Crypto’s eToro plans Wall Street debut with $5 billion IPO goal

eToro, the retail trading platform founded in 2007, is officially chasing the big leagues. According to a Jan. 17 report by the Financial Times, the company has filed confidential documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to prepare for an initial public offering (IPO) in New York.

They’re targeting a valuation of $5 billion and it could happen as early as the second quarter of this year, according to the report.

Why eToro chose New York over London

eToro’s largest market is in the UK, but it’s turning its back on London, a market its CEO Yoni Assia says no longer serves the company’s global ambitions. In his own words:

“Very few of our global clients would trade UK shares. Something in the US market creates a pool of both deep liquidity and deep awareness for those assets that are trading in the US”

Back in 2021, the company tried a $10.4 billion merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), but it ultimately fell apart in 2022. Assia explained the reasoning at the time, saying, “The markets aren’t there.”

That SPAC boom, which promised quick and easy access to public markets, had already imploded by then. In 2023, the company raised $250 million in a funding round led by big names like SoftBank and Ion Group.

That round valued the company at $3.5 billion. Now with Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and UBS backing it, eToro is going to Wall Street.

An IPO process starts when the company decides it’s time to go public, and it usually comes down to needing money for expansion or giving early stakeholders a way to turn their equity into actual dollars. Once that decision is locked in, the next step is bringing in underwriters (that’s Goldman Sachs and the rest).

These banks will figure out the company’s worth, guide the share pricing, and manage how the stock is introduced to the market. Then the company’s financials are picked apart and put under a microscope. Everything—balance sheets, operations, risks—gets thrown into a registration document, typically an S-1 form, which is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

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