The social trading platform's acquisition of the keyless MPC wallet — which has never been hacked in seven years — is its clearest signal yet that it sees crypto's future in user-held assets rather than centralised order books.
eToro has agreed to acquire ZenGo, the self-custodial crypto wallet built on multi-party computation cryptography, in a deal valued at approximately $70 million and funded mostly in cash.
The acquisition, announced on 15 April, brings together a publicly traded social trading platform with 38 million registered users and a wallet provider that has processed transactions for over two million users across 180 countries without a single reported hack since its founding in 2018. That security record — seven years, zero breaches — is the kind of claim most crypto companies cannot make, and it is the core reason eToro is paying a premium for a company whose user base is a fraction of its own.
ZenGo's distinguishing feature is the absence of a seed phrase. Traditional self-custodial wallets require users to write down a 12- or 24-word recovery phrase and store it securely; lose the phrase, lose the funds. ZenGo replaces that mechanism with MPC, a cryptographic technique that splits the key into multiple shares distributed across different devices and servers. No single party — not ZenGo, not the user's phone — ever holds the complete key. The result is a wallet that is self-custodial in principle but dramatically simpler to use than the hardware wallets and browser extensions that have defined the category for a decade.
eToro CEO Yoni Assia framed the deal in terms of trajectory rather than the present: "We believe the future of finance will be increasingly digital, decentralised and user-controlled," he said, adding that self-custody would play "an important role" in that future. The language is measured, but the $70 million price tag is not. eToro, which previously acquired smart contract infrastructure provider Firmo in 2019, is building a stack that extends well beyond its original copy-trading proposition.
ZenGo co-founder and CEO Ouriel Ohayon said the deal would allow ZenGo to "accelerate that mission at a global scale" — bridging traditional and on-chain finance. The plan, according to both companies, is to integrate ZenGo's wallet technology into eToro's platform and to use it as infrastructure for emerging product categories including tokenised assets, prediction markets, perpetual futures, and yield products.
The strategic logic is visible in the post-FTX landscape. The collapse of centralised exchanges — and the billions in customer funds lost with them — shifted industry sentiment toward self-custody in a way that years of ideological arguments had failed to do. Hardware wallet sales surged. MetaMask downloads climbed. The phrase "not your keys, not your coins" moved from cypherpunk slogan to mainstream financial advice. But adoption of self-custodial solutions has been limited by their complexity; seed phrases remain a barrier that most non-technical users find intimidating or, more commonly, ignore until it is too late.
MPC wallets solve that problem, though not without trade-offs. The security model relies on the wallet provider remaining operational — if ZenGo's servers go offline permanently, users would need to use a recovery kit to reconstruct their keys, a process that is possible but not trivial. Purists argue this makes MPC wallets a halfway house between true self-custody and a custodial service wearing a different label. Pragmatists counter that a wallet nobody can use is worse than one that makes reasonable compromises.
eToro is clearly in the pragmatist camp. The company went public on the Nasdaq in 2024 after a prolonged SPAC saga, and it needs to demonstrate to shareholders that its crypto business has a growth trajectory beyond spot trading. Wallet infrastructure — particularly wallet infrastructure that can hold tokenised equities, stablecoins, and DeFi positions — opens revenue lines that an exchange alone cannot reach.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, subject to customary conditions. ZenGo's team will remain intact. Whether eToro can integrate keyless self-custody into a platform built on centralised order matching without confusing its existing user base is the execution question that will determine whether the $70 million was a bargain or a bet.
