Founded in 2007, eToro has built up a community of more than 10 million registered users for its "social" trading platform, enabling participants to see, follow and automatically copy the actions of other investors in real time.

Over the last few years, cryptocurrencies have become an increasingly important part of the firm's business and now it is betting heavily on their underlying technology. Blockchain, says a statement, "means that the eToro business has, and will continue to, evolve".

Yoni Assia, CEO, eToro, says: "The acquisition of Firmo will enable eToro to accelerate the growth of our tokenized assets offering. Blockchain and the tokenization of assets will play a major role in the future of finance. We believe that in time all investable assets will be tokenized and that we will see the greatest transfer of wealth ever onto the blockchain."

Firmo says that its underlying technology provides a platform to securely deploy financial contracts and can work with any blockchain.

The Firmo team will now act as an internal innovation unit at eToro, tasked with bringing to life the goal of tokenizing all assets on eToro. This will involve research and development of infrastructure for the representation of assets and the execution of trade processes on blockchain infrastructure.

Omri Ross, CEO, Firmo, says: "The advent of crypto and the blockchain technology that underpins it has driven an explosion in financial innovation, however, a number of challenges are preventing mass adoption and integration into legacy infrastructure. Our goal is to enable our users to trade any asset globally with instant settlement by tokenizing assets and executing all essential trade processes on the blockchain."