Tokenized Assets, Perps and Agentic Trading with Yoni Assia of eToro
AI can interact only with digital assets directly, without an intermediary. DeFi markets are based on smart contracts. Everything is open, everything is APIs. So it's natural for AI to learn how to trade digital assets.
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Yoni Assia is the Co-Founder and CEO of eToro, which he started in 2007 with his older brother with the goal of opening global markets to everyone. Nearly twenty years on, eToro is the largest social investment network in the world, with 40 million registered users, 4 million funded brokerage accounts and around $20 billion in customer assets spanning equities from 25 markets, derivatives and more than 200 crypto assets.
Yoni has been early to nearly every shift in the space: eToro began trading Bitcoin at $5 in 2011, and in 2012 he wrote one of the first papers on tokenized assets, going on to fund the Colored Coins protocol alongside a young Vitalik Buterin. With the acquisition of non-custodial wallet Zengo and the launch of agent portfolios on the eToro platform, he is now building directly at the intersection of tokenized equities, DeFi markets and autonomous AI trading.
Tokenized equities trade 24/7 by default and move between venues in a way ordinary shares can't. Perps and prediction markets, born in DeFi, are pulling capital markets toward crypto market structure rather than the other way around.
AI agents, Yoni argues, gravitate to digital rather than traditional assets because of the open, programmatic nature of smart contracts and DeFi, effectively open APIs for finance. Crypto rails are the default for agentic finance, which is already here.
Please enjoy the following insights from Yoni Assia of eToro.
What Tokenized Equities Unlock
Equity markets went from eight hours a day, Monday-Friday, to 24/5, and are only now inching toward 24/7, primarily through derivatives. Tokenized equities are 24/7 by default, with no banking hours, exchange calendar or settlement delays.
The biggest advantages of tokenized stocks, Yoni argues, are transferability and convertibility. Buy a share on one venue and move it to another, gift it, put it in cold storage, or post it as collateral on Aave or Morpho. Interactions with perps and prediction markets extend both speculative and risk management use cases.
🎬 Watch: Why Tokenized Equities Are Better Than TradFi
https://youtube.com/shorts/vamWWcs-vNA
Capital Markets Are Copying Crypto Markets
Prediction markets and perps started in DeFi and are now pulling traditional capital markets toward crypto market structure. eToro launched a SpaceX perpetual two days before the IPO, and post-listing the price of that 24/7 contract converged with the real market. Users are starting to pull TradFi onto crypto rails.
🎬 Watch: Capital Markets Are Copying Crypto Markets
https://youtube.com/shorts/dPROl5K1bMg
Blockchains are the Rails for Agentic Finance
Yoni asked his agent to open a crypto wallet. It returned an Ethereum address with no training or configuration. He then asked it to work out what it could actually do with that address.
The answer: 29 prediction markets, a million assets on swap markets. DeFi, tokenized assets, perps and prediction markets are smart contracts with tradeable outputs. Every venue is effectively an open API for agents to transact on. Blockchains are the rails for agentic finance.
🎬 Watch: The Agent That Opened Its Own Wallet
https://youtube.com/shorts/ofDVArUKaLk
Why Agents Prefer Digital Assets
Ask any AI agent whether it would rather hold its own keys and assets or connect to permissioned, centralized APIs, and Yoni says it picks autonomy every time. An agent can interact with a digital asset directly, with no intermediary in the middle. The tokenized equity, the derivative on it and the prediction market on its future price are all tokenized assets expressing different views on the same thing, and that density of related positions is what creates the liquid markets for finance to run on.
🎬 Watch: Why Agents Prefer Digital Assets
https://youtube.com/shorts/gmv1BZKa7EU
🎬 Watch the Full Episode
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