eToro CEO: Tokenization Is the Bridge to the Future of Finance

The Main Speaker’s Hall at Finance Magnates’ Barcelona Trading Conference was packed as Yoni Assia, CEO of eToro, began his speech on the company’s visions and plans for the future.

The speech opened with some figures on eToro’s growth--the platform has onboarded 1 million new users so far this year, resulting in 11 million total users on the exchange.

And the company is continuing to expand its geographical reach. “We’re regulated across Asia, Europe, the UK, and recently launched in the US,” he said.

Further, “in the past three years, we’ve seen over 500% growth in the company,” he said, a lot of it coming from the cryptocurrency industry. This is why the company has made the decision to further its reach into the crypto realm.

Assia explained that in the several years following the company’s establishment in 2007, it had a small identity crisis: “it took 3-4 years for us to realize we’re a fintech company.”

Assia continued to say that the company has been pushing the envelope since its inception. “We started with creating a visual trading platform,” he said. “We created a couple of patents to show how you can simplify the access to the markets.”

Now, the company is focusing its energy toward linking the crypto world with the world of traditional finance.

“The traditional world of finance and the new world of finance doesn’t really connect,” Assia said. We believe that Blockchain is going to be the basis of new finance, and we believe that we will see trillions of dollars will move into the blockchain space.”

“We hope to build the bridge,” he continued. “That bridge is tokenization.”

Assia explained that eToroX is particularly well-suited for this task because it is an exchange for crypto assets as well as for tokenized assets that represent traditional financial assets - and tokenized assets.

“We see limitless opportunities around tokenizing things like art, property, and intellectual property - [things] that aren’t traditionally traded on any kind of exchange at all.”