eToro shares jump on news of Zengo acquisition in crypto and prediction market move

Shares of eToro jumped almost 5% on the news that it will buy crypto wallet Zengo for an undisclosed amount. Shares now trade at $38, which gives the Tel Aviv-based trading platform a $3 billion market cap.

The deal will enable eToro to boost its crypto applications, the two companies said in a release announcing the deal.

“It will strengthen our ability to support evolving digital asset use cases, including tokenised assets and emerging decentralised trading models such as prediction markets and perpetuals, as these markets develop,” the firm said in a statement.

Yoni Assia, eToro’s CEO, added that the deal would help the company make a bigger push into the world of self-custody. eToro debuted a non-custodial crypto wallet in December and has said it’s planning new products.

“We believe the future of finance will be increasingly digital, decentralised and user-controlled, he said.

Zengo is a crypto wallet that supports over 1,000 assets. It prides itself on security and does not use seed phrases like other self-custody crypto wallets.

The deal was worth $70 million, Bloomberg reported. Neither eToro nor Zengo responded to questions from DL News. 

The push into the crypto space comes despite the price of major coins being significantly down since last year’s bull run. The overall cryptocurrency market is down 40% since its October high and is now worth nearly $2.6 trillion.

eToro in February said it's very focused on crypto despite its quarterly earnings showing a surge in interest in commodity trading.

“We have no doubt that we’ll see more and more engagement — especially by the way of younger crypto-native generations — into crypto, despite the price of Bitcoin right now,” Assia said at the time.

Interest in the DeFi space is surging. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, in February said it was working with decentralised exchange Uniswap and had invested in its native token.

And Hyperliquid, a decentralised perpetual futures exchange, in March received the green light from the S&P Dow Jones Indices to debut a new contract giving traders exposure to the S&P 500.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.