eToro’s tryst with blockchain technology is increasing every day. They already allow trading cryptocurrencies alongside traditional assets, and now they’ve launched a blockchain development language. Called Lira, the language is designed to simplify the process of derivatives trading.

eToro announced Lira on Sunday at Ethereal Summit 2019 in Tel Aviv. Company’s Chief Blockchain Specialist Omri Ross was present at the event, and he told that Lira will reduce the risks involved in the settlement of financial derivatives. It’ll also open the doors of new opportunities, he said, including:

Creation of new derivative products based on Ethereum blockchain

Setting of different time limits on trades

Trustless swap of different cryptocurrencies

Writing of complex settlement terms

These are some promising possibilities for the future of crypto, especially when we consider the company behind them. eToro is a giant, and by facilitating these features it’s making things quite easier for further adoption of crypto among institutional as well as retail investors.

The company has also launched a demo platform to help both retail and institutional investors start trading Lira-developed derivatives immediately. The platform, which is unnamed as of now, will test a full range of contract experiments developed with Lira.

Lira Is Open Source

So far, so good. But the best thing about Lira is that eToro has open-sourced it. This will allow the community to develop a wide range of derivative products from simple future contracts to advanced exotic contracts like collateralized loan obligations. Here’s what Omri Ross said about it:

“We are excited to see how the market and the community will adopt this new programming language in decentralized applications, on cryptocurrency exchanges and in institutional finance.”

Lira Is Domain-specific

Unlike other blockchain-based development languages that are general-purpose languages aimed on the development requirements of various industries, Lira is a finance-focused language. Its features are limited, and it can perform a limited number of instructions.

This sort of focus has resulted in a very simple development cycle that is less prone to errors, Ross said. The typical length of scripting a financial contract in Lira is only 6-10 lines of code, she added, eliciting surprise from many attendees of the summit.

According to a Federal Reserve calculation of 2017, the size of global derivatives market is more than $500 trillion. So eToro has tried to tap a huge market with this launch. Now it will be interesting to see what kind of results it achieves with this move.