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Steve Anderrson Monday, 13 January 2020, 13:19 EST Modified date: Monday, 13 January 2020, 13:20 EST

Bitcoins market presence and value have been on a definite rise in these early days of 2020. The price increased 11% within the first week of the year and then fell to $7,900 on January 9, but not before peaking at about $8,400 on January 8, a high that hadnt seen since November 2019.

The growing influence and value of cryptocurrencies have brought in significant changes to the Israeli trading platform eToro. The company has managed an investment social network since 2007 and its cryptocurrency exchange division eToroX since 2019.

Cryptocurrencies alone have accounted for 20% of their total trading volume through eToroX.eToro CEO Yoni Assia said that eToro provides a social network for investors to see what assets are invested in, whether it be indices, stocks, or cryptocurrencies.

Most of eToros trading volume still sits in the stocks sector as the global stock market continued setting records in 2019. In an interview with the Daily Globes, Assia spoke on how Bitcoin will continue to lead the cryptocurrency market.

Assia stated that they see a lot of people coming into their platform for cryptocurrency trading and then later get into stock trading and remain on the platform. eToro is also one of the few platforms in the world where stocks can traded using bitcoin.

eToro also launched a digital wallet through which customers can hold and transfer their cryptocurrencies. The company also has plans to launch its debit card so its users can instantly debit the transferred currencies.

Assia stated, The card will help expand eToros financial services and will be available in more than 100 countries around the world.

Assai says that when eToro entered the market was very strategic for them since most exchanges got into cryptocurrency trading during early 2018 when the unprecedented rise in Bitcoin value came in 2017.

All the new exchanges profited from the boom, but it was short-lived as the crypto winter hit, and most exchanges succumbed to all the market pressure.

But by the second quarter of 2019, as eToro got into the crypto trading market, surges in the transactional volume and market prices were surging again due to the announcement of Facebooks Libra coin.

This brought awareness of cryptocurrencies to globally. eToro observed a 5x increase in transaction volume and the number of cryptocurrency traders on its platform. As the market stabilized during the third and fourth quarters of 2019, eToro saw a two to three times increase in crypto users and transaction volumes.

eToro had also acquired two startups, the Belgia-based cryptocurrency portfolio monitoring platform Delta, and a Danish startup Firmo, whose specialty lies in developing more secure smart contracts on the blockchain.

The company hopes to integrate Delta customers into eToroX and use the technology developed by Firmo in conjunction with eToros blockchain laboratory. They launched 17 stablecoins on eToroX this year.

In early 2019, Yoni Assia, along with his brother Ronen Assia, who is also the co-founder, and chief product officer of eToro, stated that they planned to expand their investment social network to investors in other countries such as Hong Kong, China, and South Africa.

Assia also went on to say that eToro expanded its business significantly by about 50% in Australia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. They also held an event in the United States. At the moment, eToro only provides cryptocurrency transaction services to U.S. customers, but they hope to expand to more countries in the future.

Yoni Assia also spoke about Israeli company INX which offers cryptocurrencies as security tokens saying, Securities tokens are an exciting market segment, but the liquidity and supply of this market are still not enough to attract investors.

I think that among the hot words in the various cryptocurrency markets we hear about, security tokens will be in the infrastructure development phase this year. On the other hand, in my opinion, stablecoins and DeFi applications are areas where we will see more activity in 2020.

He also believes that in the next decade, the financial industry will undergo tokenization with a basis on blockchain infrastructure. It will all be part of the gradual vast digitization of the financial sector.

When asked about his thoughts on the future of cryptocurrencies and the challenges they will face in 2020, Assia said that he believes Bitcoin will continue to lead the cryptocurrency market in the long run.

Ethereum also holds massive potential with its smart contract technology, and ripple will design the infrastructure on fund transfers between banks.

He also says that other unusual coins like Tezos that focuses on creating decentralized corporate control over IOTA will also grow prominently in their respective fields of expertise.

He also considers Bitcoin halving to be a significant event, and it will bring forth price hikes in the market.

Assia has finally mentioned that he firmly believes that the Bitcoin community came a long way in 2019 and that the concept of Bitcoin and the financial benefits it holds against traditional currencies has already taken hold of consumers in various countries.

The public discussion of Bitcoin will only continue to grow, and the stock market will continue to break records on the side.

Visit link:
eToro CEO On Bitcoin Dominance in the Cryptocurrency Market - The Coin Republic