Co-founder and CEO of EToro Yoni Assia Talks TradeZero Deal

Summary

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Bloomberg Talks: Yoni Assia, Co-founder and CEO of eToro on the TradeZero Deal

Date: August 12, 2026
Host: Bloomberg
Guest: Yoni Assia, Co-founder and CEO, eToro

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Yoni Assia, Co-founder and CEO of the global social trading platform eToro, discusses the company’s acquisition of Brooklyn-based brokerage TradeZero, their strategic push into the U.S. market, advancements in AI and agentic trading, expansion into prediction markets, and the broader outlook for crypto trading. The conversation provides insights on how eToro is transforming access to global financial products, leveraging agent-powered trading, and positioning itself as a financial super app for the next generation of investors.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reaction to eToro’s Q2 Performance and Market Sentiment

[00:37–01:55]

• eToro’s shares declined 13% following missed crypto revenue estimates, despite company-reported 9% YoY growth in both top line and bottom line.
• The U.S. remains a relatively small market for eToro, and the TradeZero acquisition (up to $231M) is seen as strategically important for growing the company’s U.S. presence.

Notable Quote:

"I can control the business. Q2 was another beat quarter. Great 9% growth year over year of both top line and bottom line... Huge roadmap coming in across AI in the company."
— Yoni Assia, 01:12

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2. Rationale and Strategy Behind the TradeZero Acquisition

[01:55–03:26]

• TradeZero brings an experienced U.S.-based team and capital markets expertise ("$80 million revenues and a lot of knowledge").
• Enables eToro to launch U.S. access to features already popular internationally: leveraged stock trading, quantitative smart portfolios/hedge fund-like strategies, market neutral strategies, and futures trading.

Notable Quote:

“All of these products will now be enabled to our customers through the integration with TradeZero.”
— Yoni Assia, 03:20

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3. Differentiating Approaches for Global vs. U.S. Investors

[03:26–04:40]

• eToro sees a significant untapped market in the U.S. for its global products, emphasizing diversification and social trading features.
• The company intends to leverage its international success (notably across Europe and Asia-Pacific) and bring U.S. retail investors into its global social trading community post-IPO.

Notable Quote:

“We actually feel our products have a huge untapped market here in the US... introducing US customers to basically the global community and the collective intelligence in eToro.”
— Yoni Assia, 04:15

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4. AI, Agentic Trading, and “AI Agents”

[04:40–07:04]

• eToro has launched new AI-driven features, including a complete app rewrite centered on “Tori,” their AI agent using the Groq model.
• Recent integration with Grok allows users to analyze portfolios via AI, while “agent portfolios” enable users to designate a portion of assets for AI to manage autonomously.
• Autonomy and flexibility: AI agents can now run daily backtests, ingest global academic research, and execute complex quantitative trading strategies, democratizing capabilities once exclusive to elite quant funds.

Notable Quotes:

“Now you can actually connect it just to a sub account or an agent portfolio and... want this now AI agent to manage my portfolio autonomously.”
— Yoni Assia, 06:05

“We're seeing things that up until two years ago, only people in places like, you know, Renaissance and Millennium could do. Suddenly we're doing it with our own quants and we're building those tools for our customers...”
— Yoni Assia, 06:36

“I believe this is just the beginning of that. And that is going to actually surpass the amount of trading activity of people on eToro by the end of next year.”
— Yoni Assia, 06:59

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5. Prediction Markets & the DeFi Expansion

[07:04–08:50]

• eToro recently acquired Zengo, a non-custodial wallet company, enabling further integration into decentralized finance (DeFi).
• Zengo’s tools allow users to transfer assets seamlessly between eToro and DeFi, participate in prediction markets, and access a vastly broader range of crypto assets.
• eToro aims to combine on-chain and traditional finance capabilities in its “financial super app.”

Notable Quotes:

“We’ve launched prediction markets in the DeFi model... transfer money seamlessly from basically your eToro account into a non custodial wallet and then actually trade tens of thousands of crypto assets...”
— Yoni Assia, 07:46

“What we're building is a financial super app that provides you access to any type of financial product that you want within the eToro ecosystem.”
— Yoni Assia, 09:20

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6. Crypto Market Outlook and Customer Behavior

[09:35–10:47]

• Crypto revenues are cyclical, tied to predictable “super cycles”; eToro’s leadership remains bullish on Bitcoin’s potential as “digital gold.”
• Following the CoinKite cold card wallet hack, eToro has observed an uptick in users moving between custodial and non-custodial solutions.
• New “crypto buying power” feature lets users deposit crypto and use it as collateral to buy stocks, representing deeper integration between crypto and traditional finance.

Notable Quote:

“I am a very big believer in Bitcoin as digital gold... But it might take time and people to adopt to these technologies real time.”
— Yoni Assia, 10:17

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Memorable Moments & Quick Takeaways

• AI as an autonomous portfolio manager: eToro is betting big on “agentic trading.” Assia predicts more trades will be handled by AI agents than by humans on their platform in the near future. (06:59)
• Super app ambition: eToro’s acquisitions and product development point to a one-stop shop model for stocks, crypto, DeFi, and active/passive trading—catering especially to Gen Z and the global socially- and digitally-native investor.
• Bridging TradFi and DeFi: The integration with Zengo suggests eToro is positioning itself at the center of both traditional assets and decentralized financial products, aiming to remain relevant for a changing investor demographic.
• Managing risk in innovation: Even as it enables margin trading against crypto and agentic, AI-powered activity, eToro emphasizes investor education and risk awareness. (11:18)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• eToro Q2 earnings and market response – 00:37–01:55
• Why TradeZero? Acquisition rationale – 01:55–03:26
• US growth strategy and investor differences – 03:26–04:40
• AI, “agentic trading,” and Tori – 04:40–07:04
• Prediction markets and DeFi integration – 07:04–08:50
• Outlook for crypto, investor trends, and custody – 09:35–11:18

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Conclusion

This episode offers a comprehensive window into eToro’s US ambitions post-IPO, its future-facing embrace of agentic trading via AI, the expansion into DeFi and prediction markets, and a forward-looking view on crypto and broader fintech trends. Yoni Assia's clarity on both the technological and cultural trends shaping retail investing makes this a must-listen for anyone tracking the evolution of social trading, fintech innovation, and the global democratization of finance.

Transcript

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[Bloomberg Host]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News I'm

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

looking at shares of Etoro Group. They're lower today, actually having the biggest decline ever down about 13%. This after the fintech company reported revenue from crypto assets for the second quarter that missed the average analyst estimate. Also big news, it announced to buy Trade Zero based in Brooklyn for up to 231 million million. We've got with us Yoni Asia, the CEO of eToro. He's back with us here in the Bloomberg Businessweek studio. So the numbers you were saying you had a good quarter and this is an acquisition that you think is the right move obviously at the time. What's the market getting wrong about this?

[Yoni Asia]

Well, you know I can control the markets, I can control the business. Q2 was another beat quarter. Great 9% growth year over year of both top line and bottom line. 18% exceeding actually market expectations of funded accounts. Huge roadmap coming in across AI in the company. We actually released a new app which is taking the old app and rewritten 100% with AI with AI focus and center around Taurier AI agent which is the Groq Frontier model. And we were talking now about Dan Pipitone from Trade Zero and the team, a great team joining us here in the US to lead Ito in the US with the Trade Zero acquisition.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Yeah, let's talk about the Trade Zero acquisition. Dan's been on our program. I used to speak to him all the time just a few years ago. So certainly a familiar name to our audience. Why buy Trade Zero rather than build something internally like what does Bringing on trade zero do for eToro that you couldn't offer us customers before?

[Yoni Asia]

So when you look at our business, the vast majority of our business is outside the us. We have a huge franchise Europe, uk, Australia, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and the US A bit got left behind sort of the rest of the world for us where the big part of the businesses what this brings is one a great team based here in Brooklyn in the US with a significant also franchise, 80 million dollar revenues and a lot of knowledge and experience in US capital markets infrastructure. So a lot of the great products that we actually have Outside the US which include leverage stock trading, long short on top of long short trading, we actually created quantitative smart portfolios which create hedge fund like strategies, market neutral strategies outside the U.S. so all of these products operate and work for ETORO outside the us and we believe that together with Trade Zero, we can actually bring all of these products, including futures trading, which is a lot of our customers were trading oil, gold, silver during Q1Q, during Q4Q1. So all of these products will now be enabled to our customers through the integration with Trade Zero.

[Bloomberg Interviewer 2]

Yeah. How are you planning to kind of differ your approach when it comes to dealing with your international clients? Because, you know, I lived in London for almost 10 years and the average retail investor there tends to be more conservative, they tend to prefer physical assets, whereas US investors are really just very much into this. And so yeah, how would you kind of differ the approach now that we're looking at a broader base of international clients?

[Yoni Asia]

So I think this actually shows the huge opportunity that we have. Right. So it's. Etoro has been hugely successful outside the US in places like Germany, Spanish, France, Italy, the UK across multiple, by the way, both geographies and products, 24,7 trading of both stocks from 26 different capital markets of commodities, indices, currencies, as well as investing, copying the top trades all around the world. We actually feel our products have a huge untapped market here in the US. But until 2025, until the IPO, basically we just took a step back, waited actually for also the crypto environment to be the right environment here in the us and together with the Trade Zero acquis, we were going to double down on the US market, introducing our US customers and US customers to basically the global community and the collective intelligence. In Etoro.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

You mentioned AI and one thing that we're increasingly hearing more about is agentic trading. There was a great piece in Bloomberg just last week, big take. Everybody should check it out, if they haven't already, about the way that some retail traders are harnessing this technology. ETORO is allowing customers to use AI agents to trade autonomously, but that's within certain defined parameters. Parameters give us an update on adoption and activity that you're seeing thus far.

[Yoni Asia]

So first of all, just yesterday we launched an official connector to Grok. So we have a great partnership with SpaceX. You can actually go now to GROK and Click search for eToro, connect your eToro account, click it opens basically an ETORO single sign on and then GROQ suddenly has visibility into your entire portfolio, into the portfolio of all of the rest of the traders in Etoro and into the X feed. So you can ask something like, look at my, look at my portfolio, look at my expos, Tell me what I'm missing in my portfolio. Now we've launched Tori, our own agent, a while back, which is also based on Groq. We launched Also now Claude McPs and we are seeing more and more users are actually connecting AI. There was one missing piece which we launched about two months ago, which is sub accounts or we called it agent portfolios. A lot of people, including myself, were afraid to connect their entire account into AI. Now you can actually connect it just to a sub account or an agent portfolio and say, let's say I have $100,000 in my portfolio, I want $5,000 invested and I want this now AI agent to manage my portfolio autonomously. Now the beautiful thing about AI agent is they never sleep. You can train them basically on everything. My, by the way, AI agent goes every day to universities across the globe, downloads research papers on behavioral economics, connects the data in Etoro, and runs back tests on actual proprietary data of Etoro. So we're seeing things that up until two years ago, only people in places like, you know, Renaissance and Millennium could do. Suddenly we're doing it with our own quants and we're building those tools for our customers to run basically quantitative trading and agentic trading as well. I believe this is just the beginning of that. And that is going to actually surpass the amount of trading activity of people on Etoro by the end of next year.

[Bloomberg Interviewer 2]

Wow.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Okay.

[Bloomberg Interviewer 2]

Yeah. All right, well, let's talk about prediction markets as well, because that's another growth area for a lot of companies like Etoro is surging in popularity. What sort of opportunity does that present for your company moving forward?

[Yoni Asia]

So we announced another acquisition in Q2, which is Zango. It's a non custodial wallet outside in the U.S. it's a, it's a great opportunity. It's a regulated market outside the us A lot of the prediction markets actually operate in the Defi world in non custodial wallets. Zengo is a firm actually run by a great founder that was actually a VC that I pitched eToro to 20 years ago. And now sort of working together, we've launched prediction markets in the Defi model in a non custodial wallet. It took us, by the way, two weeks from closing the acquisition to, to actually launch the SSO connector to basically the non custodial world. So you can transfer money seamlessly from Basically your Etoro account into a non custodial wallet and then actually trade tens of thousands of crypto assets through DeFi swaps versus only 200, only eToro. But 200 is actually a lot. And of course new markets such as prediction markets and coming soon perpetuals as well.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

How does it, how do you distinguish at least in the US between what maybe Kalshi and Polymarket are doing with prediction markets? And I mean this is a really crowded space.

[Yoni Asia]

First of all, nothing is really crowded when you think of the entire tam. Right? So the entire tam, we're still very, very early stages of the largest transformation of wealth in history. You think that we're talking about $100 trillion moving from older generations to younger generations?

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Yeah, that's outside of just prediction. I mean that's, that's the whole great wealth.

[Yoni Asia]

I think it's appetite, it's risk appetite and type of new products. And one of the reasons we did Xango is we noticed we have gen zers who are actually very interested in living on chain and doing a transaction on chain. I think that's where a lot of the ecosystem is. And when you look at the different products that we've been launching in Etoro, it's about making sure that customers on Etoro can stay on Etoro whether they want to trade stocks or commodities, or whether they want to actually trade crypto or actually copy somebody else or invest in alpha portfolios on Etoro or spend their money with a visa that's connected to the account. So what we're building is a financial super app that provides you access to any type of financial product that you want within the Etoro ecosystem.

[Bloomberg Interviewer 2]

All right, well speaking of crypto, we got to talk about that since that seems to be a little bit of a weak spot for your most recent earnings. But I mean, what's, what's the outlook in terms of the revenue from that market? And really just outlook for the market directionally moving forward.

[Yoni Asia]

I think we're seeing, you know, crypto yet in another super cycle. Everybody's talking about the four year cycles of crypto. We launched it in 2013, boom. Crashed 85% in 14. We had huge amount of revenues in 2017 coming from crypto. A huge crypto rally boom, a crash in 2018, 2021, 2022, now 2025 and 2026. So it does seem it works on a clock of a cycle, maybe a self fulfilling prophecy. And I have no doubt, I am a very big believer in Bitcoin as digital gold that we are going to see Bitcoin going way beyond the all time highs that we've seen in October. But it might take time and people to adopt to these technologies real time.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

What are you seeing as a result of the cold card wallet hack made by Canada based Coin Kite, the crypto that was stolen?

[Yoni Asia]

Does it have any impact on Etoro?

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Are you seeing more people invest in? We have Bitcoin ETFs.

[Yoni Asia]

We know we're seeing actually more people moving to non custodial. So we actually have seen people coming into Etoro depositing crypto in Etoro into Zengo and then from Zengo into Etoro. We actually are one of the unique firms that are now introducing crypto buying power as well. So you can actually come to Etoro, bring in your crypto from basically, you know, either non custody or custodial wallet and then get from us a margin buying power to buy stocks as well.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Are a lot of people doing that?

[Yoni Asia]

Could be risky, you know, risk return. We believe in educating people about the markets.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Yoni, always good to see you. Appreciate the update on what the retail investor is doing. Yoni Asia, Co founder and global CEO of eToro, joining us here in the Bloomberg Businessweek studio.

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