It wants to attract the “entire spectrum” of digital asset investors
Jacquelyn Melinek
21 hours
Robinhood has been around for over a decade, and its foray into crypto isn’t necessarily new; however, the company is still trying to expand its efforts there — even in groups that have typically strayed from the platform.
“I think crypto has always been made by very technical people and for technical people,” Johann Kerbrat, the general manager of crypto at Robinhood, said on the Chain Reaction podcast. “At the end of the day, I think customers, when they use crypto, they don’t really care what is the protocol under it? What is the network that you’re using? They just want the thing to work.”
While that may be true for novice crypto investors — the app has done a good job of onboarding that group by providing educational resources — it now wants to focus on everyone, even those who do care about underlying protocols. Robinhood users can do more technical things like transfer to its crypto wallet and use “advanced charts and autotypes where you can put, for example, a stop loss,” Kerbrat said.
The platform might not be as highly technical as one that’s crypto-focused, but Robinhood is doing research to understand what customers want and are missing.
Even though there are plans for growth, Robinhood has seemingly been wavering on its stance in the digital asset space. In June, the app chose to limit the trading and holding of certain cryptocurrencies for U.S. customers, at a time when the U.S. government was cracking down on big industry exchanges like Binance and Coinbase. With that said, the platform still has 14 cryptocurrencies and one stablecoin, USDC, available for users to buy and sell.