As the highly anticipated Robinhood IPO approaches, CEO Vlad Tenev has revealed the company will bet big on crypto with extensive new cryptocurrency offerings and planned cryptographic wallet features.
The announcement follows teasing comments in March which saw Tenev promise the integration of a crypto wallet on the platform “as soon as possible”, in response to a fledgling user base rushing into prominent crypto exchange platforms such as Coinbase.
It is currently possible to trade digital assets on the Robinhood platform, but assets are trapped within the exchange with no wallet feature or mechanism that allows cryptocurrency to be sent and received to other wallet addresses.
For many, this begs the question of whether cryptocurrency assets owned on the platform are truly owned by the user at all – ‘not your keys, not your coins’, as the saying goes.
Concerns come after the tumultuous events of January, which saw users of the platform frozen out of their holdings, after the decision to suspend trading of popular stock assets GameStop (GME), AMC Entertainment (AMC), Blackberry (BB), and Nokia (NOK) following SEC concern about market volatility.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to provide our crypto customers with the functionality that they’ve been asking for,” said Vlad Tenev.
“We know you want wallets.”
Robinhood has become increasingly reliant on crypto trading. The company’s Q1 report to the SEC revealed that around 17% of revenue came from cryptocurrency transactions with a significant portion coming from Dogecoin (DOGE) transactions.
The Robinhood IPO is anticipated later this year.
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