Coinbase Global, Inc. vs eToro

Brian Armstrong was working as a software engineer at Airbnb in 2012 when he read the Bitcoin whitepaper and became convinced it was transformative. He quit Airbnb and co-founded Coinbase with Fred Ehrsam, a former Goldman Sachs trader, through Y Combinator. Their thesis was deliberate and contrarian to the rest of the crypto industry: compliance and regulation were not obstacles to be avoided, but competitive advantages to be pursued. While other exchanges operated offshore to avoid regulatory scrutiny, Coinbase sought every licence it could obtain. The strategy was expensive and slow. It proved decisive.

Coinbase had 13,000 users in 2012. By 2017's Bitcoin bull run, it had 15 million. The exchange became the on-ramp for mainstream America's first crypto purchases — the place where people converted dollars into Bitcoin for the first time. Coinbase built a custody business alongside its exchange: institutional-grade cold storage for Bitcoin and other digital assets, targeted at hedge funds, corporations, and sovereign entities that wanted crypto exposure but required enterprise security and insurance. The custody service would later become the most strategically valuable part of the business.

Coinbase went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq in April 2021, with shares opening at $381 and giving the company a market capitalisation of approximately $85 billion on day one. The listing was the first of a major crypto company on a US stock exchange and was widely interpreted as a coming-of-age moment for the crypto industry. At peak, Coinbase's market cap exceeded $100 billion. The company earned $1.8 billion in revenue in Q1 2021 alone, driven by trading fees during the crypto bull market.

The crypto market crash of 2022 devastated Coinbase: revenue fell 57% year-on-year, the company reported a $1 billion net loss, and its stock fell from $381 to below $40. The SEC sued Coinbase in June 2023, alleging it had been operating as an unregistered securities exchange. The case went to court and became the central regulatory battle defining whether crypto assets were securities. Coinbase fought back aggressively, arguing that the SEC's approach was regulatory overreach that would destroy the US crypto industry by driving it offshore.

Coinbase reported $6.6 billion in total revenue for 2024, with net income of $2.6 billion. The company's strategic position had been cemented by one development above all others: when the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, followed by Ethereum ETFs in May 2024, virtually every major issuer — BlackRock, Fidelity, Ark, VanEck — chose Coinbase as their custodian. The most regulated crypto company in the United States had become the safekeeping infrastructure for Wall Street's entry into crypto. Every dollar that institutional America moved into Bitcoin or Ethereum passed through Coinbase custody. The Airbnb engineer who had believed in compliance as a competitive advantage had been right.

Yoni Assia grew up in a family where investing was dinner table conversation. His father, David Assia, was the co-founder and CEO of Magic Software; he used to stop the car outside their local bank to point out the end-of-day stock market quotes displayed in the window and discuss them with his son. Yoni received shares as a bar mitzvah gift. After completing IDF military service in a technology intelligence unit and co-founding a video system startup, he returned to building what he had always wanted: a way for ordinary people to access financial markets. In 2007, aged 25, he and his brother Ronen and their colleague David Ring founded eToro in Tel Aviv — originally called RetailFX — in his parents' garage.

eToro's breakthrough innovation was the CopyTrader feature, launched in 2010 via the OpenBook platform. Users could browse the trading histories of other investors and automatically replicate their trades in real time, proportionally allocating capital to mirror their positions. The feature blended finance with social networking: successful traders became influencers with follower counts; beginners could piggyback on expert strategies without understanding the underlying instruments. CopyTrader was fundamentally different from anything that existed in finance — a genuine democratisation of institutional-quality strategy access.

eToro added cryptocurrency trading in 2017, perfectly timed for the historic Bitcoin bull run that year. Crypto trading volumes surged to become a significant share of eToro's revenue, and the platform attracted millions of retail investors who were crypto-native but wanted a regulated, familiar interface. The 2017 crypto rally drove eToro's revenue to record levels and permanently expanded its user base. Yoni Assia's early writing about the need for digital currencies — published in 2012 — had positioned him as a thoughtful voice in the space years before it went mainstream.

eToro had attempted a SPAC merger in 2021 at a $10.4 billion valuation that was cancelled amid market volatility. The company raised $250 million at a $3.5 billion valuation in March 2023 and began preparing for a traditional IPO. Revenue had reached $931 million in 2024 — up from $639 million in 2023 — driven almost entirely by a surge in crypto trading volumes ($12 billion versus $4 billion the prior year). The platform served 40 million registered users in 75+ countries, with 3.81 million funded accounts and $18.5 billion in assets under administration.

eToro completed its IPO on Nasdaq on May 14, 2025, pricing shares at $52 each — above the planned $46-50 range — and opening at $69.69. The company raised approximately $310 million and was valued at $5.64 billion at IPO. Yoni and Ronen Assia remained at the helm — Yoni as CEO, Ronen as Executive Director. The platform that Yoni had built in his parents' garage, because his father used to stop the car to read stock prices in a bank window, was now a publicly traded company on the world's most prestigious stock exchange.