Looking back on 2019 with eToroX

2019 has been a year of greater successes and excitement than we ever could have thought possible, and we find ourselves heading into 2020 uniquely positioned within the crypto industry. In one year, regulated crypto services and stablecoins have gone from curiosities worth exploring, to the future of the industry, and eToroX is leading the charge.

Here are a few of our more significant achievements from 2019 that have brought us to where we are today:

AlgoX Prime — We launched and announced our institutional-grade API trading program, AlgoX Prime, to a flurry of excitement at the Consensus invest conference in Singapore, prior to presenting it again at the Blockshow Summit. Algo X Prime employs the deep liquidity of eToro, extremely tight spreads and bespoke capabilities for institutional-level crypto-asset trading.

With highly competitive fees and a high-quality, low latency colocation service that incorporates professional-level connectivity and enables direct access to eToroX’s dedicated, high-security data center, AlgoX Prime is already playing a key role in our mission to help facilitate mass adoption and bridge the gap between traditional markets and crypto.

Lira — Following our acquisition of smart contract company Firmo, we were able to launch a brand new open-source programming language called Lira, marking the first step toward bringing the $500 trillion OTC derivatives market onto the blockchain.

Lira was announced in September at the Ethereal Summit, and presented at the DevCon Summit in Osaka, Japan, where it met with great interest and subsequent progress. Lira is a domain-specific language that can be used to write OTC financial contracts for assets currently on the Ethereum blockchain. It is the first decentralized finance (DeFi) project that looks to expand the code across different blockchains.

Stablecoins — One of the prime purposes of creating eToroX, and an early focus of ours has been to add and support a wide variety of stablecoins to the eToroX wallet and exchange to give users more value and a greater range of trading capabilities while attracting users from further afield and generally creating more opportunity in the stablecoin market.

2019 was a great year for stablecoins and we’ve spent a significant amount of time adding more assets to our services as well as trading pairs to extend usability. As of November, we have nearly reached our goal of supporting 120 ERC-20 tokens on our wallet, many of which are stablecoins. We have also added important cryptoassets, including EOS and Stellar among several others.

Gold/BTC pairing — Bitcoin is often referred to as crypto gold, acting in many ways as a store of value for the digital currency market, in much the same was as gold does in traditional finance. What better way to bridge the gap than to trade freely between gold (or GOLDX, a stablecoin pinned to real-world stores of gold) and Bitcoin?

Following this reasoning, another of our initiatives in 2019 was to offer this new trading pair, which is also contributing to the overall perception of cryptoassets as real stores of value.

Conferences and summits

One of the most exciting parts of working with crypto is networking, getting to know other entrepreneurs, sharing ideas, and discussing the future. In 2019, we had the opportunity to participate in several major events to facilitate these connections, including:

• Asia Crypto Week (Hong Kong)
• Blockchain and Bitcoin Conference Israel (Tel Aviv)
• Blockchain Week (Paris)
• The Next Web (Amsterdam)
• Ethereal Summit (New York)
• Consensus CoinDesk (New York)
• iFX EXPO (Limassol)
• Token Fest — Business of Blockchain (Tel Aviv)
• Blockchain Expo (Amsterdam)
• Fintech Junction (Tel Aviv)
• Asia Blockchain Summit (Taipei)
• BTC (Barcelona)
• Rise Hong Kong (Hong Kong)
• Ethereal Summit (Berlin)
• Consensus 2019 (Singapore)
• Web Summit (Lisbon)
• Malta AI and Blockchain Summit (Malta)
• Ethereal Summit (Tel Aviv)
• FMLS19 (London)
• Blockshow Asia (Singapore)

On top of all this, eToroX also acquired crypto portfolio tracker app Delta in September, an important piece of the puzzle to provide our users with information to help them make better decisions. By empowering users with knowledge, crypto investments become less risky, and more profitable in the long run, contributing to the movement towards mass adoption.

2019 has been an exciting year, and more is planned for 2020, as we continue to seek ways of bringing greater stability, more opportunity and increased transparency to the crypto market on its way to mass adoption. Thank you for your interest and belief in what we do in 2019, and we are greatly anticipating everything that the new year will bring.