Newly public eToro may launch its own blockchain, says CEO

The Israeli stock trading company, which recently went public in May on the Nasdaq, is speaking with “four or five” different blockchain ecosystems, he said, declining to specify which ones. He was quick to say that any launch isn’t imminent. Still, if eToro decides to put a portion of its operations on crypto rails, a side chain—crypto industry lingo for a light-weight blockchain built on top of another one—makes sense, he said. 

“We can’t run today the millions of transactions that we’re transacting on a monthly basis on existing blockchains,” he said. “We’ll need, by definition, to have a dedicated blockchain if we want to run the entire eToro ecosystem.”

The company’s shares were down almost 4% since markets opened Tuesday.

Assia’s comments came directly after his online brokerage, which lets users trade both stocks and cryptocurrencies, announced Tuesday that it was planning on launching tokenized stocks on the blockchain Ethereum. Tokenization refers to the act of putting stocks in blockchain wrappers, which theoretically lets traders buy and sell the shares more quickly without a middle man.

Tokenized stocks on eToro will be tradeable 24 hours a day, five days a week, and will include 100 of the most popular companies and ETFs listed in the U.S., according to the announcement. The online brokerage is first opening up access to the blockchain-based assets to users based only in Europe on a wait-list basis, Assia said.

Echoes of Robinhood

EToro’s plans for its own blockchain and tokenized stocks mirror similar moves from its competitor Robinhood.

In late June, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said his company was letting customers in the European Union trade tokenized stocks for U.S public companies and ETFs. It also said it planned to launch its own blockchain using technology from the Ethereum layer-2 chain Arbitrum. (Layer 2s are a variant of side chains and are likewise built on top of other blockchains, and offer faster and cheaper transactions.)

Both Assia, who’s mulled the utility of tokenized stocks for more than a decade, and Tenev argue that tokenization reduces costs for traders and helps markets operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Still, critics say that tokenized stocks can be a strategy to circumvent public disclosure requirements for publicly traded companies. As part of its tokenized stock announcement, Robinhood said it would allow traders to buy and sell tokenized shares in OpenAI, the privately owned AI behemoth. After the announcement, OpenAI shot back that it hadn’t authorized or endorsed Robinhood’s offering.

While eToro’s tokenized stock offerings currently don’t include private companies, Assia said he’s looking into it: “That’s definitely on the radar. I think we’ll see that in the near future.”