EToro

With offices in London, Cyprus, Israel, and Hoboken, New Jersey, eToro is a 'social investment network' that combines trading currencies, commodities, indices and equities as well as cryptocurrencies with social networking features. "Social" trading or investing entails trading platform customers allowing other customers to view their transactions in order for them to replicate others' successful trading strategies. 
eToro, based in Israel, is not a big player in the U.S. crypto market. It has only 240,000 customer accounts compared to Coinbase's 100 million. It managed $11.3bn of customer assets across 3 million accounts as of March 2024.
In January 2025, the Financial Times reported that eToro had filed with the SEC for a U.S. IPO. It plans to list in New York rather than London, even though its largest market is in the UK. The filing, which is confidential, could value the business at more than $5bn, FT said.
The company first attempted to go public in 2021 through a $10.4bn deal with a blank check company. Its CEO, Yoni Assia, said that eToro ended that attempt in 2022 after the boom in blank check vehicles known as Spacs imploded. At that time, eToro was valued at $3.5bn in a 2023 funding round that raised $250mn from investors including SoftBank and Ion Group. 
== Products and Services ==
=== Digital Asset Trading ===
As of September 12, 2024, in the U.S., eToro is only allowed to offer trading in three digital assets: bitcoin (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH) and ether (ETH) because of a settlement agreement with the SEC. eToro previously offered trading to U.S. residents in bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ripple, Dash, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, Cardano, IOTA, Stellar, EOS, NEO, ZEC and, as of October 30, 2018, Binance Coins (BNB). EToro listed Dogecoin on May 3, 2021, tweeting, "Much good boy! Such happy!" in the spirit of the shiba inu meme cryptocurrency. U.S. residents can access trading only on eToro's cryptocurrency markets. 
The listing of BNB drew attention from observers who noted that, unlike other cryptocurrencies listed on eToro, BNB would likely be considered a security token for purposes of regulation by UK and other financial market regulators.
=== Market data ===
eToro also collects and publishes market data, which is regularly cited in news outlets like Forbes, CNBC, Finance Magnates, Bloomberg, and Fortune.
According to a survey conducted by eToro's U.S. division in January 2019, there is significant demand for greater education for digital assets - how to trade them, store them, and how they work. The survey found that 69 percent of all respondents said they were interested in learning more about digital assets, including 97 percent of the millennial and gen-x respondents. 75 percent of respondents reported that they were not knowledgeable about digital assets - 20 percent of those who reported this way also reported that they were holders of digital assets.
In August 2019, the London Economic reported that according to data from eToro, there is evidence showing that retail investors opened more gold and bitcoin positions whenever news broke of escalation in the trade war between the United States and China. Because gold is often treated as a store of value in times of geopolitical and global economic instability, they said, these data indicate that retail investors are seeing bitcoin more and more as a similar store of value. UK eToro analyst Simon Peters said that this may be because bitcoin shares similar characteristics to gold - "there will only ever be a finite amount in existence (21 million), it’s decentralised, its price is not affected by inflation and it has the added benefit over gold of lower storage costs.” Peters said that three factors are impeding mainstream acceptance of bitcoin as a more solid hedging tool: price volatility, alleged market manipulation, and the vulnerability of cryptocurrency trading platforms, as well as individual holders of digital assets, to hacking attacks.
=== Staking ===
eToro supports staking for multiple digital assets. Staking is the practice by which the owner of a digital asset that is based on a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism delegates their voting rights into "staking pools." The more digital assets are in a pool, the higher the chance that the pool will produce a block on the digital asset's blockchain, conferring the rewards for doing so to everyone who has vested a stake into the pool. 
In October 2020, eToro announced it would launch staking services with no fees later that month. The first digital assets to be supported, according to the announcement, were ADA and TRON.
== Company History ==
 
eToro launched its first full version of social trading on CopyTrader, one of its trading platforms, on June 27, 2011. A key feature was its OpenBook network, which let users see what trades other users were making and how they were ranked. Within certain account-based limits, customers could copy trades made by successful traders. According to eToro co-founder Yoni Assia, OpenBook provided customers with a way to learn about currency trading and the eToro platform. Before that, eToro offered a social aspect to its currency trading by encouraging its members to share information and opinions about market movements through a private online chat platform. 
In January 2014, eToro launched trading in cryptocurrencies, limited to contracts for difference on bitcoin.
In March 2019, eToro released a statement saying that it would acquire the research and development team of Danish blockchain firm Firmo in order to "accelerate growth of tokenized financial assets."
On June 12, 2024, eToro announced a partnership with X to publish a series of financial education content on X, through livestream events, video on demand and audio Spaces. The program was set to roll out across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UAE and the U.S. The partnership is in addition to the renewed agreement for title sponsorship for X’s real-time Cashtag feature, which provides charting and data from TradingView on a wide range of stocks, cryptos and other assets alongside the ability to invest with eToro. 
On September 12, 2024, eToro USA agreed to settle charges with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it operated as an unregistered broker and clearing agency and that it facilitated trading in some cryptocurrency assets that are securities. The agreement requires eToro to pay a $1.5 million fine and limits the company to trading only three digital assets: bitcoin (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH) and ether (ETH).
==Key People==
*Yoni Assia - CEO and Co-Founder
*Ronen Assia - Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder
*Shalom Berkovitz - CFO
*Avi Sela - COO
==References==
Category: exchange
Category: Trading
Category: digital assets
Category: security token
Category: CryptoMarketsWiki
Category: MarketsWiki Page of the Day