Social trading and multi-asset brokerage company eToro has acquired Firmo, a smart
contract infrastructure provider, for an undisclosed amount, eToro announced on
Monday. The company said the acquisition aims to bring it “one step closer to
becoming the first truly global service provider allowing people to trade,
invest and save.”
The Firmo team will act as an internal innovation unit and
will be tasked with bringing to life the goal of tokenizing all assets on the
eToro platform. This will involve research and development of a
blockchain-based infrastructure for the representation of assets and the
execution of trade processes.
Commenting on the acquisition, Yoni Assia, co-founder and
CEO of eToro, said the deal “will enable eToro to accelerate the growth of our tokenized
assets offering.”
“Blockchain and the tokenization of assets will play a major
role in the future of finance. 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,” Assia added.
eToro, a brokerage company providing a social trading platform
supporting both traditional assets and crypto-assets, established its digital
asset subsidiary eToroX last year. eToroX is responsible for “defining and
executing eToro’s vision around blockchain and the development of
cryptoassets.” In particular, it is building a product range and infrastructure
centered on tokenized assets.
Today, eToroX manages eToro’s newly launched
wallet and will run the company’s forthcoming crypto-assets exchange set for
global launch later this year.
eToroX was
granted a distributed ledger technology (DLT) license from the Gibraltar
Financial Services Commission (GFSC) in December 2018.
“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.”
Founded in 2017, Danish startup Firmo provides a platform to securely deploy financial contracts and which can work with any blockchain. The startup has developed a formally verified, domain-specific contract language, called FirmoLang, which, with the support of Firmo’s compiler can be translated onto a number of blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, EOS or NEO.
Omri Ross, CEO and founder of Firmo and an assistant
professor at the University of Copenhagen, said:
“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.
“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’s acquisition of Firmo comes as the company continues
to expand its crypto-asset offering, announcing simultaneously the addition of
Tron’s TRX token. TRX, eToro’s 15th crypto-asset available on the
eToro platform, 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,” made headlines in 2018 when it announced
the acquisition of BitTorrent, one of the largest peer-to-peer sharing
platforms in the world with more than 100 million active users.
Earlier this year, BitTorrent launched
BTT, a utility token based on the Tron protocol. The move marked BitTorrent’s first
step in tokenizing its content sharing ecosystem.