Robinhood App Goes Live with Cryptocurrency Trading

The popular stock market trading app announced cryptocurrency trading would be here in the coming weeks, and that day is finally here for the 1 million people who’ve signed up for the beta.

Streamlining the Process of Buying In

Robinhood is extremely popular with teenagers and young adults because it offers a completely fee-free way to invest in the stock market.  This can be very attractive to younger people as they don’t have to deal with the complications that come with investing with a traditional stock brokerage and lets them invest in any amounts. It can also give people that may not have as much disposable income an avenue in which to invest and build a better future for themselves.

Robinhood announced last month that they would enable the buying and selling of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and in addition added full market data for over a dozen cryptocurrencies. This gave huge exposure to the rest of the investing world, and with the activation of trading, we’ll hopefully see more adoption by the masses. Today, they finally enabled the trading feature in the app and allowed users in the select states to trade on the app.

Making Exchanges Trivial to Use

Currently, there are few options for people that are completely new to Bitcoin and trading to buy some. Many exchanges don’t even use dollar pairings, opting for Tether or BTC pairings to dodge regulatory concerns. Arguably the exchange that newcomers use the most is Coinbase, which aims to offer the easiest point and click method to buy Bitcoin with fiat. Coinbase has been under fire in recent weeks for a host of issues with user bank accounts, which was later found out to be an issue on Visa’s end.

Robinhood is one of the easiest ways for the public to invest thanks to its quick process and intuitive user interface. With crypto-currency trading being enabled on the app, it’ll provide some competition in the quickly growing crypto market. Currently, the Robinhood trading feature is only available in five states, but the team has stated their intent to expand their market as much as possible. Lots of competition is coming to the US Bitcoin exchange industry, with Coinbase activating Segwit earlier this week, bitFlyer obtaining the BitLicense from NY State, and now Robinhood offering cryptocurrency trading.

Are you planning on using Robinhood to trade? What do you think about the current popular crypto exchanges? Let us know in the comments below!

Images Courtesy of Robinhood, AdobeStock