How Yoni Assia created eToro | Crypto Stories

We just launched Bitcoin on Etoro a month before Mount Gox collapsed. It was trading at $1200 and I think couple of months later it reached $150. And everybody around us thought like this is it, Bitcoin is dead, crypto is dead. From 2014 to 2017 only 2% of our users actually traded bitcoin. And most people were sure it's dead. Then during the crypto rally of 2017 we saw Cryp becoming from 2% of our customers trading crypto to 90% of our customers trading crypto. And we've scaled the company significantly throughout that process. Hi, I'm Yoni Asia, co founder and CEO of eToro and this is my crypto story. This was back then trading through the bank on an old moden. I really remember that feeling that I'm sitting parents house basement making a trade and that trade actually changed the price of the stock that I can see later on on Yahoo groups. My father David Assia was the co founder and CEO of Magic Software, which was the first software company to be listed on NASDAQ in 1993. And I remember as we were kids when we were driving back, let's say from dinner, we would stop in front of a bank and on the bank you had on the window like the quotes of the markets and to sort of pause the car to actually see the quotes of the market's end of day quotes. We always had that sort of passion around capital markets. And then when I was 13 I got a present to my bar mitzvah with some shares in my account. Basically he enabled me to sort of start trading those shares. I actually managed to as a high school kid make significant returns during the dot com bubble. And then when I actually got drafted to the army in March 2000, that's exactly when sort of the bubble burst of the dot com era. And I managed to see a lot of those profits sort of disappear into a very significant downturn market. And I remember calling home from a payphone in a military base asking questions about where are the stock markets right now? And that's also for me was a very important lesson about capital markets bubbles and bursts. Back then we saw like the millions of people or tens of millions of people already back then in 2007 sort of joining the Internet. This was the beginning of social networks and we had this dialogue about the fact that the user experience of all of the trading platforms are just not meant for regular normal individuals. Everything is super complex. You always look at multiple screens and lots of numbers and charts. And if you think of 2007, you know, back then it still took, you know, days of manual processes to open accounts in most brokerages. And we started Etoro with a vision of simplifying trading and investing and making it more accessible and open for everyone around the world. And when we launched Etoro, people could just download the software, open an account and fund the account with a credit card. And that on its own was already simplifying the entire process. Until today. You still can't deposit funds to most brokers with a credit card or a PayPal. We started that back in 2008. The 2008 crisis was for us, you know, doom and gloom. We thought at some point that we could kill Etoro. Really didn't know what's going to happen in the next couple of days within the financial services industry, you know, in retrospect, actually 2008 was a great year for Etoro where we really started sort of growing the business. We learned from that that in a lot of cases, financial crisis actually generates a lot interest in what's happening in finance and actually pushing people into new products in new markets. During that global financial crisis, I saw how like currency prices basically freeze and how you don't know the next day whether your bank is actually going to open or not. And that for me showed me that there's a problem in the system, that it's disconnected. I discovered Bitcoin in 2010. Prior to that, I actually wrote a bit about the need for digital currencies and the need transparent money system. And I remember starting to look at both Satoshi's paper and reading it A to Z and then downloading the first bitcoin software and mining a bit on my computer. For me that was truly an aha moment, sort of. I felt like this is the future of finance. This is how all financial services eventually should work. 24. 7 distributed ledger is connecting everyone around the world. We experimented with buying bitcoin back in 2010 at about $5 per bitcoin. So I still have those screenshots. With our trading team buying Bitcoin at $5 and $8 and $10. I saw the opportunity of transforming the entire financial services industry into a blockchain based industry. And we started with the concept of let's tokenize assets on top of the bitcoin protocol. And one of the programmers who joined us back then was Vitalik Buterin who participated very early writing the colored coins paper. Eventually, as we all know, Vitalik believed that we need to build a new blockchain that has that sort of internal design supporting multiple tokens. And I think this was also for me, seeing for the first time what would later be called Bitcoin maximalism. A lot of people around the community basically thought that bitcoin should be the only blockchain. There are actually a lot of people that worked on Etoro that got like the white paper very early on and were able to participate in the ICO of Ethereum. I think what was amazing to see is the concept of smart contracts that came into Ethereum and really changed the direction from just tokenized assets that for us sort of took everything into the next level. Justin sun just placed the winning bid in a charity auction of $4.6 million. He recently won a 4.56 million dollar bid in eBay's annual charity auction. And it's a charity event. And this year you actually placed the winning bid. It was over $4 million, I believe. Exactly. Wow. Well, I would say this. When Justin and four friends came, they behaved perfectly and we had a good three and a half hour dinner and the whole thing was very friendly thanks to Justin sun, who invited me to the dinner with Warren Buffett. We came to the dinner thinking we would try and convince Buffett to believe in cryptocurrency and in bitcoin. I was a bit skeptic. We'll manage to do that. And indeed it was the same place that he takes every year. So this is a charitable event where he basically takes, sells a lunch or dinner with Buffett on ebay and the proceeds goes to charity. And this was a very open discussion, discussion, open dialogue around dinner around purpose and value of capital markets of the US Star. All of us around the table trying to pitch him blockchain or crypto. We were not successful in trying to convince him that he should invest in Bitcoin or there's value for bitcoin. But what I really learned from that dinner with him, which was for me, really an inspirational moment because Etoro's vision was to open the markets for everyone, to trade, invest in a simple and transparent way. And I've learned through that dinner how much he believes in capital markets and how much he believes that everybody should participate in capital markets and that it also takes time to build confidence in believing in yourself as an investor. And I remember during that dialogue, I sort of realized a couple of things even about myself. I have the confidence of saying I am a successful investor and I managed to generate significant returns in my portfolio in both capital markets and crypto markets over the past 10 years. And you can see that on my Etoro profile, which is public and everybody can see it, but also how important it is that you can actually see what other people are trading on Etoro. And the fact that you have access to millions of portfolios and see how they manage their investments is a real inspiration because you can actually see how people are managing their investments over time and are managing to generate returns over time. Buffett did talk about the fact that a lot of the companies he's invested in are setting up blockchain teams and are looking at the value of this technology over time. One, I understood Buffett's position that actually potentially creates damage to all of his existing investments. So I think a part of his view is that it's actually damaging to his own portfolio. I'm a crypto conservative, so while I'm not a generally conservative person and I'm a big believer in innovation and technology, I'd say that in crypto. So the majority of my investments you can actually see that in my account is in Bitcoin and Ethereum, sort of, you know, investing in the king and queen of crypto. And then about 20% are distributed across all of the various sort of tokens, blockchains, etc. In case somebody's able to dethrone the king or queen of crypto. You know, we are on this journey and we've scaled Etoro Significantly now with 32 million registered users on the platform. But I truly believe that the opportunity to grow the company is still a 10x opportunity of where we are today. Hi, everyone, I'm Yoni Assi. I'm the CEO and founder of Etoro.