Tokenized Assets, Perps and Agentic Trading with Yoni Assia of eToro

0:05Welcome to ReBank, your front row seat to the future of finance.

0:12Yoni Assia, welcome to ReBank.

0:15Yoni Assia: Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to connect with you. Both you and eToro are legends in this space. I've been in fintech since 2014, and eToro was already an OG at that point. And you guys have continued executing ever since. Maybe just to kick off, I'd love to hear in your own words, what is eToro? Sure. So I'm Yoni Asya, co-founder of eToro. Co-founded the company together with my older brother in 2007, almost 20 years ago. and we started eToro with a vision of opening the global markets for everyone to trade and invest in a simple and transparent way. It has been our vision since we started.

1:00Yoni Assia: And ever since, we've constantly scaled eToro through re-embedding the newest and best innovations in technology into our vision of enabling people to trade and invest in a simple and transparent way. And in 2009, it was around social trading. We realized that one of the biggest gaps that people have is connecting with like-minded investors. So we opened up our network. We are now the largest social investment network in the world with 40 million registered users, 4 million funded brokerage accounts, about$20 billion of assets. and we created a very unique technology that enables our customers to trade today's stocks from 25 different capital markets, derivatives such as futures, options, and CFDs on commodities, indices, and currencies.

1:55Yoni Assia: We were very early on to crypto, started trading Bitcoin at$5 at 2011, and now we have over 200 crypto assets on the eToro platform and actually over 5 ,000 on the Zengo non-custodial, which we'll talk about later on. And the unique part of Vitor is you can actually see what everybody's doing. And you can then copy the most successful investors on the platform. And when you copy someone, you basically take$1 ,000 from your account and say, I want to copy this investor. And it copies their entire portfolio to your portfolio, fractionalizes it. And every time they trade, it trades in your account at the same time and the same price.

2:33Yoni Assia: We have now over 5 ,000 pro investors in a program where we actually train them to be certified wealth managers. They get paid on assets under a copy. Our two top pro investors have over$250 million copying them, making over a million dollars a year. Just from starting as retail investors on eToro, although I have to say they're both magnificent, generating over 25 % IRR on an average of roughly 10 years tenure in eToro. And then we expanded that into smart portfolios, which enables you to also invest or copy in portfolios that are created by your chief investment office, including partnerships with the likes of Franklin Templeton, who managed$3 trillion, BlackRock, who managed$10 trillion, Cathie Wood, who is very famous around technology investing in Wisdom Tree.

3:28Yoni Assia: And we're creating a lot of very unique investment strategies, whether it's thematics like nuclear energy or quantum computing, which is what is happening right now in the market. Let's create a portfolio for it to even alpha portfolios where we have a quant team. Then we'll talk about that later on as well that are actually creating long short strategies that mimic the hedge funds of New York who are doing long short strategies and market neutral strategies. So what we're building is really a place where everybody can invest in anything and people can find each other and the talent to find the right strategies in the most interesting markets at any moment.

4:12Wow. Talk about a comprehensive platform. Very impressive. And just to put a finer point out, can you talk about the geographic coverage? Because that's one of the things that's always stood out to me about eToro. And I understand that you're also available in 48 U.S. states, including New York, which is notoriously difficult to operate in. So tell us about that.

4:30Yoni Assia: So we have today offices in more than 12 different regions, regulated entities from Europe, UK, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Australia, Latin America, US, and I think I forgot somewhere, someone. So really customers from 75 different countries. The platform is in 20 plus different languages. Our biggest market is Europe. We've built a great platform in Europe to cater people in both euro or European currencies, European shares and U.S. shares and expanded through that from the U.K. to Asia to the U.S., Latin America and more. Wow. Very, very, very impressive. So one of the things that I wanted to dive into with you today, you have unique perspective because you've been doing this for so long.

5:24You've seen at this point, probably what I would consider a number of different kind of retail investor transitions. There was the kind of free stock app days when Robinhood was just getting started. There was the kind of robo-advisor days where you could deliver this sort of like passive diversified ETF portfolio at very low management fee. Challenges ultimately maybe monetizing that model. And then you ultimately, obviously, had a series of crypto booms. In the meantime, you could say that maybe now it's all about perps and prediction markets. How do you think about, if at all, any sort of evolution in your customer base, customer profile that you've been serving over time?

6:12And then I wonder how you think about that going forward. Sure.

6:17Yoni Assia: So I'll touch on three different dimensions of that. So one dimension is sort of how we think of product in eToro, right? So we started more from the active trader and casual trader segment. We then realized we wanted to see actually people which accumulate more assets over time. So copy trader and smart portfolios are more of an investment product, right? Long and hold, fine strategies that generate double digit returns. we realized that traders are somewhat of like people you know i i played basketball when i was young um but i'm not a professional basketball player so now i like to watch basketball right that's copy trading for you so we have we're catering and i love traders i'm to some extent a trader myself uh but to be a good trader you need to spend your 10 000 hours of malcolm gladwell on becoming a very good trader, usually on a specific niche, on a specific product.

7:20Yoni Assia: Then investors are a much wider audience, right? So we've seen that sort of shift in eToro. And then you have savers who are even a larger audience, which are where your ISAs and SIPs and 401ks and superannuation in Australia, where actually governments are pushing customers to become savers, save towards your old age in capital markets. We've seen an explosion in growth in cash ISAs and stocks and trading ISAs, which is the UK pension scheme. We're now seeing more and more pension infrastructure happening in Europe, which is surprisingly unstructured, right? So US is the largest pension capital markets or savings markets in the world.

8:05Yoni Assia: You then have Australia, surprisingly. You then have UK and then Europe is just now emerging. And we have spending, which is connecting your Visa debit card into your eToro account and being able to actually use the eToro account to pay with crypto or pay with your card or pay with your virtual bank account with eToro. So those are like the four different product categories. Each of them have very different types of audiences. And my general view is a person can actually be that audience of four, like myself. I'm a trader. I'm an investor. I'm a saver. And I'm a spender, right? Or you can be one of those.

8:46Yoni Assia: We, of course, at eToro believe that the more products that you use of eToro, the better customer you are for eToro and the more you experience from the eToro offering. Then age groups, also a very diverse, right? Because again, we've been doing this for 20 years. And the age, the average age of eToro customers, I think, went up by about 10 years during that period, right? So from 25 to about 36, even a bit more now. And with it, also sort of the appetite of Gen Y has changed, right? So younger audience always wants high-risk products. And when they mature, they want to learn more how to preserve their assets, still risk.

9:35Yoni Assia: And as they grow older and older, in your 50s and 60s, you start thinking more about preservation. So you have very high risk appetite when you're in your 20s, or you should have a high risk appetite in your 20s with smaller amounts of money. to high risk capital, which is what you now talked about, sort of also the product diversity. So prediction markets and perps, new products available in both DeFi and TreadFi related to tokenized equities, customer audience more in their 20s and 30s today. Crypto 10 years ago was what prediction markets and perps are today, right? By the way, stocks were that in the 80s, right?

10:19Yoni Assia: And tech stocks were that in the 2000s. So you always have new generations who, by definition, have a high risk appetite to new types of products. And they are the ones who basically are in charge of forming not only the capitals, about capital formation, but actually creating that industry, right? So meme stock and meme tokens have a very high correlation between them, but it's a different audience. the GameStop rally and AMC rally of 2021. Actually, brilliant strategy. A lot of retail investors made a lot of money. But then at some point, people who came in too late or were too optimistic sort of didn't realize that beta or alpha in the markets.

11:06Yoni Assia: I think what we're seeing next, and then I'll divide it for like the first 10 years, second 10 years, and the next 10 years. First 10 years was really about opening the markets. Right. So people in most markets where we operate didn't have access to stocks. You couldn't buy like a U.S. stock to buy it. By the way, surprisingly, still some of the competitive landscape, mostly, by the way, banks, you know, would charge you one percent conversion fee in and out, which means you're to buy Tesla stock from the UK would cost you two percent plus 20 pounds. So it basically means you can't really trade stocks.

11:45Yoni Assia: It means you can only buy and long and only if you have more than 5 ,000 pounds. So I'd say the first 10 years was lowering the barriers to entry, creating fractional stocks, lowering the cost of execution for people across the globe. Then roughly the next 10 years was really about educating retail investors who suddenly came in their masses. and we had to educate more people about more products. How to learn to be a trader, how to learn to be an investor, what is an ETF, how do I copy trade, what's a smart portfolio, what's a long short mutual fund. I think the next 10 years is really about people using AI to be able to trade and manage their risk and their trading on their behalf in a much, much more effective way.

12:33Yoni Assia: So when I think about the world today, hey, you can have a risk manager agent, you can have a chief investment officer agent, you can have Warren Buffett as one of your agents, and they can all together sort of opine and share on what to do in your portfolio. And with agentic trading, whether it's in the Toro agent portfolio or if we're talking about DeFi agent wallets, I think we're going to see more retail investors understand the power of basically using AI to manage their investments over time. Excellent. And all of that makes a lot of sense. And thank you for the very concise description of such a broad topic.

13:18One of the reasons I was so excited about this conversation is because it actually kind of tracks well with my own professional experience, which was at one phase of my career building in fintech 1.0, so on the cloud mobile API stack, a better bank, so a fully authorized bank in the UK, Allica, starting in 2014-15, and then now more recently, building infrastructure around 24-7 instant settlement of tokenized assets. So really kind of leaning into the tokenization transition as a form factor for financial assets. How do you think about the sort of infrastructure journey that you guys have been on over time.

14:05Where do you feel like you've been able to kind of get leverage at various parts of eToro's history? And then, you know, you mentioned AI agents, you mentioned DeFi, you mentioned tokenization a little bit. Where do you see the highest leverage infrastructure opportunities being right now?

14:23Yoni Assia: So, you know, we, I think one of the biggest leverage points of eToro over time was the fact that we're a regulated broker-dealer who is multi-asset from derivatives to equities to crypto to asset management, which is what a copy trader and smart portfolio is, and then continued to reinvest in our savings markets and spending markets or neobanking. So our biggest leverage point was the key understanding that when a customer comes to eToro and then trades another product, buys another product from eToro, their lifetime value and their retention rate increases significantly. And that's a lot of the leverage that we used across the years, which is we were able to be not only first to crypto, but one of the first regulated entities to enable you to very easily deposit fiat money, right?

15:22Yoni Assia: Deposit with PayPal or with your debit card or with your bank transfer. while most of the crypto companies out there still don't have banks, right? Or didn't used to have banks. So sort of leveraging on the fact that we're a regulated company that had already that brand that trusts the rails, the fiat rails, to be able to introduce new products into the markets. I think that's definitely one of the sort of biggest leverage points. And we see that now also diving into the market. So another big moat of Vitoro is the fact that we have now an experience of 20 years. And some of our pro investors are with us for more than, the majority are more than five years.

16:06Yoni Assia: But the big ones actually are with us more than 10 years on average. So when you see their track record, it's not a two-year track record or one-year track record. It's what 20-year-olds would look at a prediction market trader and say, hey, he has an amazing one-month track record. It's a 10-year track record you're looking at, and it's real. It's not luck anymore. It's about talent. It's about alpha. It's about finding the market. So I think it's infrastructure. It's building a trusted brand over a long period of time. And I think the last part, because you're talking about more technologies, is I think the inflection point eventually is when the infrastructure of blockchain becomes gradually the infrastructure of equities, of capital markets.

16:57Yoni Assia: So if you would look at SpaceX IPO, the largest IPO in history, we got a very nice IPO fill for retail investors in the UK. So an 80 % fill ratio roughly of UK clients, they were very smart about how they looked at it. So that's leveraging the fact that we're regulated, FCA regulators can offer SpaceX to people who love Bitcoin and Tesla, who are our customers. Right. And two days before that, we actually launched SpaceX, a derivative that is based on perps that traded on eToro. that sort of was an estimation of what is the IPO price. And post-IPO, the price of that 24-7 perpetual future actually translated into the real market perpetual future.

17:56Yoni Assia: So I think the ability to take innovation today from crypto into capital markets, to take capital markets, which is, for example, tokenized equities, and would love to talk about that more. Like take your SpaceX stock now and move it into your Zengo wallet. So actually making it now a digital asset, a tokenized equity, and then spending it or sending it to your friend or collateralizing it on Avermorpho. I think that's really the next stage where the lines start blurring between capital markets and crypto markets. Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. frankly, it's what I'm most interested in as well.

18:40You know, this convergence between what has been blockchain based financial innovation, i.e., you know, building and perfecting upgraded settlement rails, the merger effectively of those rails with the broader financial system and the new, you know, experiences, efficiency, speed that it unlocks. Two questions that I wanted to ask you, I'll start with the first. I hear a lot of people in the tokenized equity space. Here, I'm primarily talking about maybe firms that were crypto firms, crypto exchanges, who are now active issuers, distributors of tokenized equities. Kraken, Coinbase, a number of others come to mind.

19:20And people talk about tokenized equities, one of the value props of tokenized equities is being able to kind of distribute US equity exposure to people around the world that don't have access. And on the one hand, as someone in the US that does have access, I don't have direct experience with that pain point. And so I can kind of nod my head and say, sure, sounds good. On the other hand, eToro has been doing just that for the past 20 years. So talk to us about how real that value prop is with respect to tokenized equities versus the existing work that you've been doing, I think, through different structures, maybe some direct equity exposure, maybe some CFDs, but basically ways of getting exposure to equity price appreciation in parts of the world where it wouldn't have been easy over time.

20:13Yoni Assia: So, first of all, we now have about$20 billion of customer assets with an worth of$10 billion in stocks. So the vast majority of customer holdings are in stocks where we're the custodian of our customers. And we've seen that surge in customer interest across, say, roughly the last six years. I think you can say the rise of retail investors really started hitting in 2019. Then 20 was an inflection point. And then 2021 was a perfect storm with both a meme stock rally and crypto rally happening sort of at the same time. So we've seen that across the globe. But stocks are still, you know, have some limits to it versus tokenized equities, which is they used to trade only eight hours a day.

21:07Yoni Assia: Then it moved to 24-5. Now we are starting to move into 24-7, but we're moving there on derivatives because it's still not available in real stocks. Tokenized equities, on the other hand, automatically trade 24-7. The other part is transferability and convertibility. So you can buy stocks on Coinbase and then eventually send them to eToro. You can start your process somewhere and then move with your stocks. You can gift your stocks. You can potentially put your stocks in a cold storage. So I think transferability and then convertibility of stocks does create a different type of product in many, many cases, right?

21:52Yoni Assia: So in many places around the world, people are still very much concerned about their trust into financial services. I think being able to tokenize U.S. equities and enable more people to access tokenized equities maybe than traditional equities, I think that's a big opportunity. And I think moving 24-7 is a very, very big opportunity, especially, by the way, for my new friends, my AI agents. They don't sleep at night and they don't want the weekend off. So why don't let them trade? That makes sense. This is certainly very front of mind for me right now, given that our business, Multiliquid, does a lot of work around instant liquidity for tokenized assets, including tokenized equities.

22:40And it's just been increasingly a source of inbound conversation.

22:45Yoni Assia: We're just launching our tokenized equities. Yeah, yeah, great. So what Multiliquid is, is a neutral distribution platform for the growing pipeline of blue chip tokenized assets, whether they're in fund form, whether they're tokenized equities. So everything from money market funds to structured products, IG credit, high yields, tokenized reinsurance, you know, through to private credit and tokenized equities. All of these assets, which are in some cases permissioned, either only on primary, sometimes on primary and secondary. So there's some kind of coordination challenges, which ultimately impact liquidity.

23:25And without liquidity, it's difficult to deliver these true 24-7 instant workflows, which can then support things like automation, full DeFi composability, agentic finance running on top. So the multi-liquid platform is really designed to make deep aggregated liquidity across a range of different liquidity sources available in the right venue for the right asset at any moment in time to make these experiences much more instant.

23:55Yoni Assia: I don't know if you know the origins, but I'm one of the first people who ever wrote about tokenized assets back in 2012. And then Vitalik picked up the white paper in Bitcoin Talk and came to Itoro's offices. And we worked on a protocol called Colored Coins. And we actually went together and we presented Colored Coins as a way to tokenize assets on top of the Bitcoin network. And at some point, the project started to, you know, we did it as an open source project because the board of Vitoro told me, don't touch anything related to this. This is too much, too high risk. so everything like was open source but we were financing it right so I paid people in Bitcoin to sort of build open source projects of tokenization back in 2012 2013 then the project sort of forked to different opinions Vitalik went to build eventually Ethereum which you know was a superior line of thinking because he also brought in the concept of smart contracts and gas and automated market makers and everything there.

25:03Yoni Assia: So I'm a very big believer in tokenization and therefore in automated market makers, because again, liquidity becomes an issue if everything is tokenized and cross asset automated market makers, because if you have dollar to Facebook and dollar to Tesla, why don't you have Facebook to Tesla, right? So it's all algos and math. But I have to say that I'm actually surprised by how far the technology has gotten to and how fast it continues versus adoption. And I think the biggest hurdle was and maybe still is a regulatory one. So that the crypto, digital asset industry, a bit underestimated how hard it is to tokenize real world assets without real world regulators.

26:00I feel your pain. I spent a couple of years at Standard Chartered and we built a tokenized assets business within the bank. And yes, so that business from a technology standpoint is a platform to issue regulated securities as tokens on public blockchain. And then it also has a regulated broker-dealer arm to basically distribute and provide services around those securities. You can imagine what it was like to do that within the constraints of a top 40 global bank. This dates back, I guess, probably starting in 2021 or 2022. Different climate from a regulatory and policy standpoint. And we ended up partnering with Wellington, a large U.S.

26:46asset manager, and creating one of the first tokenized money market funds. Investment grade rated by Moody's in S &P, we were thrilled by the quality of this product that we were able to put out. But we very quickly ran up against those constraints of, in a sense, you're inheriting all of the TradFi on the back end. So subscriptions and redemptions or T plus two, anytime there's a fiat lag, which there needs to be because at some point you're buying and settling off-chain treasuries, you just run into all of that friction. And so a lot of the inspiration really for multi liquid was how do we take the best of what blockchain architecture defy architecture enables and then apply that to building better settlement for these assets yep a hundred percent i think uh

27:33Yoni Assia: i actually but i always said it i said in 2021 as well like and there was a famous quote i think which is elon musk's which is the most probable outcome is the most entertaining one right so So people thought NFTs is going to disrupt Sotheby's or Nike. And then we all stayed with our punks and crypto and apes, right? I think that what's interesting now is it's actually going on the other side. So the most interesting thing happening right now is, as you said, prediction markets and perps, which are starting in DeFi and are actually impacting TreadFi. they're pushing the TreadFi markets to be more like the crypto markets.

28:24Yoni Assia: So suddenly capital markets are copying crypto markets versus vice versa, which is, by the way, the way it should be because these are much, much faster, much smarter markets. So the other question that I wanted to ask you, and I think you're uniquely positioned here, you talked about your non-custodial wallet offering. and at this point, Coinbase is a non-custodial wallet offering, Robinhood as a non-custodial wallet offering, many leading kind of fintech neobanks investment platforms do. I see Coinbase effectively monetizing their non-custodial wallet through the base chain and their economic participation there.

29:06Talk to us about the monetization of your non-custodial wallet offering versus like any cannibalism of your core business, right? If you're like enabling people to come in, you know, maybe like mint a stock, you know, once an e-toro, transfer it to the wallet and then kind of go take it away and do DeFi. How does that interact with your core business and how do you think about monetization?

29:32Yoni Assia: So first of all, the biggest monetization platforms for all DeFi wallets are OnraPalfrent, right? which we have and invest at great length in our payment infrastructure, virtualized and the card. So a lot of synergies between the fact that we have a Visa debit card, a virtual bank account, payment rails that support multiple variety of how to fund an investment account in Toronto, withdraw money from it, including e-money licenses. that immediately applies to the on-ramp, off-ramp, basically ecosystem of DeFi wallets. The second part is buying crypto. That's what we do on DreadFi, right? So you come to Zengo.

30:20Yoni Assia: Eventually, you'll be able to already, by the way, it's up and running like three weeks or a month after closing. You can go to your Zengo app. You can fund your Zengo app with eToro SSO. So if you're a customer of eToro, you click SSO, you connect your Zengo eToro, you bring in money into your Zengo wallet, and then you can do whatever you can do on DeFi markets. And a lot of those things that you do in DeFi markets are, hey, I want to buy Ethereum. So you use, again, your funding in eToro to buy Ethereum, to bring it into your DeFi wallet. So I think those are like original OGs, revenue sources of the wallets were buying, on-ramp, and swaps, right?

31:08Yoni Assia: Those are the three original business plans of DeFi wallets, which are very similar to the core business of Vitor, which is trading and buying and selling crypto or stocks. Now the way we see it is the market is going to expand for you to be able to buy in Zengo, which is now our non-custodial wallet, Facebook stock and Tesla stock and SpaceX stock, right? So you were transitioning from you could buy in DeFi only crypto assets to you can actually buy on DeFi everything. And that excites us a lot. Then you can lend your Facebook stock to a decentralized lender. like Avermorpho and make interest on it, right?

31:53Yoni Assia: Which is similar to stock lending, but it's going to have different rates, different user experience. You'll be able to lend against your crypto or your tokenized equities. And of course, we're looking at, we launched prediction markets where applicable on Zengo. So they just recently launched it. And they're also looking at prediction markets, right? So swaps, prediction markets, tokenized assets, basically everything in DeFi. In many cases, the most exciting thing about having a non-custodial wallet, and we actually started building our own about four years ago with a Good Dollar project, which is our nonprofit, is you can do everything when you own your own keys, right?

32:39Yoni Assia: But owning your own keys is risky. It's complicated. That's what Zengo simplified, which is really the values of eToro. So it's much simpler with Zengo to have a Safeway MPC wallet bio sort of embedded into the MPC. So you can't lose your password because it has a backup in your face connected to it. Right. So a secure way to hold your own keys and transact in DeFi. Got it. All right. So I think we've covered all the building blocks at this point, which leads us into the crescendo. Agentic finance. Talk to us about what the current state of play is on the eToro platform with respect to AI and agentic finance and then where you see it going from here.

33:31Sure.

33:32Yoni Assia: So three parts to that. One is, and I'll start with this disclaimer, I'm under AI psychosis. so I've been talking to agents into humans over the last four months um and uh so uh so a bit of grain of salt I'm a bit sort of living in the future which by the way last time I felt like this was probably 2017 with blockchain right so you're going to these protocols and smart contracts and you're seeing what's happening you're like everything this is crazy like the technology of blockchain and smart contracts is wow right and it's the same with the experience i'm having with ai so and it started about a year ago and sort of started three paths on etoro one is we realize that everybody can actually suddenly build financial apps so let's give our pro investors the ability to build financial apps we created an ai studio for them that where they can actually built an app into the eToro app store.

34:34Yoni Assia: So we unleashed for them capabilities that they had no idea that they had. Like they were building products. They came on stage in eToro and they're like, I can't believe I'm now a builder, right? So now you have builders.etoro.com and every single week there's more APIs, more APIs, more APIs. You can do more things with APIs on eToro.com. Then second stage is we started rebuilding our entire stack with AI, right? So November, mid-November, Opus 4.5 comes in. Suddenly the best developers in Etoro come to me and say, Yoni, you were wrong before, but you're right now. AI can write code as good as we can.

35:19Yoni Assia: It just needs the right infrastructure and the right rails. And I'm like, great, so let's go on in, 100 % code written in AI. And then the third part is agents. And so we had APIs, we had the pro investors building apps on the Toro App Store, and we launched the agent of Vitoro, which is Tori, which is a frontier model, which is accessible to our customers, but it has access to your account, to your MCPs, right? So we were constantly building the MCPs, the CLI, like how do we build things for agent talks to? And we launched them in about September last year, and for like four months, we didn't see a lot of traction.

35:59Yoni Assia: We're trying to figure out why. And then I realized I'm not using it in my main account in eToro as well. Because I have a lot of money in my eToro main account. And I'm afraid to give my open claw or clawed or cursor access to my main account. So we launched the concept of agent portfolios. And ever since then, we're like at 50 % week over week growth and 30, 40 % month over month growth in some KPIs. because people needed to have that ability to say, okay, I have$10 ,000 in your Tori account, but I actually want AI to only have access to$100. And then you can go into Tori's agent and say, I want to open up now an agent portfolio with$100.

36:45Yoni Assia: Now give me the API key. You can go with it to Cloud or Cursor or Grok or Tori, our own AI agent. And you can basically either bring your own agent or use our agent to start trading for you algorithmically. Now, I've been trying to build algorithms which trade the market since I was about 16 because it just makes sense. Because you're like, okay, software can probably, 24-7 software can probably do this better than me. And I'm probably familiar with 100 different types of strategies in the markets. Many of them, by the way, have been replicated to smart portfolios. But I always needed resources.

37:27Yoni Assia: I always needed people to build something. Now I can go into QuantClaw, which is my quantitative trading agent, which overnight downloads research papers from the academies around the world, including universities in Japan and Australia, translates academic research papers into skills. Those skills go into QuantDB, which is where I have data scouts, AI agents looking for information on the internet and building our database and pipeline of information. And then I have testers who test these strategies, Ivy League quantitative research paper strategies on all of that data with our GPUs. So we wake up in the morning and we're like, hey, we have 50 more new signals.

38:20Yoni Assia: As usual, 45 have failed and five are interesting and might have alpha. Right. So this is like. Like we're running here things that. I would not have imagined two years ago we would ever be in the situation. I think that two years ago, maybe five funds around the world could have done what we're doing today. And what we're doing today is we're not doing it for ourselves. We're actually building this for our customers, right? So every time we're building new skills for our own AI, we're then, okay, now take that skill and let's make sure that Tori, our AI agent, has that skill. and I think that process of where I have pro investors working on money claw and they're building their own skills and I have a shared memory to learn about those skills and people are building tools that we can use for those AI agents to use I'm like I think the rates of return in the market and the volatility in the market is actually going to go up and up and up so I did this back just a while ago, I asked my open claw, do a three-year window moving average, move it over since 2008, tell me what happened to the rates of return.

39:41Yoni Assia: The inherent rates of return in the market are actually constantly scaling up. Of course, this is more due to inflation and the fact that governments are printing money and that great companies, our public companies are growing faster than the economy. but the fact is we're actually seeing that accelerate right so space, philanthropic, open AI, so many trillion dollar companies. 10 years ago I would have told you we're gonna have 10 trillion dollar companies. You're gonna tell me no way Jose. Now like it's now you know me telling somebody I think Itora is gonna be a trillion dollar company. Maybe you know reasonable maybe I hope it takes me less than 20 years but reasonable.

40:24you're pulling back the curtain on on the future so to tie a few these things together what what is the relationship between tokenized equity you know tokenized assets in general perps and this ai kind of agentic uh investment management future um agents ai can interact only with

40:49Yoni Assia: digital assets directly without an intermediary. I think if you ask any AI agent out there, what do you prefer? A digital asset where you have an API to or connecting to a centralized API. They will all say, let me have my own control. Let me make sure I have my own tools. By the way, the tooling themselves, I don't know if you've had that experience, but one of my first experiences with OpenClaw was, hey, OpenClaw, can you, I called him Quant, Hey, Quant, can you open for me a crypto wallet? And he goes, yes, sir. Here's your Ethereum address. I'm like, ooh, that's cool. I didn't teach him anything.

41:29Yoni Assia: And I'm like, okay, now go learn what you can trade and do with an Ethereum address. He comes back to me like a minute after and he's like, I can now trade 29 different prediction markets. I can trade 1 million assets on swap markets. I can also trade on prediction markets. I'm like, what? Because DeFi markets, the interesting thing about DeFi markets, they're based on smart contracts. Everything is open. Everything is APIs. So it's natural for AI to learn how to trade digital assets, right? Then if you look at all the rest of the innovations we're talking about, these are all tokenized equities.

42:10Yoni Assia: SpaceX tokenized equity one over one is, you know, the tokenized shares of SpaceX. SpaceX derivative that is a derivative on a Delta One price of SpaceX, but 5x leveraged, is also a tokenized equity of a derivative. The prediction market that asks who's going to win the World Cup or what is going to be the price of SpaceX in a year is also a tokenized asset, right? So these are all tokenized assets, types of tokenized assets that represent different perspectives on the price of something. and the beautiful thing about the markets is once you have a market you have capital formation and you have a market formation and if there is a relationship between and there is the spacex equity the spacex tokenized derivative and the spacex price in one year prediction market then you have liquidity created because you have then arbitragers and market makers who will always try to look at making money from those price differences.

43:27And the eToro platform sits at the heart of all of that. You've done incredible work over the past 20 years. I'm very, very excited about where you guys go from here. Yoni, thank you so much for making the time. This was a fantastic conversation.

43:43Yoni Assia: Thank you very much, Will. Pleasure.