Social Trading is Driving Crypto Trading Forward

Communities of online traders have developed a distinct swagger recently, sharing their gains and losses with the world. For instance, one of Reddit’s most notorious subreddits is WallStreetBets (WSB) where members routinely share recent success and failures of their trading portfolios, alongside plenty of public jesting from fellow community members.

This portfolio sharing in WSB started at a rudimentary level, with traders taking screenshots of their trading apps or even screenshots of spreadsheets they use to track their picks. While portfolio gains have historically been something investors hide, the growth of these communities has supercharged an intriguing subculture of traders wishing to be outward facing about their investing prowess. 

Social trading platforms like eToro, Zignaly and League of Traders have made this public-facing profile a key platform feature. Each of these platforms is either crypto-enabled or crypto-centric, and they focus on building a community among their traders.

Top performing traders are celebrated on these platforms, especially on League of Traders where the primary screen on their app is a platform-wide leaderboard that shows the best overall performance among all traders. The top traders on League of Traders boast lifetime gains of 1400%. Further, recent League of Traders competitions have seen the top competitors gaining as much as 300% in crypto value during the competition, and this is during competitions that take place in just 3 weeks. 

For professionals and experienced traders, this recent crypto boom has accentuated their skills. Experienced currency traders have transferred their skills into crypto, and crypto enthusiasts have built their skills into a new mastery using these digital assets. However, novices had largely been left out of the mix, left fighting to understand the intricacies and differences among these new digital currencies. For a novice trader looking to jump into crypto, the entire market can feel very risky and confusing. 

The crypto-trading platforms mentioned before, eToro, Zignaly and League of Traders, have found a feature to encourage novices to dip their toes into the cryptocurrency trading market with little hassle. This feature is commonly known as copy trading, which allows novices to piggyback on the success of experienced traders at the top of the leaderboards.

The process is relatively straightforward. Any user on these platforms can scroll through a list or leaderboard of top-performing traders and choose to copy their precise trading behavior. Users are able to analyze these top-traders portfolios, seeing their growth, current picks, trade history and risk assessment. Once a trader is comfortable committing to the copy trading of a user, the user can click the copy button to copy the exact behavior of that top trader. 

Investors have embraced this trend. eToro alone has garnered over $272M USD in funding, and Zignaly, the much smaller start up from Spain, has also raised $3M USD. In terms of user base, eToro has scaled to over 20M users. This growth seems to be accelerating with eToro averaging 400k new users each month in 2020 compared to just 190k new users each month in 2019. 

The crypto market cap is currently valued at $2T. That’s compared to the Nikkei market cap of $5.7T, the NASDAQ market cap of $19.4T, and the NYSE market cap of $25.6T.

These platforms have opened the door for tremendous growth, and the copy trading feature of League of Traders and others have enabled even novices to reap the rewards.