eToro, the social trading and multi-asset brokerage firm, bought Firmo, a smart contract infrastructure provider. The company did not disclose the purchase price. Yoni Assia, eToro's co-founder and C
eToro, the social trading and multi-asset brokerage firm, bought Firmo, a smart contract infrastructure provider. The company did not disclose the purchase price.
Yoni Assia, eToro's co-founder and CEO, said the deal brings eToro "one step closer to becoming the first truly global service provider allowing people to trade, invest and save." He views blockchain and tokenization as the future of finance. "Blockchain and the tokenization of assets will play a major role in the future of finance," Assia said. "We believe that in time all investible assets will be tokenized and that we will see the greatest transfer of wealth ever onto the blockchain."
Firmo's team will operate as an internal innovation unit at eToro. They will develop blockchain infrastructure for representing all assets and executing trades on the eToro platform. The acquisition, Assia said, "will enable eToro to accelerate the growth of our tokenized assets offering."
eToro created eToroX as its digital asset subsidiary last year. The unit oversees "defining and executing eToro's vision around blockchain and the development of cryptoassets." eToroX has launched a new wallet and will open a global cryptocurrency exchange later this year. In December 2018, the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission granted eToroX a blockchain technology license.
"While our expansion has been largely organic to date, as the eToro business continues to grow we are on the lookout to acquire businesses which will help us stay at the forefront of fintech innovation," Assia said. "We believe that the market is particularly exciting at the moment."
Firmo, founded in 2017, is a Danish startup. The company provides a platform to securely deploy financial contracts that can work with any blockchain. Firmo developed FirmoLang, a formally verified domain-specific contract language that can be translated onto multiple blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, EOS, and NEO. Omri Ross serves as the CEO and founder of Firmo and is an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen.
"The advent of crypto and the blockchain technology that underpins it has driven an explosion in financial innovation, however, a number of challenges are preventing mass adoption and integration into legacy infrastructure," Ross said. "Our goal is to enable our users to trade any asset globally with instant settlement by tokenizing assets and executing all essential trade processes on the blockchain."
eToro announced the addition of TRX, Tron's native token, to its platform at the same time. TRX is eToro's 15th crypto-asset offering and joins Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, XRP, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, Dash, Stellar, NEO, EOS, Cardano, IOTA, BNB, and ZCASH.
Tron, a blockchain project seeking to decentralize the internet, acquired BitTorrent in 2018. BitTorrent is one of the largest peer-to-peer sharing platforms in the world with more than 100 million active users. BitTorrent launched BTT, a utility token built on the Tron protocol, in early 2019 as its first step toward tokenizing its content-sharing ecosystem.
