Robinhood CEO says: Crypto wallet waitlist reaches 1 million customers

The waitlist for Robinhood’s crypto wallet is now more than one million customers long, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev told CNBC on Thursday. The feature is in high demand by clients of the popular zero-commission trading app.

Robinhood, one of the largest trading platforms in the US, announced last month it was planning to roll out a crypto wallet in early 2022 that would allow customers to trade, send and receive cryptocurrencies, as well as transfer them to hardware wallets.

“Crypto is certainly here to stay as an asset class, and the ease of use and the global nature of it, I think, has made it attractive to lots of people,” CNBC cited CEO Tenev.

Over the last year, Robinhood has been leaning heavily on the crypto market, realizing that the user interest in the market was increasing over the last couple of years. Commissions from crypto trading accounted for 41% of Robinhood’s revenue in its second quarter, up from just 17% in the first quarter. Overall, Robinhood has said that more than 60% of its customer traded cryptocurrencies in the second quarter.

The crypto market seemed freer from such regulatory oversight at that time, and there continue to be regulatory loopholes in the crypto market even now. This is one of the reasons why the trading platforms are rushing towards embracing the crypto industry, as it gives them the freedom to operate freely, at least for the short term.

“We’re very proud of our cryptocurrency platform and giving people more utility with the coins they have,” Vlad Tenev said. “We rolled out our wallets waitlist. A lot of people have been asking for the ability to send and receive cryptocurrencies, transfer them to hardware wallets, transfer them onto the platform to consolidate, and the crypto wallets waitlist is well over a million people now.”

As part of its approach towards crypto, the platform has chosen to offer its digital wallet to its customers, who would now be able to store their digital assets in the wallet. They would no longer need to convert their digital assets into fiat and can continue to use the wallet to store, trade, send and receive cryptos as well. It helps to unify all crypto holdings into a single wallet, and this feature is currently under development at Robinhood.However, with the SEC continuing to view crypto with suspicion, this move might get Robinhood into even more regulatory trouble shortly. The platform is already under scrutiny over its main revenue model of payments for order flow, and it is speculated that this practice might be shut down by the SEC.