 currencies. Borrowed funds can be spent directly through the ether.fi Cash card, which now offers 3% cash back and no top-up fees, or transferred out elsewhere. The upgrade is live across web, iOS, and Android.
The protocol describes the positioning explicitly as trying to be “less crypto-forward” in pursuit of a broader mainstream audience, bundling investing, borrowing, and spending into one non-custodial app rather than three separate crypto-native products. Some features, including tokenized stock and metals trading, aren’t available yet in the US and a handful of other markets.
Betting that users want their crypto app to feel like a neobank, rather than the reverse, is a real wager on where adoption actually comes from next: not more crypto-native features, but fewer visible ones wrapped around the same DeFi rails. Whether “less crypto-forward” actually converts non-crypto users, or just repositions the same existing base, is the open question.
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