How Tokenization Is Reshaping Markets With 24/7 Trading of Stocks, Gold and Oil

Well, joining me to weigh in here at Consensus in Miami is Yoni Assia, the CEO and co-founder of eToro.

Yoni, great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

Well, first and foremost, let's talk about the temperature on the ground here in Miami.

What do you make of some of the conversations that are taking place when it comes to digital assets?

Well, I think there's two very interesting lanes everybody's talking about.

One is tokenization.

And if you think of tokenization on a large scale, it's about tokenizing U.S. stocks, tokenizing equities.

We've transformed into 24-7 through crypto.

Basically, now we toro on gold, silver, oil stocks suddenly trading 24-7 due to tokenization.

Second, of course, is tokenization of different types of trading activities.

If you think about prediction markets as sort of tokenization, private markets, Anthropic is actually trading now in crypto markets.

So what you're seeing is a lot of tokenized assets, whether derivatives or wrappers, trading in crypto markets that actually are not yet trading. in traditional markets.

So everybody's talking both on real-world assets, on new type of assets being tokenized, and of course, a lot of dialogues around policy, the Clarity Act, when is it going to be signed, how is it going to impact the entire crypto landscape, and is it going to bring really an institutional flow into crypto activities.

And Yoni, you've been attending a lot of events, but you're here on the ground and you are about to take the stage later today.

And you'll be speaking on the panel, Securing the Next Decade of Decentralized Finance.

So can you give us a little bit of insight into what you'll be actually talking about?

Sure.

So if you look at the last 10 years, we've seen amazing innovation in DeFi.

I think 2017-18 sort of really picked up DeFi with ICOs, right?

Then you had all of the DeFi-like Aave and Compound and our Morpho.

So you have lending at very large scale, right?

So you have about a hundred billion dollars of lending, which today is really about lending against crypto assets, but it's a sizable business already.

And when you think of tokenized assets and real world assets coming on chain, that means you'll be able to take the same protocols and innovation that you've seen in DeFi for the past five years growing at 10x scale because they'll suddenly become institutionalized and will enable real world assets lending and yield swaps.

So all of the innovations we've seen, I always say that the crypto world to some extent is like a sandbox. of innovators, of builders, of geeks that are constantly building very, very, very smart technology that, you know, in a bank would require 10,000 employees to run.

And in smart contracts, it's one programmer building a really, really smart contract.

And I think what we'll see over the next 10 years is the translation or transformation of a lot of the DeFi technologies that have been basically Proved their abilities right their scale their success in the crypto world Transform into real world assets and that will bring a lot of opportunities moving now from you know Moving stocks from one broker to another takes today somewhere between three to 15 days, when you think of stocks, private markets moving on chain, it means everything is 24-7, everything is transferable, a much global ledger for more people to operate and use new technologies that came from crypto DeFi.

Yeah, and speaking of which, I do want to ask you about a technology that we all use and we are all paying attention to, and that is artificial intelligence.

So when it comes to AI, can you tell us your vision for this technology and how do you think this will affect the future of the global market?

So we're very much into transforming everything we do to agents.

So over the last nine months, we launched the Toro APIs, the Toro MCP servers, the Toro CLI, an agent portfolio, an agent wallet.

My view is within the next 12 to 24 months, most trading activity on eToro is actually going to be done by agents.

I have 40 agents right now living on my phone, speaking to them on WhatsApp.

And each of them are PhD level in finance, in mathematics, in engineering, in quantitative trading, right?

So I'm teaching and training my AIs.

Everything they can learn from the Internet.

They wake up every morning and send me a report of what they read yesterday happening in the markets.

They're specialized into different categories in eToro.

So I understand that.

I want a I to trade on my behalf, and I think that's a. very big trend, not only trading and trading and investing in commerce, right?

So you look at all the great companies out there, they're all looking at this marvelous technology, which means that somebody can have a team of agents that are super smart, working for them 24-7.

And I think that's a very big shift.

This is the year, I call it in eToro, where agents are coming and I expect that by the end of the year, A significant part of eToro customers will have the eToro agent working for them, and all of our employees are going to have the internal eToro agents working for them.

Yeah, Yoni, that's really interesting.

And hopefully if you have time, I might ask you about that after the show.

But many institutions are present here at Consensus and they are talking about the convergence of TradFi and DeFi.

So whether we're talking about people who actually are working for these organizations or attendees, innovators, as well as builders.

So what do you think is coming as a result of crypto infrastructure entering TradFi here?

I think, first of all, it's important to connect the dots between DeFi and AI.

So one of the first thing I did with my OpenClaw, I told him, open for me an Ethereum account.

And he said, done.

I'm like, oh, wow.

And then I said, give me the address.

And I sent it $100.

And he's like, I just got $100.

What do you want me to do with it?

Can you trade for me perpetual markets and prediction markets?

He's like, let me find out the skills.

I have no access to 10 prediction markets and 10 perpetual markets.

I'm like, can you carve a strategy for me to trade?

And he's like, yes, sure.

What style of strategy?

And I'm like, going with this.

And he actually did the trades, reported back to me.

He lost a bit of money.

I told him, can you try making that money?

But what's interesting is, DeFi is very native for AI, like it's out of the box.

They can learn the skills, they can connect to all of the different venues, they can trade on your behalf everywhere because DeFi is technology and AI works very well with technology.

So I think when you connect the dots and say, okay, super intelligence at the hand of users and users have agents and agents are going to trade on their behalf, they're going to want to trade on DeFi rails. because they want to trade on what's native for AI, which is DeFi Rail.

So PredFi is basically, and I think, by the way, it's amazing then to connect that to policy.

You can hear SEC Chair Paul Atkins saying, we want to move U.S. capital markets on chain, right?

So when you move real capital markets, real world assets on chain, you basically make those assets AI native.

And if you think of AI that can trade 24-7, never sleeps, and probably will trade and do everything a lot more, because it never sleeps and never goes on vacation, then I think that will force Treadify to go on-chain even faster than people think right now.

Well, finally, as someone who is in the space as well, I do have to ask you about hallucinations as well as security.

Where are you concerned?

Where are your concerns in addition to the opportunities?

So first of all, as a regulated company, we put a lot of guardrails, right?

So we have AI doing security on AI.

We have people that are coming from compliance and regulation trading AI on compliance and on rules.

By the way, AI is really great at understanding rules and regulations, right?

So you can give AI the book of rules and regulation and we're regulated across the globe, right?

So 10 different jurisdictions across the globe from the US to Australia, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, UK.

And you give AI the rules, and you're saying, OK, these are the rules.

Here's a product.

Evaluate.

Put the guardrails in.

So I think, actually, a lot of the perceived risks, which are correct, it's if you're not using AI properly.

And it's the same, by the way, when you think of trading and investing, right?

I'm a very big believer people should invest in the markets.

People should learn how to trade.

That's what we do in eToro.

We educate people on how to trade the markets.

But in order to be successful, you need to understand the risks and you need to learn quite a bit on how to become a successful trader.

Using AI is no different.

AI is an amazing tool.

It's super intelligence in your hands.

But you really need to learn how to use it correctly.

And you need to spend a lot of hours with AI.

I think I've been talking more to AI agents over the past three months than to you. people, and you learn gradually really how to operate it.

So AI sometimes, you know, it's a P, I tell my team like it's a PhD level in math and engineering and finance and also chemistry and biology and everything you will teach it, but then sometimes it acts like a three-year-old.

Sometimes it forgets, sometimes it lies to you, sometimes it tells you the wrong things, And you need to constantly train it, build for it a memory layer, a knowledge layer, learn from other AIs.

So I think it's all work in progress.

It's all on the cutting edge of technology.

But people should 100% start embracing it and learning how to work with it.

Well, Yoni, just like everything, I think education is key here, especially with technology.

So thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.