Robinhood doubles down on crypto as it faces increasing competition

Karthik Subramanian

Robinhood, the most famous stock trading and investing platform within the retail trading community in the US, is looking to press on with its plans to introduce crypto wallets into its platform and it may be rolling them out as soon as next month.

The company has always kept abreast of the latest changes in the fintech world and its introduction of crypto trading last year has turned out to be a masterstroke so far. The crypto trading-related revenues now account for around $233 million of the total $451 million and it is also reported that over 60% of the user accts in the platform traded cryptos with most of the users favoring dogecoin trading. It is a clear vote from the users for bringing in additional features surrounding crypto trading and the company seems to have responded to the call.

The new crypto wallet can be used to store many types of crypto and so the users would be able to use this wallet to collect together their cryptos in a single place and manage their portfolio in a much better manner. The users would also be able to send and receive cryptos in the wallet and it is also expected that the users would be able to use these cryptos to trade and invest as well which means that they can avoid the extra step of conversion of the cryptos into USD. This was the step that was generally resented by many users as then they would lose out on the volatility and growth in the cryptos and would also be forced to shell out conversion charges as well.

But this is likely to come under the hawk eyes of the SEC and it depends on how they would view this wallet and trading and investing using cryptos. Already, the SEC is looking to shut down one of the primary revenue streams of Robinhood which is the payment for order flow business model, and this new all-out foray into the world of cryptos is likely to get a lot of attention from the SEC as well. But the company does not seem to be too bothered about this as it needs to be more concerned with the increased competition from the likes of Revolut, Square, and Paypal, all of whom are competing with each other to become a financial super app that captures the attention of all traders.

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