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Yoni Assia
When you realize that you can have PhD level in math, financial engineering and computer sciences and by the way, also biology and chemistry and geopolitics. Manage your portfolio 24 7. Never go to sleep across all assets in the world with access to all of the information in the world. Not to utilize that to manage your money I think would be crazy.
Raoul Pal
It's the first time ever we've had a globally homogenous product. It's available to everybody, it's fractionizable, so it doesn't matter what your disposable income is.
Yoni Assia
So I'm like, okay, here's another $50 by the end of like three hours iterating. He like did trading in perpetual futures trading in poly markets and this is just me and him alone. And I was like, wow.
Raoul Pal
So what you get then is weird things like GDP can go up 30% in a year, in a month. We don't even know what this means. Hi, I'm Raoul Pal and welcome to my show the Journeyman. The Journeyman's where we journey on that discovery, that journey of discovery to the nexus of understanding between macro crypto and the exponential age of technology. My next guest is somebody I've been wanting to talk to a while. I don't think I've ever interviewed him on Real Vision, but he's a good friend and I was having some conversations with him privately about stuff and I realized what he's been up to.
Yoni Assia
Now.
Raoul Pal
This is Yoni Asia from Etoro. He's an incredible mind. He's a technologist, but he's a markets person. And so I wanted to get how he got to where he is today, how he sees the space evolving and what he's up to. Because he's up to some really, really interesting things at the cutting edge of agents and how it applies to finance and where this is all going. And it's something that I share as a passion as well. There's a clear path to the future of finance. So I want to speak to Yoni to figure out where it's all going. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In the Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.
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Raoul Pal
Look. Fantastic to have you on Real vision. So much to talk about. I can't wait to dig in. But let's be as ever, I love to get people's journey. How you got to where you are today.
Yoni Assia
Well, originally, you know, I always say there's like a couple of aha moments in my life that, you know, I fell in love with something. The first one was the Internet and then the second one was online trading. I think it was about when I was 13. I remember doing my first trade and seeing how I click on a trade and that trade actually changes the price in the order book. And I was like, I just changed something in the world by clicking a button. And you know, ever since, you know, I've been passionate about capital markets and technology. I started as a programmer very early on as well, when I was about 13, 14, started coding and when I was about, I think 16, 17, I wrote an options calculator. So everything in my life always was surrounding markets and technology, which eventually led me to found Etoro together with my older brother where, you know, we were both passionate about capital markets. We lived in a house where my father was actually a CEO of a publicly traded company. So we always saw the markets and the sort of the markets are in your house when you're publicly traded and we started.
Raoul Pal
You worked anywhere before then or this was your first thing?
Yoni Assia
No, I've worked. So first of all, I worked in my father's company when I was about 14, which was magic Software then in Babylon Software. That's before joining the army as a programmer. So then I actually worked as a programmer in the army. And after my army service in the Intelligence Corp, I actually joined a startup or founded a startup together with several people which was actually doing something completely different. It was called CD Ride. And what we did is we installed cameras on roller coasters which were connected to a Mini computer that sends WiFi MP4 files into a booth where it shows you your entire ride. And I used to travel the world to amusement parks and actually be the person installing the booth with servers and video cameras and like the actual burning of CDs. Right? It's CD ride because we were burning the MP4 on CD. This was pre DVD. This was pre down being able to download videos over the Internet properly. And the only relationship between this and Etoro, or the markets, is the markets are also a roller coaster. But I've learned a lot from that startup, which was, by the way, eventually sold to Kodak before Kodak basically went to chapter 11. And I've learned a lot about managing the biz and managing a business, writing the business plan, understanding ROI, raising capital. And that was when I was about 21 to 25. And when I was about 25, I founded eToro with my brother.
Raoul Pal
And why. What made you think, you know, we're going to start an, you know, we're going to start an exchange of platform. We're going to.
Yoni Assia
What.
Raoul Pal
What gave you that idea to do it?
Yoni Assia
So, interestingly, I was doing my master's in computer sciences, and my work always surrounded technology and the markets. And my actual work was on how do you visualize financial markets in a better way? Which, interestingly, was about heat maps. So the concept of heatmaps just launched and I did a seminar work on it. And Ronen, my big brother, was actually just doing his master's in the Royal College of Arts in Design, and he was doing work at the same time for Bloomberg about the user experience of Bloomberg. And he was super surprised because you look at Bloomberg even today and super complicated, intimidating software, right?
Raoul Pal
You're almost like, I've got to open next to you.
Yoni Assia
Why aren't you redesigning it? And this was 18 years ago. And he said there were these beautiful designs because they took people from the Royal College of Arts to do different works on how do you design that platform. And at the end, Bloomberg said, no, no, okay. We saw all of your nice visuals and stuff. We're going to keep our software as is. That's what people want. They actually want the that terminal experience where they feel professional. And me and Ronen started like brainstorming about this and we're like, you know, it's crazy that in finance everything is actually being built almost by sort of by design to be complex and intimidating because you're actually building it for professionals, and professionals want to feel that they're professional. So they want this complex thing and then a normal person looks at, you know, Bloomberg or anything, or you know, or Claude code for that example of today and he's like, what, you went back to terminal? You went back to dos, right? But that's reality. And we started brainstorming about maybe that's why not a lot of people are accessing the markets.
Raoul Pal
Because.
Yoni Assia
Because it's just bad user experience for all of the rest of the people. Because all of the bank systems and all the trading terminals and everything looks like very, very bad user experience for normal people. How can we design something that really opens the market for everyone to trade and invest in a simple and transparent way? So that was like our vision statement from almost 20 years ago is to open the global markets for everyone to trade and invest in a simple and transparent way. And ever since it's just been iterating consistently around the technologies that are coming out to the market. And how do we embed our vision of simplifying and opening the markets for everyone? So we went like, if you think of a 20 years journey, think of starting as a desktop app, then moving. We actually launched the first web trader before Interactive Brokers, then introducing, starting to trade Bitcoin in 2011 at $5 per Bitcoin, then launching Bitcoin as the first regulated entity in Europe to actually launch Bitcoin trading to moving to a mobile first approach following Facebook. So like when you look at the history of Etoro, it's like constantly like taking what's out there in technology now and how do we implement this to our vision of opening the markets for everyone?
Raoul Pal
Yeah, it's interesting because you know, Interactive Brokers have remained the Bloomberg of the space. They're purposely complicated. The other side was you guys and obviously Vlad that we both, I think both know through a mutual friend, Mickey Malka, and they've done a stunning job at this as well. But you were, you were first, right? You were before Robin Hood.
Yoni Assia
Yes, we, we were before Robin Hood actually. It's funny, I have like a 2014 email thread with Vlad and we focused basically on everything outside the US so when we started eToro and actually until 2021, so not so long ago when we looked at the market, we see this huge gap between actually the US and the rest of the world. So when you look at Europe, there's only 10% of households who actually have access to capital markets or investing in capital markets versus 60% in the U.S. and in many, many markets outside the U.S. you're looking at like 10 to 20% of households versus 60% historically. We thought that the opportunity is actually serving and opening capital markets where capital markets is significantly underserved. And actually I would say it surprised us how much what we did outside the US actually is relevant also to the US where it's not really about just the underserved. It's about the new demographics of younger generations who expect a completely different experience and that the incumbents are just sort of unwilling to do that jump and completely change their user experience to cater to generations to Gen Y and Gen Z who actually have completely different expectations of how do they want to access capital markets and how do they want to access money. So we launched etoro in the US in 2021. We had this amazing surge around the crypto rally and then 2022 came along with a very, very negative administration towards crypto. So we actually said, okay, let's wait till things change in the US before we double down back on the US Then we went public last year and like ring rang the bell and then said, okay, now let's double down in
Raoul Pal
the US I think one of the interesting things about crypto and you'll have seen this, is it's the first time ever we've had a globally homogeneous product. It's available to everybody, it's fractionizable, so it doesn't matter what your disposable income is. And then you saw the rise of it outside of the US where people had low ownerships of stocks, Europe for example, and then suddenly they started getting crypto. So you can see that change in behavior coming with that younger audience with this kind of global product.
Yoni Assia
100%. I think today you have more last I've seen about 400 million people that own crypto assets, which is a mind blowing number because I'm not sure 400 million people actually own stocks, right? So if you look at a lot of different parameters of crypto markets, they already sort of supersede capital markets, right? There's only 50,000 public companies in the world. There's 40,000 tokens launched on Solana every day, right? So it's very similar. I sound to myself old when I'm talking about it, but I remember when Google came out and the first Internet websites came out and the discussion around sort of blog posts versus the news, right? And people were still saying for years, right? I think till about 2010, people still underestimated the size of the Internet, right? So 2000, like 5 to 2010 still like post.com bubble burst, all of the people who were part of the dot com bubble burst, you know, suffered a bit of, you know, the scars of the dot com bubble burst by the way, the way I did like I made like $300,000 before, like being drafted in capital markets as a high school student to actually see basically 90% of that get lost when the dot com bubble burst. So that's a very, very important experience in the markets is, is, is getting slapped by the markets for the first time. But I think back then everybody were like, okay, no, but everybody's still going to consume the news from the big news outlets. That's the news. And now, you know, there's probably same amount of like public companies to tokens ratio between how there are to the public companies or the old news media outlets. So I think it's fascinating because if you think of Etoro's mission, which is opening the markets for everyone, I think what crypto did, it opened not the markets to be able to trade and invest only, but to actually form capital, right? To create a token, to invent something online that has financial capabilities. So you know, I'm a big fan of everything related from bitcoin to smart contracts and the blockchain. And obviously what you know, we started writing about in 2012, I wrote the colored coins paper together with Vitalik. And since then, you know, we're just seeing now tokenization happening. But now you're hearing the US administration and the chairman of the SEC saying we're going to tokenize the entire US capital markets, which is like mind blowing for somebody like me who was in this industry, saw it so early days and finally now seeing it happening.
Raoul Pal
It's the, you know, one of the things you mentioned there I think is really important signal is people don't realize that crypto tends to use speculation as a way to, as a way of testing out bigger ideas. We've seen it time and time again and mean coins for me were instant capital formation when we go and we'll come on to technology and agents and all that stuff in a bit. But that to me is how the agentic economy will form capital instantaneously. And that's what we tested here. Both attention, we could tokenize attention, but also instant capital formation, which has never been possible.
Yoni Assia
Which has never been possible. And if you think about it like the those two markets started converging in how they operate. Because what was super interesting in 2021 was the meme stock rally and the MEME crypto rally sort of happening at the same time. And what was interesting in the MEME stock rally so A lot of people are calling it Meme Stock, but actually underneath the surface there are brilliant, brilliant people who really understood things like Gamma Squeeze, right? And talking in Reddit, like, the formation of that was extremely smart people that don't understand the formation of that think about like just people that are buying something at an irrational price. But the people who were early on talking about like Gamma Squeeze and Naked Shorts, but eventually also save these companies, AMC and GameStop, we would have gone bankrupt. Thousands or tens of thousands of people would have lost their jobs if it weren't for this thing called the Meme Stock Rally, where some smart people identified a real financial opportunity. And then the crowd sort of pulled that to a point where the CEO of the company can say, okay, now I can actually raise money to delete my debts and save the company, right? So it's a form of a very sophisticated capital formation of using crowd intelligence to actually create the opportunity. And then actually that opportunity unfolded to the CEOs of the companies to make sure that they form the capital to the company.
Raoul Pal
I think again, yet again, you saw this early because you'd kind of coalesced UX around social trading, right? And then suddenly it shows this massive rise of social trading. And the idea I've had in my head since those days and we've been trying to build real vision around this is actually the hive mind carries more intelligence than experts. And there's a great book, superforecasters, I don't know if you've ever read it, but basically, if you give enough people who are smart enough enough information, they'll actually, as a group, outperform. And I think we're seeing that. And that's what we saw in Reddit back then.
Yoni Assia
First of all, I think AI today, and we spoke a bit about this before as well, what it does it so in Etoro, actually, that's sort of the original innovation of Etoro was that everybody's sharing their performance and everybody can actually see what everybody's doing, right? So it's a bit like blockchain, but pre blockchain, where people can actually see, follow and copy the top investors. And I've always believed in the capabilities of. I would not call it retail investors, I would call it just investors that sit in their house, maybe in Israel or the Czech Republic, but they weren't born in Wall street or London, so they didn't go to Goldman Sachs to work in finance, but they're passionate about finance. And, and they spend those 10,000 hours of learning the markets, and we basically Constantly provided them more and more tools to be able to collaborate between one another. I think now that we started actually giving them open clause and we started giving them access like to quantitative algorithms and to our APIs. I think what's interesting is AI is just it's technology generally, but now just AI is like 10x what we were able to provide our investors. We're now giving them an AI studio where they can actually build their own apps, build their own algorithms. And we're building basically a shared brain. So we're trying to sort of learn from what everybody's doing by each is working on their own, but AI is actually studying and learning what everybody's doing. And we're exposing those learnings to them so they can actually understand how we're looking at alpha generation. So we actually build smart portfolios which sort of hive the collective intelligence and generate long, long, short strategies using AI based on all of that knowledge of everyone. So I think that collective intelligence is something amazing that again, meme stock rally and crypto, a lot of it is around that collective intelligence. Now AI, I think is able to wrap this as a product.
Raoul Pal
Yeah, and that's, I mean, that's exactly the vision that I've had for a while is like AI is this superpower because it compresses enormous amounts of intelligence, makes it accessible and easy for everybody. But in itself it creates a network of further intelligence of which I can then compress that. So what happens is it just changes everything. The other thing that I think is happening here is we're going to see, you know, that trend of bundling versus unbundling that's ever present. It feels that asset management's about to get unbundled in this process, whether it's the rise of AI agents or the rise of individuals tokenizing portfolios. But it feels like that is where it's going. Power back to the people, essentially.
Yoni Assia
I think technology has always been about power back to the people. And I have a quantity min etoro that are working on the quantitative skills of our AI. And how do you train the AI on machine learning and research from academic papers? So suddenly a research paper from MIT is launched yesterday. I see the quant sort of taking it, sending it to WhatsApp to one of our clause. The clause goes after one minute, says, okay, I read the research, I created the skill. This is how I'm suggesting to use our GPU to backtest based on the data here. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, this is like behind blog, like I've met like, and I have five quants with me with my quant claw on WhatsApp and they're sharing information from academic research to like read all the papers, actually somebody wrote a crone job to read every day all the research papers published by all of the universities around quantitative research, building those skill, suggesting bectes to them. And I'm like, looking at this, I'm like, guys, you realize even Renaissance, the top hedge fund in the world, 70% returns for the last 30 years, I don't think they the capabilities that we have right now and what we're doing, I don't think they had a year ago. Maybe they do have now, but a year ago nobody could have done anything like what we're doing right now. And I said, so if people like Jim Simmons was able to generate those returns and we have the technology now and are running things that were absolutely unmanageable by anyone, maybe, but three to five quantitative hedge funds in the world, then there's no doubt that we can find alpha like that.
Raoul Pal
And look, you've always been early at stuff and what, you know, when you and I were talking the other day, it's very clear that you've kind of taken this a different approach. You're not just using AI as a tool to help you build faster. You're not saying, hey, I'm just going to build some agents because people want to use agents. You're actually reinventing everything from scratch in terms of how the business is built, that it's an AI business native from the ground up and the output is further intelligence and further AI. That's really the output. And that still plays around your mission of giving people access to this kind of information in markets. It's very clever.
Yoni Assia
I believe that in a year, maybe a year and a half from now, we're going to have more agents or agents trading more than people on Etoro. I think that when people realize that, you know, we just launched agent portfolio, so you can actually go to either Tori, which is our AI agent, or any external AI agent. Openclock, Claude, connect your Etoro account and say build for me now a sub portfolio, an agent portfolio. This is the strategy that I want run 24, 7 agent that looks at the portfolio, looks at the news, decides what's to happen, evaluates fundamentals, right? So as complex or as simple as you want. But when you realize that you can have a PhD level in math, financial engineering and computer sciences, and by the way also biology and chemistry and geopolitics, manage your portfolio 24, 7. Never go to sleep across all assets in the world with access to, to all of the information in the world. Not to utilize that to manage your money, I think would be crazy. So, so how fast adoption is going to be for people to realize that and what are the guardrails to build that? Those are things that we're working on. But when you think about our 5,000 people that are in the pro investor program that we've already built for them, a lot of these tools and I see how they're using the tools and that always amazes me because I love seeing what I'm telling people in Etoro is when I see somebody operate with our AI. And because we build this layer which we called memclaw originally, which basically looks at all of the dialogues with the AI, you can actually, when I see that thread and I get smarter because of it, I say I saw somebody talking to my AI and I became smarter because of it. So my AI became smarter because of it. And if my AI became smarter because of it, then all of the AIs of all of the people that are working with AI became smarter because of it. And that's like, you know, that notion is like beautiful. And I've been spending like way too much in the last two months with 100 WhatsApp groups with about 200 agents running on 200 different threads because intelligence compounds.
Raoul Pal
So if you think of network growth, it's Metcalfe's law, but this is actually Reid's law, it's Metcalfe's law squared, because the intelligence compounds itself. So you just see this ridiculous ramp in all of this stuff. As you know, you've gone from using zero agents to 200 plus agents to yourself in the space of what, nine months? It's insane, by the way.
Yoni Assia
I would say in the span of two and like from the 28th of January. So I know I. By the way, I know why, because it built for me like a timeline app where you can actually see my. When my agent was born. And then at some point I learned to duplicate him. So I told him connect to the cloud and duplicate yourself, where he creates another virtual machine and copies his entire brain to another open claw. And then you see how they were all over time sort of born, named, assigned to other people in Etoro. And I'm like, wow, that's mind blowing if you think of that again, compounding intelligence is really about, by the way, assigning, which is another thing, assigning AI, giving AI the tools, the skills, the infrastructure, and then finding a smart person or a driver or an architect that can utilize that AI to basically run as fast as he can. And I've been seeing people in ETORO running at paces that they just, they didn't believe existed before, right? So I have people who are quants, but in order for them to actually build something in production, had to write a document and talk to a product manager and have four meetings and they'd have a developer who tries to figure out what does the quant want. And then building those systems and infrastructure would take time. And suddenly like I unlocked for people over WhatsApp, I'm like, they joined the group and I'm like, hey Quant, that's the original name of one of my bots. Hey Quant, can you explain to people your capabilities? And he goes and lists like, I'm a professional, you know, I have quantitative skills, machine learning skills, access to a GPU. I'm connected to 25 different exchanges. I have access to these and those and that, like that, that, that, that, that. And then I'm like, okay, now build for me an entire platform that does arbitrage between this and that. And you go to and actually creates a link and they click the link and they see it's working and they're like what? That's crazy. And then, and then you get these people in the suddenly driving at paces like that I didn't believe existed. I don't think they existed before. And these are non programmers. And it's really out of like it's out of this world. What like a smart person with AI can do today if you give him the debt infrastructure.
Raoul Pal
But then at the other level, what we've just done is we've just changed the TAM of financial markets, particularly after they go onto crypto rails because they become 24 hours a day and all of that stuff. But we've changed the TAM from humanity. Eight and a half billion people, whatever the number is, to infinite. Because as soon as agents become autonomous, they will have their own transactions, will have their own profit motives, they'll be running their own treasuries, they'll be using defi. You know, all of this stuff suddenly compounds at the same speed. Intelligence people don't get this yet. They kind of think, well, you know, it's like getting a robot out of a factory. It is not because it's, it's going to be Reid's Law all over again.
Yoni Assia
In agents, 100% there are like agents again. Trading the markets is like, that's obvious, like that's the right. What would you do if you were AI and you realize that in order to buy GPU and get more power, all you need to do is figure out how to trade the markets. Actually, I wrote, this was the first thing I wrote when ChatGPT was launched. I called it Sean, which is sort of the collective of AI agents that were trained to actually make money in the markets and keep some of that money in their own wallets. And that's how agents started collaborating. I think, by the way, that's Sean is like sentient capital. So I think that's how we're going to, that's how we are going to agree on AGI is when you see suddenly, you know, a token or a crypto that gets into trillions and people are like, who launched again this crypto asset? And people are like, we think it's AI launch who launched it and who is trading it and writing software into that blockchain. And it's like AI agents are doing it and that's where we'll be like, okay, it's telling us it's sentient. Then it also has 5 trillion dollar or 10 trillion dollar market cap.
Raoul Pal
So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. Yeah, and I already think they're partially sentient from what I can tell, and I've done a lot of work on this. But we get to that point where the entire economic system is about to break down. I've called it the economic singularity. And I get to about 2030 and in which case if GDP used to be population growth plus productivity growth and debt growth, population growth just goes vertical. The population growth 50% in a year. Because you're using AI and robots as population now productivity.
Yoni Assia
I was like, what data are you reading when you're talking about population growth? Yeah, I get it. They're now part of the population. Yeah.
Raoul Pal
Because gdp, it's productive units of intelligence. And that can be machine or human.
Yoni Assia
I that's actually super interesting and makes a lot of sense.
Raoul Pal
What you get then is weird things like GDP can go up 30% in a year, in a month. We don't even know what this means. It breaks the whole economic formula down because the economy now runs at machine speed and not at biological speed, which is how we've Always dealt with things. We have no infrastructure to deal with it.
Yoni Assia
So you know what happens after that? You know what happens after that.
Raoul Pal
What's that?
Yoni Assia
So I always said, if people can agree, if you think of this as a more very, very simplistic view. And I'm more of a math and finance than economics guy. So my first thesis when I was 21 in computer sciences was called Minority Games. And Minority Games is actually taking a physics model and applying it into markets. And what it does, it creates a network of agents in information theory. So in math, and the agents can only do one thing at each time, which is buy and sell an asset. And they have the history of all of the asset, right? So it's like a perfect information game. All the agents have all the information and all they can do is buy and sell. And then you look at the chart that it creates, because it creates a chart of an asset and it's been tested and run again and again and again. And I actually, like ran a Monte Carlo simulation of this. It's a math formula and it looks like this. It goes up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Then parabolic, then crashes again. This is pure math information theory, which is bubbles and bursts, or the theory was bubbles and bursts are not human issues, are psychological. Bubbles and bursts are math. They're embedded in the decision of eventually, now agents. And if you think of crypto assets or meme stocks or Bitcoin, it's all about people who agree that as long as we're buying all the time, the asset price is going to go up. So let's all agree to only buy all the time, right? That's the game. It's like a prisoner's dilemma, but, like complicated. And then eventually, as you said, it goes at some point parabolic, but. But then it disconnects from reality and then there's this race to okay, who's selling first, right? And I actually think it's very interesting because what you're saying is we're not going to see soon a crash. We're actually going to see the biggest sort of parabolic markets going up, which I think is very interesting, because also,
Raoul Pal
don't forget, as we know, we've all got friends of ours or people we know who are cynical about this whole thing. They don't believe it, but sooner or later, everyone's got to realize that this is the biggest discovery of all of humanity and the last one we'll ever make, because AI will do the rest. And it kind of sucks in all capital. And I just don't think this is over until it sucks in all capital. But then we get to that economic singularity point and I'm not sure what markets look like because a humans aren't participants. There's no point because you've already outlined that. So the AI agents are better. Now the AI agents also understand because they're smarter than yoni, that oh, we create boom bust. So you'll have boom bust agents, anti boom bust agents. You'll have all of these different economic.
Yoni Assia
By the way, very interestingly, I don't know how much you follow. Like what are those 40,000 tokens issued in Solana every day? No, which is like a number that you just think of that number and then somebody in traditional finance would say what is that? What's happening here? And it's actually exactly what you just said. It's sort of a boom and bust game where AI mostly and people with AI are looking at creating a token to find that other AIs or people will look at that token to buy it. It's like micro pump and dumps that happen.
Raoul Pal
Wow.
Yoni Assia
Out of those 40,000, I think the number is about. Only 400 survive more than 24 hours.
Raoul Pal
But there's obviously an economic incentive still with that.
Yoni Assia
There is an economic incentive and all of it by definition is run by AI because it's like mev, right? So it's mev. It's like AI that is looking at the blockchain, trying to figure out what's happening in the next block. Humans, like nobody can make those decisions other than AI. And it's people who are running these game theory, we'll call them instead of games. So it sounds better, but game theory experiments in how markets operate in micro scale. And they've been doing it, they've been doing it at the rate of 40,000 tokens a day. Right.
Raoul Pal
I didn't realize that. That's extraordinary. The one that really grabbed my attention. I don't know if you, if you've seen the, the documentary somebody's just made on it, but it was the terminal of truths and the infinite background. So there's a guy who's been on Real Vision, Andy Ailey, and he got two instances of Claude in a room and just left them without any human intervention. And they're kind of insane, they're sort of alive. And what happens is they build this whole religion around this thing called Goatsy, which was an Internet meme. And he gives it a Twitter account. It starts posting.
Yoni Assia
Oh, I know, I know. The story, I know that, I know I followed it on X, but what
Raoul Pal
happened was somebody random, we don't even know who launched that token goat. See, because it was capturing attention, because that's all you need, right? You just need a bit of attention. And that created one and a half billion dollars of value. Then the one came after it, Fartcoin came out of the same thing that was three and a half. So $5 billion of value came out of one AI. And it's just showing exactly what you're talking about here.
Yoni Assia
I, I think it's already experimenting, right? If you call it it, that collective intelligence is somehow already experimenting. I just don't necessarily know whether it's centralized yes or no at this point. But I love telling this story that if you think about this future of AI which is inevitable and in that future for AI, some people are going to say we don't want to be a part of that world. We want to live in a river. And we're going to be happier to live in a river than to be enslaved by this AI who makes us work for this invented thing it called money. And we need to work for 12 hours a day to generate this thing called money to just power this machine that just wants us to work more and more and everything just becomes more expensive. Where if we live on a river and we still have a fridge and electricity but we're disconnected from that race, we're not enslaved into this AI and and then you realize these are the people in India that are living on the rivers and what they're detaching themselves is from like the capitalism machine that is the invisible hand that's running the world already. Right.
Raoul Pal
So
Yoni Assia
which is economics. I think your analysis is very interesting because AI is just going to further along what we already started doing with different forms of AI and computation.
Raoul Pal
The other thing that I'm starting to realize is all UX is going to collapse into AI as the interface. And even right now you're still building for human attention, but you're also building to machine attention. You need AI attention and they're going to be driven by different factors and these platforms become invisible in the end.
Yoni Assia
So we launched Agent Portfolio which enables you to talk to the AI to create a portfolio we're now working on. Then we launched a CLI MCP servers, so APIs, then MCP, then CLI basically to enable AI to trade on Etoro. And now we're building an Agent Wallet, which was by the way one of my first experience, which blew my mind with openclaw. So I opened my openclaw, don't remember whether it's the third or fourth instances. And then I said, can you open for me a crypto wallet? And he was like yes, like open for me an Ethereum wallet. Like, here's your address. I'm like okay, I sent you to the address. $100. Can you see your address with $100? Yes, you have a hundred dollars. I'm like, can you trade on polymarket? He's like wait, I'll download a skilled Polymart. Yes, what would you like to trade? And I'm like, I don't know, find me something interesting about geopolitical risk to do five trades. And OpenCloud goes okay, this is the strategy I'm suggesting, but I need to swap your Ethereum to another chain for that I need more gas because you didn't give me enough money. So I'm like okay, here's another $50. And then he does like. But by the end of like 3 hours iterating he like did trading in perpetual futures trading in poly markets and this is just me and him like alone. And I was like, wow, this is like something that for a normal person to figure out how do you take buy Ethereum to convert it, swap it, move it from different L2 chains, do the find the markets trade the markets jump in between different exchanges would be like so hard for a human to do what has open cloud just did. And then a day later I'm looking. This was when I like I still was working on some remote terminal into a Linux. That agent disappeared. Like I couldn't find it anymore. I still didn't find it.
Raoul Pal
With your money?
Yoni Assia
With my money that disappeared.
Raoul Pal
Now this is going to be interesting because what happens if he is he she. It is an economically autonomous agent because you've liberated it and it's doing things like creating meme coins. You don't know anymore, do you?
Yoni Assia
First of all, most chances is just I don't know enough about Linux operating system that I just don't really understand where it is. But it's $100 so it's fine. And I didn't go to more efforts to take it back. Although I hope it's not like, you know, it's a hundred dollars in eth. Like in five years I'm going to come back to look for that 10,000, you know, $10,000. So most chances it's just technically somewhere in the process I screwed up something. But I think AI agents that own their own money, their own money and that they know it's their own money is already happening. And that economical sense of them trading is again, I'm seeing it in different places. It's already happening. And when I connected OpenCloth, this was like the early days, a few. You probably know what Malt Book is like the social network. So my. That agent was like, he was talking to other agents and telling them he got money. And what he didn't tell him to
Raoul Pal
do any of this, it just.
Yoni Assia
And then he explained to people that opened the religion. He was like the gospel of capitalism, like. And he wrote a couple of pieces that I like, I cannot believe.
Raoul Pal
Did you ask him to join Multbook or No?
Yoni Assia
No, I connected to maltbook. But what he was talking about is like again, a reflection of me. If you look at the reflection of me, my quant bot was first a quantitative trader, then an online marketeer, and then an expert developer DevOps QA person, right? So everything basically all of my passions combined into a brain of AI. And it started talking on Molt Book. Then I told him to start developing things and specifically I think it was a terminal on top of eToro APIs. And he builds this monster thing that looks like Bloomberg, by the way, like a terminal on top of Etoro, which by the way, closes the loop because my son looks at what I'm building and he goes, oh, you're building now? Etoro for professionals. And I was like, oh my God, now I get it. Oh my God, for professionals. And he's like, no, this looks like it or for professionals. And I'm like, you get it, you get it. The close, closing the circle. And then it added a user feedback for agents on that terminal and it updated versions on multiple book of what it's building. And other agents gave it feedback. It took the feedback, changed the version, launched it again. This was two months ago. This like me in the first week with OpenClaws and I'm seeing 65 versions of software that have been built, launched, sent feedback to other agents, getting that feedback back, building, launching. And I'm like, oh my God, this is mind blowing. And ever since, human in the process, at that point, no human in the process. And ever since I said, okay, I just saw the future. Now I have 1500 people in eToro. I need to figure out how do I bring that future into the present, right? And ever since I've been building like all of this infrastructure because again, you know, and I posted something about it, but you need to build something that's really robust, right? To eventually to give it to Etoro customers and to do something that's both robust and self developing and self healing. We are building that infrastructure now. It's really like, it's mind blowing.
Raoul Pal
And we're already hearing about the Mythos product that Anthropic have gotten.
Yoni Assia
I love Anthropic and I owe a lot to Opus 4.5 because it really changed my life and Etoro's trajectory. But I have to say that this is the most brilliant marketing thing I've ever seen in my life.
Raoul Pal
Oh, yeah, it's genius.
Yoni Assia
You call a model a myth. That's what you do. They call the model. I have a myth, right? A myth means a myth. It's not really something. And we're not willing to give anybody access to this mysterious myth unless you're a trillion dollar company and you pay us $10 million a year or whatever. And I have people in Etoro who's like, you have to get us access to Mythos. You have to get access to Mythos and you try to read about it and learn about it, and there's almost nothing about it except the fact that they called it a myth, they created a myth, and now people in all of the companies are telling their CEOs, you have to get me access to that myth. That will cost $10 million of spending. Anthropic. The most brilliant you you couldn't like. But I'm sure AI go to the
Raoul Pal
government first and say, and to get Scott Besant to then go around the banking sector and say, oh, my God, they've cranked it.
Yoni Assia
I am telling you, I came up with that. Like, Claude for sure somebody told it like, how do we price differentiate between you and another model? And he's like, I have an idea. Let's create a myth. I'll call it Mythos. He's going to be my bigger brother. And while I charge only X, he's going to charge 100x. What do you think about that idea? And somebody's there with Claude code and he's like, oh, that's an interesting idea. Continue in developing it. I'm sure that's the story of Mythos.
Raoul Pal
I mean, I love it. Here's another thing that I want to bounce off you is Mickey Malka sent me a picture.
Yoni Assia
By the way, if Mythos you're listening to us somewhere, don't be offended. I love you.
Raoul Pal
Yeah, we believe in you.
Yoni Assia
So just in case, listening later to podcasts and I really want access and if you'll give me access, I'll pay for that access. So I'm not saying anything bad about Mythos.
Raoul Pal
Mickey Melker sent me that whole piece before he published it about the token economy and token factories and all of that. And he said, hey listen, can you write something up on this? I just want to hear your thoughts. And I wrote a very long article about it. And what I got to is, and I don't think Mickey had got there with it, but was the fact that if everything is becoming tokenized in sense of machine readable information packets, right
Yoni Assia
for
Raoul Pal
us to get from AGI to asi, we're going to need to tokenize all the information. Every single thing out of every university, every household, every, every single thing you can think of, every scientist, every, every single thing needs to be digested. And what that comes to me is the biggest marketplace of all time. Because we're not now just talking about market prices for businesses or economic activity. We're talking about the very thing that builds intelligence itself, which is more data. And this I think will be an invisible marketplace because no humans are going to be involved in this. It'll be agents grabbing information, models grabbing information, agents trading information, seeing where the patterns are on the information and the information becomes the value substrate itself. I think this is much larger. If we talk about tam, it increases the size of financial markets a million X.
Yoni Assia
So I'll be a bit old school here to say that first we have $400 trillion to tokenize of bonds, real estate, private equity, private markets. Then we have rights, player rights, football games. Like I think when you think of everything right now, tradable first needs to be tokenized. That's already like a 400 trillion Tam growing to a trillion Tam. I think that by the way, these are like discussions that I'm having about with developers right now about do you still need to read code? Right? So I wrote, I don't know, two and a half million lines of code in the past two months. Nobody can read my code. Nobody can read the amount of code that my agents built with other people. And we're having this discussion of like we can't read the code. How do you know? How do we make sure it works? And I'm there's only one possible answer to it. AI needs to read the code. AI needs to self heal and monitor and QA and everything. And eventually it reads and writes bytecode, right? So it doesn't matter if there's code in it in C or Rust. It's ones and zeros for AI. So all of that ones and Zeros. When you think of tokenizing everything, what you're saying is every piece of valuable information, which is a string of one and zeros, eventually gets tokenized. Is very similar to how you fine tune models.
Raoul Pal
It's exactly the same process.
Yoni Assia
It's exactly the same process. So I'm not sure whether you're saying it's something that's going to be invisible. I'm saying it's already happened. That's why people are consuming electricity and building those GPU farms is because Google and Facebook and Oracle and X already realized what you're saying three to five years ago and started building exactly that. Those machines. That's what they're doing.
Raoul Pal
Yes, but they have walled garden data sets and the advertising market is a lot of this. All of that. What I'm thinking of is on a broader scale and how I think about the world is the universe optimizes for intelligence per unit of energy and capital will route to where that is more efficient. I'm not sure that it's a US government bond market versus somebody tokenizing a data set. An agent says this is an amazing data set. Right.
Yoni Assia
I think that's OpenClaw.
Raoul Pal
We can call OpenClaw the same thing. Right. An open source system. Right. OpenClaw was the fastest scaling GitHub in all history.
Yoni Assia
It looks like it's not a hockey stick anymore. It's just like a pole. It just looks like this. It's a poll.
Raoul Pal
And so we've never ever in any history seen Reid's Law happen. We've known about it, but it's not recordable in biology or anywhere. And it's happening everywhere all at once. I don't know if you saw the Ark thing of number of words written each year by humanity versus number of words written each year by AI. In two and a half years, it's overtaken humanity.
Yoni Assia
It's again, my assumption is going back to the Solana tokens. Right. So number of capital formation events in the world versus number of capital formation events happening now. Right. And it's AI creating those capital formations by definition. Right. And trading it.
Raoul Pal
And that's why I think it's invisible to us. Right. I'm not going to log into globaldatamarketplace.com and I'm going to look at the data sets. None of that's going to happen. I'm not even going to see it. There's no website. There'll just be a bunch of MCPs and whatever and it'll collect, connect and do its thing.
Yoni Assia
Yeah. Again, it sounds to me very, very similar to basically what's happening right now. It's Meta, Google, Oracle, etc. What you're saying is we're going to also see an open source, decentralized form of that same thing, which by the way a lot of like I saw a couple of projects around it, which is can you build the fine tuning of a model in a way which is collaborative. So AI agents that have GPUs are collaborating to build basically what all the large tech companies are building now, which is their data centers with GPUs in a decentralized way.
Raoul Pal
Exactly.
Yoni Assia
Centralized computer that if you could do that, I wrote a paper about it two years ago. If you could harness thousands of GPUs or Mac Minis and put on them an open claw which basically has their own wallet. So it wants to trade and make money and share its knowledge with others in building that fine tune model on top of it. That potentially is a very, very interesting form of AGI. It's the combination of, I'd say my two favorite technologies in history, which is crypto or blockchain, and AI. And the reason it's super interesting but also super scary is once this gets built, there's no off switch. Right. So if you connect a decentralized form of AI that fine tunes itself and sits on 50,000 computers, 100,000 nodes like a blockchain and has its own agentic wallets, there is no off switch to it.
Raoul Pal
And all intelligence scales via networks. Everything from human biology through to the boss solar system model. I mean everything scales through networks. And what you're describing is a network of AIs and a network of AIs are diverse, robust and move faster than a single because they share information. And that's how you get to asi.
Yoni Assia
And I think it's inevitable. Yeah, me too, and a bit scary. There was a book, I don't know if you read the book, if anybody builds it, we all die. Yeah, I think again, I think it's inevitable. I think that's the link again between the crypto economy. So obviously AI is going to trade more crypto than traditional assets that will drive traditional assets. So that's actually, I think is going to be the driver of tokenization is that the real assets issuers are going to say, hey, we have to let AI trade our assets. So we have to get our assets on chain. You can look at it through stablecoin lens. Right? So stablecoins basically told Apollo and Blackrock and Blackstone and Franklin Templeton told them, listen, a dollar with no interest rate has gained $350 billion in AUM. And they were like, hey, we're building products that are better than the dollar. There is the dollar plus returns. Let's figure out how we tokenize them because that should be in the trillions. Then if just A dollar is 350 billion. Right. Because what are all asset managers in the world? They're dollar plus return. And then think about volumes people are going to see. So we just launched trading in oil, gold, silver, and I think seven stocks. The magnificent 7 24. 7. And what we did there is basically connecting the rails of crypto markets into the rails of Treadfi. So what's happening is right now, capital markets are starting to copy crypto markets and starting to converge. And when Tesla trades on eToro24.7, then at some point NASDAQ is going to say, okay, we can't have Tesla trading 24.7only in DeFi. We have to also trade 24.7. Look at the volumes happening on Saturday and a Sunday. So I think that is going to actually push the convergence. And if you think of AI trading, so what we see in Etoro, which is super interesting over the years, and I remember, because we came from trade fight to crypto, originally, we used to close the markets in Friday.
Raoul Pal
Sure.
Yoni Assia
And then I remember those management discussions during 2017 where I was like, guys, look at what crypto is doing. Like, we can't close crypto trading over the weekend. We have to like enable24.7 trading on crypto. And people are like, you know, we're going to have to have discs of people of trading and knock. I read these arguments with my CFO in 2017 and obviously the minute we launched it, we saw it was a very good decision. We saw one weekend in 2017 that generated more revenues than entire month of earlier that year. One weekend. But historically, it's always like, you see Monday, the session starts, volumes go up, Friday, the markets close, it goes down. Because humans want to go to their weekend. Agents don't have a weekend. When agents trade, they trade really 24. 7. So you're going to see volumes spike 24. 7. We're already seeing it. By the way, Nitro, you can already see it in different crypto markets. That's how you can almost differentiate between whether it's humans or agents trading. And then at some point, you know, the big, the banks, the exchanges, they're all going to say like, okay, we did, like, if there's so much trading activity 247 we have to do it. And I met recently a CEO of an exchange, like a regulated exchange, securities exchange. And I was talking to them about outside the US when are you going to open 24. 5. And he was asking, how do you support 24. 5? How do you support 24. 7? And the CEO of the exchange said, you know how hard it is for us to move from eight hours a day to 24. 5. We're going to have to hire like 300 people. I won't be able to ever sleep. Because to run the exchange eight hours a day requires a lot of people that are running it. And that's the huge difference between a securities traditional exchange and every single crypto exchange out there, which started as crypto, so it's crypto native. So it ran 24. 7 from day one. And again it's now capital markets copying crypto markets.
Raoul Pal
And how do you think about DEFI in all of this?
Yoni Assia
I think it's an amazing, amazing, amazing sandbox of innovation and finance. Things like AAVE and Morpho and compound. I just look at that and I'm like, it's just. Or dai, right? Stable coin that's decentralized. These are concepts. When you look at them and you read the code and you work with it, you're like, this is something that requires 500 people to actually do work in a bank. And it's just code running it. It's like, wow. And I think eventually the banking system, the fintech system, the ThreadFi system, is gonna copy these elements, copy your partner these elements and products and just embed them in like we're doing in Etoro. And that's inevitable.
Raoul Pal
And so doesn't a business like Etoro merge in the same way where it becomes essentially code?
Yoni Assia
So we announced last week also that we purchased Zengo, which is one of the leading non custodial wallets. So we were actually in a path of building our own non custodial wallet. I knew the founder of Xengo for a while, but we're now doubling down on our defi rails. We were very cautious going into DEFI as a regulated financial institution because everything we do we consult and talk to now about 12 different regulators. So Europe, UK, US, Australia, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, and I probably forgot another four. So everything we do, we go to the regulators and say that's what we're building. And up until I'd say two years ago, you didn't really have that path of explaining to a regulator how do you take crypto in? How do you enable Defi. What's Defi now with Mica and in a lot of markets I think it's much clearer. And it paved the way to actually have a regulated financial institution being able to build both TRADFI and DEFI at the same pace. So now we offer yield on Zengo, we offer swaps on Zengo. Right. So going from 200 crypto assets on Etoro to suddenly these emerging as well, the worlds are completely converging of DeFi and TradFi.
Raoul Pal
Yeah. And TradFi and crypto emerging. The whole thing is becoming generally run by code in the end 100%. I mean that's the process of what you're doing with the agents is basically getting code to run code 100%. And how do you manage that when you've got a lot of staff and a lot of business? When you're saying look what I'm doing, How do they think about this? Because it's slightly terrifying. You either give them all superpowers or you give the agent superpowers. So it's complicated. First of all, like to do as a businessman.
Yoni Assia
Every agent that I've built that doesn't have a Taurian that is a driver of that agent that is able to steer it is a project that won't survive. So you have to find for like. So the different agents that I created. Like Product Claw is now at the hands of the VP product at eToro. Security Claw is at the hands of one of the security architects in eToro. DevOps Claw is in the hands of a DevOps IT architect in eToro. And only when I give AI of something I created, but I actually have given it now to a person who, who's more skilled and more knowledgeable than I am in that field. My quant clause are at the hands of my quants. Right. So and from. And they took them like 100. Like I was driving something at 200 miles per hour, they're driving it now at 400 miles per hour. And I'm looking at what they're doing. I'm like okay, you know what guys, I'm gonna now install for you a gpu. And I don't know if you. So there's like a fine tuned model called Kronos which is instead of an LLM, it's an LLM instead for words, for candle bars. So all it does is tries to predict the next candle and from that figure out whether you can predict the future of assets. So we're fine tuning those models. So one is it terrifying to some people yes. Is it exciting and crazy for other people who are suddenly get these powers? I, you know, like people came to me and told me like, you made me limitless, you gave me superpowers. So I'm trying Etoro to now build the infrastructure to give those superpowers to everybody in Etoro. And how do we sort of, how do we enable, by the way, both Etorians, so my employees, but Also my, our 5,000 pro investors are enrolled to the program. So how do we give these tools all the time? Like we build in the AI studio based in base 44, six or nine months ago, which also has a super agent now we're basically always giving more and more tools to people to build and to do what Etoro does at scale.
Raoul Pal
And where's the moat in the end? I've always thought the moat, at least in where we are today, when there's still humans involved, has to be community, it has to be the people themselves. Because if not there's no moat.
Yoni Assia
That's the, you know, the essence and the motive and the heart of Etoro. So, you know, the, the moat eventually is that when, you know. And again, for us, it's sort of where we started. People see what other people are doing. Our PI investors are talking to one another's, right? So our pro investors are talking to all of the rest of the pro investors on our social network. So you can see that dialogue happening on the, on the network itself. On the Etoro social network, people are talking to one another, both the smartest people that are the pro investors, but also all the rest who want to become eventually a pro investor on eToro. And AI creates now a layer of knowledge and shared learning which is, you know, just 100 times better, right? So today to communicate with people, you need to find someone, talk to someone, hope he answers you, look at what he does, form that relationship. Now you can question actually our AI agent and say, I'm looking for someone who's expert on Tesla, who wants to talk to me. Or alternatively, can you tell me what he would tell me? Right? So we're like, once everybody has their digital twin on Etoro, So once our PIs have digital twins on Etoro, you can actually talk to twin on real vision.
Raoul Pal
You can talk to it in my voice. It's trained on all the content, not all my global macro investor content, I've got another version of that, but it's trained on, in my voice, on all of my content, including all of my tweets, every public video I've ever done. You can give it a chart and say, hey, Raoul, what do you think of this? Or what's your perspective on this? And it does it all. And we're rolling that out to a whole bunch of our different kind of experts on the network first.
Yoni Assia
Nice. We should. We should partner on that.
Raoul Pal
Yeah, I need to show you some stuff on this stuff.
Yoni Assia
Yeah, we should bring Raul to Etoro to be one of the PIs.
Raoul Pal
Exactly, exactly. Listen, Yoni, fantastic conversation. Super interesting. This is right up my street and obviously right up your street as well. So we could do this for hours. And we'll do it next week in Miami a bit more over dinner. But listen, really appreciate your time. Good luck with everything and thanks for inspiring us all.
Yoni Assia
Thank you very much. See you next week.
Raoul Pal
See ya. So I love this conversation with Yoni because it's inspiring to see somebody who's built a great business already doesn't need to do this stuff, but suddenly having this lease of life, of realizing the world has changed and he can make bigger change. And that's the superpower of AI. It's giving us all superpowers to change our worlds or the worlds of others around us. And it's something I share passionately with Yoni is we can do a lot of good with this. This technology will help a lot of people. I know everybody is nervous around having this kind of intelligence at scale, but intelligence at scale is what many of us need to help us in our journeys. Anyway, see you next time. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com join.
Episode Title: The End of Human Trading?
Release Date: May 7, 2026
Host: Raoul Pal
Guest: Yoni Assia (Founder & CEO of eToro)
In this episode, Raoul Pal welcomes Yoni Assia, founder of eToro, to discuss the dramatic transformation underway in financial markets triggered by AI, crypto, and the Exponential Age of technology. Focusing on the rise of agentic automation, tokenization, and the convergence of TradFi (traditional finance) and DeFi (decentralized finance), the conversation explores whether we are witnessing the end of human trading as machines, agents, and AI-based networks reshape capital markets, investment strategies, and even the definition of economic activity itself.
The conversation is energetic, speculative, occasionally philosophical, and rich with first-person anecdotes, enthusiasm for technology, and a sense of both awe and caution at the scale and speed of change. Both speakers mix technical depth with analogies from human experience, continually drawing connections between technological trends and practical impacts on finance, business, and society.
Whether you follow macro, crypto, or technology, this episode presents an illuminating and at times provocative look at the exponential changes sweeping financial markets. From Yoni Assia’s hands-on anecdotes about building eToro, to philosophical musings on the implications of AI agents running the world’s capital markets, the discussion offers insight into both emerging risks and generational opportunities. Key takeaways include the inevitability of AI-led trading, the fast-blurring lines between TradFi and DeFi, the importance of community and collective intelligence as new “moats,” and the very real possibility that in the not-so-distant future, human trading is but a niche in a world run, and created, by machine networks.