eToro, a foreign exchange and cryptocurrency brokerage which allows its customers to copy the trades of other customers, has added MIOTA to its list of tradeable assets.

It is now the twelfth cryptocurrency to find its way to eToro’s platform. The last new addition was Cardano in June.

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Early adopter of Bitcoin

eToro was founded in 2007 and began offering Bitcoin trading early, in 2014. Such was the explosion in cryptocurrency trading last year; the company shared that it acquired more new customers in one day in December that it had in the whole of 2016.

In March it raised $100 million to for a blockchain company investment fund, one of which will be its own decentralised cryptocurrency exchange, and in June 2018 the company announced its plans to open a branch in London that will cater to hedge funds.

We are happy to announce that @etoro has completed a fund-raise of $100 Million to support our expansion into new markets as well as continued research and development of #blockchaintechnology, and the digitization of assets! pic.twitter.com/7sv0L8rBRi — eToro (@eToro) March 21, 2018

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Oracles and mobility

IOTA is not a blockchain network but a “transactional settlement and data transfer layer” that uses a decentralised network called ‘the Tangle’. It was launched in 2015 with the dream of becoming the internet-of-things. This is a concept in which the appliances and systems that govern our everyday lives will be connected to and controlled by the internet. Founder David Sønstebø told Finance Magnates in an exclusive interview in January 2018 that the team sees it as becoming “more than a cryptocurrency.”

Despite that, its cryptocurrency, MIOTA, has a market capitalisation of $1.4 billion, according to coinmarketcap.com.

There has been a lot of news on IOTA this year. In May, the IOTA Foundation signed a deal with a branch of the UN under the terms of which it will help the international organisation to manage its documents more efficiently, and in July it sent a team to the Audi headquarters to work with the German car manufacturer on a “permissionless mobility ecosystem”, whatever that means.

In June, it published a mysterious promo on YouTube for a new system called Qubic, which is intended to be the means by which the world interacts with the Tangle. If your job is to tell the system what the weather’s like, congratulations, you are now an ‘oracle’. The IOTA team calls it “a platform for the greater community and ecosystem to create things we can’t even imagine yet.”

Just this month (August), the Foundation launched a new open-source protocol designed to expedite the process of an exchange listing its coin, IOTA Hub, which has already been used to list MIOTA on Upbit, one of South Korea’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges. It also published a job ad for a North American business development manager, apparently signalling its intention to enter that market. The job will be based in California.

In December 2017 there was a limited amount of controversy over a semantic misunderstanding as to its exact relationship with Microsoft.

CEO Yoni Assia said in a speech in April: “The use of blockchain and crypto is and will become a way of life.”