Robinhood crypto wallet waitlist reaches 1 million customers
Robinhood, one of the largest trading platforms in the US, has said that its crypto wallet waitlist now has more than 1 million customers who have signed up showing the increasing interest in the digital assets market.
Over the last year or so, Robinhood has been leaning heavily on the crypto market after having realized that the user interest in the market increasing over the last couple of years. This provided an additional revenue stream for the company as its normal revenue streams like payments for order flow have come under increasing scrutiny from the regulators like the SEC. The crypto market seemed a bit free from such regulatory oversight at that time and there continue to be regulatory loopholes in the crypto market even now which is one of the reasons why the trading platforms are rushing towards embracing the crypto industry as it gives them the freedom to operate freely, at least for the short term.
“We’re very proud of our cryptocurrency platform and giving people more utility with the coins they have,” CEO Vlad Tenev said. “We rolled out our wallets waitlist. A lot of people have been asking for the ability to send and receive cryptocurrencies, transfer them to hardware wallets, transfer them onto the platform to consolidate, and the crypto wallets waitlist is well over a million people now.”
As part of its approach towards crypto, the platform has now chosen to offer its digital wallet to its customers who would now be able to store all their digital assets in the wallet. They would no longer need to convert their digital assets into fiat and can continue to use the wallet to store crypto, trade, send and receive cryptos as well. This helps them to unify all their crypto holdings into a single wallet and this feature is currently under development at Robinhood. But with the SEC continuing to view crypto with suspicion, this move might get Robinhood into even more regulatory trouble shortly.
The platform is already under scrutiny over its main revenue model of payments for order flow and it is speculated that this practice might be shut down by the SEC which would place its revenues in jeopardy. With Robinhood now looking to go all-in into crypto, SEC may not view this move favorably and the scrutiny is only bound to increase shortly.
