Reeling from the GameStop saga, the investing platform is setting its sights on digital assets.
Could Robinhood redeem itself in the eyes of its community with an increased crypto offering? That could be the motivation behind CEO Vlad Tenev’s desire to ramp up their crypto trading service.
In a fireside chat posted on the company’s YouTube channel, Tenev admitted that it could take months to recover from the fallout following the GameStop incident.
Tenev explained that he wants to increase and improve the crypto features on the app, adding:
“As much as people are bugging me on that on social media, I'm bugging our crypto team and our software engineers. We're going to try and get that done as fast as possible. And we'll see. We might add some new coins along the way.”
In spite of the bad publicity Robinhood received when it halted trades of GameStop stock, it added six million users to its crypto app in the first two months of 2021. Like other exchanges, they have seen a surge of interest in crypto since the beginning of the year.
Could a Robinhood Wallet be Next?
While the Robinhood Crypto app lets you buy, hold and sell crypto, it doesn’t give users the ability to transfer their coins in or out of external wallets to Robinhood.
And while many users are calling for the app to create a wallet, Tenev said that the firm would tread cautiously, doing extensive testing before releasing a wallet feature, although he did suggest adding new coins.
Tenev went on to say that the Robinhood mission was to “get 95% of US households investing” and “democratize finance for all”. Since the beginning of the year, Tenev noted that “female users of crypto have grown 7x,” and that “users were increasing in favor of more and more women.”
For some crypto enthusiasts, the shut down of GameStop trading clearly demonstrated the failings of centralized platforms, prompting them to quit the app completely.
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