Yoni Assia, CEO of eToro

In this episode of The Scoop, The Block's podcast, host Frank Chaparro sits down with Yoni Assia, the founder and CEO of eToro, the social trading platform he launched in 2007 that has grown into one of the largest investment networks in the world, serving millions of users across more than 140 countries. Assia, who has been active in the cryptocurrency space since 2012, walks through eToro's evolution from a niche trading app into a multi-asset brokerage that lets retail investors trade stocks, commodities, currencies, indices, and crypto assets side by side, anchored by a signature copy-trading feature that lets users automatically mirror the portfolios of more experienced traders on the platform.

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The conversation touches on eToro's push into the United States, where the company had recently expanded its crypto offering to more than a dozen digital assets and was preparing to add stock trading, part of a broader strategy to compete with fast-growing rivals like Robinhood by leaning into community and social engagement rather than pure no-frills execution. Assia also discusses eToroX, the firm's proprietary digital-asset exchange, which issues its own suite of stablecoins pegged to major fiat currencies and enables trading of digital tokens against commodities such as gold and silver. Beyond the product roadmap, he lays out his longer-term thesis on asset tokenization, arguing that blockchain infrastructure will eventually underpin how a wide range of traditional financial instruments are issued, settled, and traded, a vision that has informed much of eToro's product strategy in the years since.

The discussion offers a window into how one of fintech's earlier crypto-native platforms was thinking about regulation, competition, and global expansion at a pivotal moment for both the trading-app boom and the broader digital-asset industry, making it a useful marker for anyone tracking how retail-facing crypto platforms matured heading into the 2020s and how eToro positioned itself against both Wall Street incumbents and Silicon Valley fintech upstarts. Assia's comments also reflect the broader industry mood of that period, when crypto exchanges and brokerages were increasingly courting mainstream retail investors rather than the niche audience of early adopters that had defined the space in prior years.