eToro CEO: Navigating the Bear Market and the Road to $250K Bitcoin

19 April 2026 | 14:49

Key Takeaways:

• Bear Market Confirmed: Yoni Assia identifies the current phase as a bear market, emphasizing that the timing of recovery remains the primary unknown.
• The Self-Fulfilling Cycle: The traditional four-year crypto cycle persists as a psychological and mechanical phenomenon driven by participant behavior.
• $250K Bitcoin by 2030: Assia maintains a "crypto-conservative" target, betting on institutional adoption and supply dynamics.
• The $100 Trillion Shift: The bottleneck for moving real-world assets on-chain is regulatory infrastructure, not technology.
• 24/7 Market Evolution: Crypto is already forcing traditional markets toward continuous operation as stocks begin trading on-chain around the clock.

There is a particular kind of evasion that runs through crypto market conferences. When prices are down and sentiment is fragile, few on stage are willing to be the one to say the word. Yoni Assia, the CEO of eToro, is not one of them. During a recent interview at Paris Blockchain Week, when asked directly if the market had entered a "bear" phase, Assia didn't hedge. He confirmed it.

The weight of that confirmation comes from Assia’s unique vantage point. He isn't a commentator with nothing to lose; he is the leader of a publicly listed platform watching the real-time behavior of retail traders across 25 markets. What he sees in the data is a pattern he has navigated four times before: 2013, 2017, 2021, and now, 2025. He even shared his own recent trades—selling a portion of his Bitcoin at $126,000 in October and buying back in increments from $110,000 down to $100,000—as proof that the cycle’s psychological and mechanical power catches everyone.

The Self-Fulfilling Machine

Assia describes the four-year cycle not as a broken relic, but as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Caution at the top breeds selling, which triggers a downturn, which in turn forces defensive moves from those who never intended to exit. It is a cycle that causes itself. While massive institutional inflows from ETFs and sovereign funds have entered the mix, Assia argues they haven't killed the cycle—they have simply slowed it down, creating a more "grinding" and less dramatic market than the crashes of 2018 or 2022.

The $100 Trillion Vision

The real story, according to Assia, isn't just about the current price—it’s about the $100 trillion in real-world assets (RWA) that he believes are inevitably moving on-chain. The bottleneck isn't the technology; it's the lack of a legal infrastructure that makes on-chain ownership as trustworthy as a traditional deed.

While he acknowledges progress, such as the SEC’s recent clarity on non-custodial wallets and the DTCC enabling stock tokenization, he views these as mere steps. He warns that while a built infrastructure is hard to "undo," a hostile administration can still starve it of adoption. The window is open, but the race is on to see how much can be built before that window potentially narrows.

A 24/7 Market Magnet

Perhaps his most underreported observation is how crypto is already warping traditional capital markets. Stocks like Tesla and Meta are already trading on-chain 24 hours a day. Crypto markets are now forming the prices for these assets before traditional exchanges even open their doors. Assia calls this a "magnet," a structural pressure that will eventually force traditional institutions to abandon the concept of "opening" and "closing" bells. For a new generation of traders, continuous pricing is already the default expectation.

The "Conservative" Path to $250,000

Assia’s Bitcoin price target—$250,000 by 2030—landed with a deliberate lack of drama. In a room full of million-dollar predictions, he calls himself a "crypto conservative." This number isn't a marketing hook; it’s an accountable estimate based on institutional adoption, regulatory clarity, and supply compression.

He believes the rising tide of tokenization will make the entire on-chain ecosystem structurally harder to exit. The current bear market hasn't changed that destination; it has only changed the timeline. By buying back into a falling market, Assia is signaling that he is willing to be early and "wrong" in the short term to be right in the long one. Bitcoin is currently trading near $75,000, but for Assia, the focus isn't on the gap—it's on the infrastructure being built to fill it.