Interview - Yoni Assia (Co-founder & CEO of etoro)

"When you're too early, you get scars from being too early"

Yoni Assia has been early to almost everything, which in his telling is not the compliment it sounds like.

He made his first trade at thirteen and started writing code the same year. He co-founded etoro in 2007 with his brother, a year before the global financial crisis gave him the problem he has spent the following two decades trying to solve: a financial system that, to someone trained in computer science, simply stopped responding. He bought his first bitcoin in 2010. By 2012 he was co-authoring the Colored Coins white paper, an early attempt to issue other assets on top of the Bitcoin protocol, alongside a then-teenage Vitalik Buterin, who wrote part of it sitting in etoro's offices and was paid in bitcoin. Colored Coins is now generally read as one of the first serious attempts at tokenisation, and as a direct ancestor of both non-fungible tokens and the argument that produced Ethereum.

None of that made etoro a crypto company. For most of the following decade it made etoro a company caught between crypto conviction and institutional resistance . Assia is unusually candid about the internal dilemma: a board that told him to sell the bitcoin treasury and stop touching it, two of the world's largest banks giving the firm thirty days to move hundreds of millions of dollars, and a strategic reflex of retreating to equities every time a crypto winter arrived. He now names that reflex as the reason etoro underbuilt in decentralised finance.

The company he runs today is a different proposition. etoro listed on Nasdaq in May 2025 and reported $20.1B of assets under administration as of May 31.¹ In April 2026 it announced its first acquisition as a public company, paying roughly $70M, mostly in cash, for Zengo, a keyless self-custody wallet built on multi-party computation cryptography.² Zengo will sit outside etoro's regulated perimeter, with users interacting directly with third-party protocols, which makes it less a product line than a statement about where Assia thinks the next decade of the business happens.

We spoke to him about all of it, and about what money actually is when you have spent thirty-two years watching it move.

The Node: You are a Bitcoin early adopter, which most people don't know. You also co-wrote a white paper with Vitalik Buterin about Bitcoin, not Ethereum. It was about Colored Coins, arguably the first instance of non-fungible tokens. And you had some notable readers: Charlie Lee of Litecoin used Colored Coins as well. What brought you to digital assets at that point?

Yoni Assia: I founded etoro in 2007, so we founded it pre-crypto, but also pre-global financial crisis. And during the crisis, as a young entrepreneur, I saw something that shocked me, because I come from a computer science background. I thought the financial system worked the way you would expect it to work on modern computers, on the modern internet.

What happened in the global financial crisis is that you were actually worried the bank was going to be closed tomorrow. You couldn't connect to the bank at all. We had money in the banks. We had raised money from investors. We had already launched etoro, which was connected to trading in capital markets. And nothing worked. Everything stopped. It was as if somebody pulled the plug and everybody was in the dark.

That led me to start thinking the system doesn't work, because the system needs to be like the internet, 24/7. And more than that, the reason for the global financial crisis was that money is not transparent. Nobody actually understands how money moves.

I started trading when I was thirteen and developing when I was thirteen, so I have now been thirty-two years in the global markets. As an entrepreneur, I was shocked at how broken the system is. The banks are still working on T+1, on the same concept as my grandfather, who built a bank in the 60s without computers. That system also worked on T+1. So since the 60s, the system has worked essentially the same way. ETLs, reconciliation.

Then I started writing about what eventually became our non-profit, GoodDollar, and about the need for a new financial system that works like the internet.

A universal basic income.

That was pre-UBI thinking. It was really a description of something similar to a blockchain: you need a connected database where people can see transactions moving from one place to another, so the invisible hand can become the visible hand.

And then Bitcoin found you.

In 2010 my brother, who was my co-founder, sent me an article about Bitcoin and said this really sounds like what you wrote about in GoodDollar, you should check it out. I remember downloading the Bitcoin back then and mining a bit. Just the fact that from the terminal I created a wallet, and then created another wallet, and sent money back and forth. Back then there were faucets too, if you remember those. And I thought, this is how finance should work. Transactions settled online on a ledger that works 24/7.

Two confirmations and it's done.

And it's done. I thought, this needs to replace everything in finance. This is how finance should work. And that was sixteen years ago.

I started writing on Bitcointalk, which back then was the only place everybody in Bitcoin was, including Satoshi originally, and Adam Back, and everybody. It got a lot of reactions. That was really the early stages of thinking about tokenisation.

Then I wrote the Colored Coins whitepaper. The concept was very simple: how do you issue euros or dollars on top of the Bitcoin protocol? So in parallel we had one track, which was how do we tokenise assets and how would that work on top of the Bitcoin network. And on another track we actually started buying bitcoin at etoro. We bought something like 3,000 to 4,000 bitcoin, about 3,500 or 3,800. So in parallel we thought, we have to list Bitcoin on etoro. That was a struggle, because this was 2012.

While we were writing the colored coins paper, Vitalik came and sat in eToro's offices to write it. We paid him in bitcoin. There is still an open Google group from back then where you can see Charlie Lee and Vitalik and a lot of people from the industry talking to one another about tokenisation and colored coins. You have people from Tether there who evaluated doing USDT originally on colored coins.

And the company itself?

Interestingly, while the company was progressing towards Bitcoin, my board was obviously very afraid of crypto. They said: you should sell it, don't touch it, it's dangerous, it's defocusing. There was a real struggle inside eToro, where the board's position was that this is not real money, this is not something you should deal with.

So everything we did in Colored Coins, we said, fine, it's open source, it's for the community, it's not etoro, unrelated to etoro at that stage. And a lot of forks came out of it.

Vitalik started back then what became the Bitcoin maximalism debate, because he said you need to build something different for tokenisation. And everybody around, all the Bitcoin people, said no, that's blasphemy, you need only one chain, only one chain should rule them all. And the rest is history. He went off with someone else who was at etoro at the same time and founded Ethereum with Joseph Lubin and others.

We eventually launched Bitcoin on etoro in 2013. It took us a year or a year and a half to explain to regulators exactly what it is, how we price it, and what Mt. Gox is. And that was a month or two before Mt. Gox collapsed, so that was my first experience of a crypto winter.

That is our history in Bitcoin. But I have always known, from the first time I saw Bitcoin, that this is the future of finance. The future of finance is 24/7 connected ledgers that offer transferability to all the participants in the network. So I am a very big believer in the path now towards the tokenisation of all assets.

Next year is eToro's twentieth anniversary. 2007 was not quite the beginning of the internet, but roughly the beginning of Web 2.0. How do you reflect on those twenty years? You could say eToro grew alongside the internet itself.

I have been a tech lover since I was very young, so I always say there were three technologies, now four. I remember the first time connecting to the internet and thinking, this is the future. That was around 95 or 96. The first time I made a trade on the internet I thought, capital markets are amazing. Then Bitcoin. And now, of course, AI.

We saw the social element of the web emerging, and that is how we built what became the largest social investment network, where people not only trade but share their trades and other people can see them.

Since then we have seen constant change in technology. It was a desktop app. We were then the first company to launch a web trader, then the first trading company to move to a mobile-first approach. Before that, introducing Bitcoin in 2013. Then using AI in 2017 to select the top traders on etoro to copy. Every time there is an interesting technology we try to be at the forefront of implementing it for our customers, with the same vision and mission of helping them grow their knowledge and wealth in capital markets.

Who are your customers?

Our actual users are wider than this, but the core is Gen Y, roughly 25 to 45 year olds, who twenty years ago were 25 and are now 45. People who are tech-savvy and want to invest in the markets. They know they want to buy stocks, or we are helping them educate themselves on the importance of buying stocks, and now crypto, and now commodities, whatever is interesting and relevant at that point in time. And they understand that using technology makes them smarter and better investors.

So the core audience of eToro is: I want to understand how to manage money, I want to educate myself and be smart about how I manage and invest it.

And there is a range of products now.

We are going more and more towards a super app approach. We provide trading, now 24/7, which I love because it is capital markets copying crypto markets. We offer investing by copying the Pro Investors on etoro, 5,000 of the smartest people I have ever met who manage money on the platform while others copy them. So you can find someone with 30% average returns over twelve years and say, I want to copy them with $5,000.

We have our Smart Portfolios, including with CoinShares, and our partners also include BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree and ARK. A lot of the best asset managers build their own strategies on etoro, and our customers can invest in those strategies. We have the Napoleon X strategy that CoinShares brought, running on etoro for maybe six or seven years, which has done 1,300% since inception and has 10,000 people copying it with about $40M*.

So we provide the range for trading, which is shorter term and sometimes leveraged, to investing, which is medium term, to savings, where we have our ISA in the UK, superannuation in Australia and now life insurance in France. And we have our banking products, where you get a virtual bank account, a Visa debit card, lounge access, and the benefits of being a Club member. As our customers grow with us, we grow our product depth, to eventually replace their financial services providers.

You are genuinely disruptive, integrating every new technology. What is your relationship with banks, given that in the end you compete with them?

In crypto there was always this tension. It's an interesting story. When you were early to crypto, a lot of your bank accounts were closed.

We already had a big non-crypto business. Then suddenly the crypto business was booming, in 2017. We had hundreds of millions of dollars in two of the largest banks in the world, and they simply called us and said, your accounts are closed in 30 days, take your money out. And we didn't have so many banks.

At that point we had crypto winter number two, in 2018, and we really had to distance ourselves, to balance the crypto part of etoro a bit, because we realised it could endanger the entire business. In the earlier winter it had been clear to everybody that Bitcoin was dead, that it was a fad, hype, irrelevant. In 2018 the crypto community was all in and stayed all in, but the banking community was really tough. They were closing accounts for all the crypto companies, everywhere.

So we had to double down on the non-crypto part and make sure that, as a regulated company coming from TradFi first, everything we did in crypto was super regulated, compliant, anti-money laundering. From 2018 to 2021 we had a lot of banks shutting down customers' ability to deposit into etoro, which is very bad for the business. It is also very bad that banks were doing it. But that was how banks viewed crypto, and how they thought they should close their banking system to it.

And after 2021?

Everything started changing. Visa, Mastercard, Goldman Sachs all worked out that they can't kill it, so let's somehow join it. By then we were already building relationships, and etoro had grown from 300 to 600 million dollars in revenues. Our customer assets had grown to $20B,¹ which meant we no longer had hundreds of millions but billions of dollars in banks. Then during the IPO you build your banking franchise.

At that point it was already clear: now we're overbanked. We were underbanked, fearing for our life, and moved to overbanked, where everybody wants to bank eToro, everybody wants to open accounts for us, and we have to feed the mouths and make sure the funds are distributed correctly.

Gradually we are seeing more and more banks realise that their real core competency is lending. That is their business and it will remain their business. Their balance sheet lets them take deposits and lend against those deposits for twenty years. Mortgages are very hard to disrupt. The lending business and the balance sheet business are very hard to disrupt.

And I think they understand more and more that they want to use innovators like etoro, and others in the space, to offer better products and a better user experience to their customers. They definitely understand that they have to be on-chain, and thinking on-chain, and enabling their customers to buy bitcoin or digital assets, to remain relevant.

Speaking of on-chain, you mentioned that you have acquired the Zengo wallet. Does that signal a move by etoro to go fully on-chain?

Yes, 100%. I have always had a dream of moving all of etoro on chain, since 2012. But you also always need to make sure you're not too early. When you're too early, you get scars from being too early, and then you're a bit too late.

I think the fact that we have been in this space for a period of time, and experienced the 2018 winter and the 2022 winter, matters. Every time a winter hit we said, let's focus on capital markets, on the stock markets, let's add more stocks to etoro. And we didn't do a good enough job of building the DeFi part of the business.

Now it's very clear that DeFi on its own is a parallel universe to TradFi, and there is a connectivity layer growing as well. But the people in DeFi are different. Sometimes they're the same, like me: I would have both a Zengo wallet and an etoro wallet, and I love experimenting with every new product coming out in crypto, and of course I hold my own stocks and crypto on etoro.

But people who are more crypto-savvy, first of all, there are many more of them. Second, the world has grown. There are 400 million people now with crypto assets,³ and there are actually more people with crypto assets today than with direct ownership of stocks.

So we want the ability to let our users experience everything in DeFi. Everything in DeFi starts with owning your own crypto, but in a safe way, with Zengo. Then swaps: instead of the 200 coins on etoro, customers will be able to trade a million coins on Zengo. Then lending. I use Aave, I'm looking at Morpho. Lending is a big thing, especially when you think about tokenised assets. And then two of the newest parts of decentralised finance, which are perpetuals on tokenised assets, and prediction markets.

We eventually want to offer those services both on TradFi and on DeFi, and we believe that when you have both you can create a better ecosystem for your customers.

Do you expect everything to get tokenised?

Yes. I think by 2040 we will see probably $100 trillion on-chain, at least. And you know what, it's probably going to be even sooner. From experience, I like to push things forward in order to be right.

But now you have the US SEC chair and the CFTC chair saying out loud that they are going to move US capital markets on chain. So US capital markets moving on-chain is $200 trillion.⁴ And they have actually started doing it. They approved the DTCC to work with blockchain companies to tokenise assets. And they are talking not only about stocks but about bonds. They are already making USDC regulated, so stablecoins, which are already a big part, are going to be in the trillions. It's inevitable.

And then you're talking about new opportunities: private markets, real estate, secondaries of private companies. All of those are going to emerge, and all of them are at different stages of infancy. The reason they are still in their infancy is that regulation is still a gap. How you connect real world assets on chain in a way that is regulated, compliant, legal and trusted is still a challenge in 2026, which is surprising.

What is money to you?

A medium of exchange. Actually, when I look at money, it's like the definitions people use about Bitcoin. It's a medium of exchange and it's a store of value. And as a store of value it is really a price formation indicator. So I highly appreciate money in capital markets as price formation. And price formation for what? For the value you created.

Obviously, like many people in crypto, I'm a libertarian and I believe in free markets. In free markets, dollars represent the value a person potentially created that is positive in the world. That's in a perfect system, so it doesn't always work.

But I think that is money, and money will have different forms. We are coming from a world where money is very flat and one dimensional, into a world where money and value represent a lot of different values and have many, many dimensions. Which is why I'm so excited about everything that comes out, whether it's NFTs or prediction markets or any of the innovations I see, because I see the value created by them.

Sources

¹ etoro Group, May 31 2026 results, assets under administration of $20.1B

² etoro Group, "etoro acquires Zengo to expand self-custodial crypto capabilities", 15 April 2026

³ Crypto.com's Crypto Market Sizing Report put global ownership at 741 million for 2025, and Triple-A at 562 million for 2024

⁴ Assia's figure as spoken. It sits above the roughly $120 trillion to $130 trillion combined value of US listed equities and the US bond market, and above the $100 trillion global on-chain figure he gives earlier in the same answer

* As of April 2026. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Capital at risk.