It wants to attract “the whole spectrum” of digital asset investors
Robinhood was for over a decade, and its appearance in crypto is not necessarily new. However, the company is still trying to expand its efforts there — even to groups that have typically turned away from the platform.
“I think crypto has always been made by very technical people and for technical people,” said Johann Kerbrat, general manager of crypto at Robinhood. The Chain Reaction podcast. “At the end of the day, I think customers, when they’re using encryption, they don’t really care what the protocol is underneath it? What network are you using? They just want the thing to work.”
While this may be true for newbie crypto investors—the app has done a good job of onboarding this group by providing educational resources—it now wants to focus on everyone, even those who I am doing they care about the underlying protocols. Robinhood users can do more technical things, like porting to the crypto wallet and use “advanced charts and automatic formulas where you can put, for example, a stop loss,” Kerbrat said.
The platform may not be as technical as the crypto-focused one, but Robinhood does research to understand what customers want and miss.
Although there are plans for growth, Robinhood appears to be wavering on its stance in the digital space. In June, the app chose to restrict trading and holding of certain cryptocurrencies for customers in the US, at a time when the US government was cracking down on major exchanges in the industry such as Binance and Coinbase. With this, the platform still has 14 cryptocurrencies and one stablecoinUSDC, available for users to buy and sell.
