Trading Platform eToro to Delay Public Debut Until Fourth Quarter

Trading platform eToro is delaying going public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) listing until the fourth quarter from the third quarter.

• “We now anticipate that we will complete the merger and that eToro will become a listed company during Q4,” eToro said in email to CoinDesk. “We’re really excited about the next stage in our journey.”
• eToro, which mainly caters to “social” or beginner traders, announced in March that it would go public through a merger with Betsy Cohen’s FinTech Acquisition Corp. V in a deal that valued the combined entity at about $10.4 billion.
• “We have been working closely with the [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission] since before we publicly announced the transaction and continue to do so,” eToro said. “We are in the final stages of comments from the SEC. Once we have final approval, the transaction goes to a vote with the FTCV shareholders which takes 20 days and then it takes a few more days to finalize the transaction. Given this timeline and where we are today, we wanted to be transparent with the market that a Q3 closing was no longer possible.”
• The news was earlier reported by the Financial News, which cited the general backlog of SPAC listings as the reason for the delay.
• eToro said last month that its commissions from crypto trading increased by nearly 23-fold to $264.2 million in the second quarter, from just $11.2 million in the year-ago period.