Exness Group vs eToro

Exness was founded in October 2008 by Petr Valov and Igor Lychagov in St. Petersburg, Russia — launching in the same month that Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial crisis reached its most acute point. The timing was counterintuitive: financial institutions were failing, trust in banks was collapsing, and these two entrepreneurs were starting a retail forex brokerage. Their thesis was that the crisis would drive more individual traders to seek alternative instruments, and that a broker built on genuine transparency and reliable execution could attract them. They initially focused on Eastern Europe and Asia.

Exness relocated its headquarters to Limassol, Cyprus — the Mediterranean hub that had become the European regulatory home for retail forex brokers — and obtained a licence from the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) in 2013. The CySEC licence provided EU regulatory standing and the ability to passport services across European markets. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) licence followed in 2015. Exness was one of the first retail forex brokers to voluntarily commission Deloitte to audit and publish its trading volumes and client withdrawal data twice annually — a transparency measure that made it significantly more credible than most competitors.

Exness built its competitive position on features its larger competitors could not or would not offer: an automated withdrawal system processing withdrawals in seconds at any hour; zero-spread accounts with execution at interbank prices; unlimited leverage for professional traders in certain jurisdictions; and a proprietary ecommand execution architecture designed to minimise requotes and slippage. These were not marketing claims — they were measurable technical advantages that professional and high-volume retail traders could verify through their own trading activity. The platform expanded to offer forex, metals, energies, indices, stocks, and cryptocurrencies through a single account.

In August 2023, Exness recorded a monthly trading volume of $4.52 trillion — a figure that placed it among the largest financial intermediaries on Earth by volume, dwarfing the trading activity of many publicly traded banks and brokerages. The company had over 625,000 active monthly clients in more than 150 countries, with a team of over 7,200 employees representing 90+ nationalities. Exness had grown from a St. Petersburg startup founded during a financial crisis to the world's highest-volume retail forex broker — almost entirely through product quality and word-of-mouth rather than marketing spend. The company remained private, disclosed no valuation, and maintained a deliberately low public profile.

By 2025, Exness employed 7,200 people and had acquired land in Cyprus for €75 million to expand its Limassol campus. The company launched a social trading product allowing clients to copy successful traders — a feature that brought it into direct competition with eToro's CopyTrader. Exness operated under regulatory licences in the UK (FCA), Cyprus (CySEC), South Africa (FSCA), Seychelles (FSA), Kenya (CMA), and several other jurisdictions. The company continued to be regulated, audited by Deloitte, and almost entirely invisible in mainstream financial media — a $4 trillion per month broker that most people in finance had never heard of.

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.