Can U Buy Crypto On Robinhood

There are some advantages to using the trading app, but information technology isn’t correct for everyone.

Robinhood is best known as the stock trading app that pioneered the concept of commission-gratuitous trading several years before most brokerages got rid of their trading costs. But you can as well buy Bitcoin and six other cryptocurrencies straight through the app.

Like all cryptocurrency trading platforms, Robinhood isn’t the best choice for everyone. Here’s a rundown of the key advantages and disadvantages of using Robinhood to buy Bitcoin.

Benefits of using Robinhood to buy Bitcoin

Robinhood pioneered commission-free stock trading several years ago, and while its competitors have largely caught up to the company’southward pricing structure in the brokerage side of the business, the same cannot be said of cryptocurrency trading.

Specifically, many of Robinhood’s top competitors accept expensive and somewhat hard-to-understand pricing structures. For example, Coinbase charges a ane.49% trading fee for well-nigh transactions, so if you want to buy $500 worth of Bitcoin, you pay nigh $7.50. And that’due south on elevation of a markup, or spread, you pay over the current market place price. To be fair, Robinhood makes money from the spread between its current buy and sell prices, but that’south information technology — no other fees apply.

At that place’s also value in having your cryptocurrency holdings and stock investments in the same like shooting fish in a barrel-to-use app, and Robinhood certainly lets y’all practice that. Many people look at Bitcoin every bit an improver to their investment portfolios, then it makes a lot of sense to keep all of your investments in one place. With Robinhood, you tin can. With many other cryptocurrency exchanges, not so much.

Drawbacks of using Robinhood to buy Bitcoin

Past far, the biggest drawback to Robinhood’s cryptocurrency trading platform is that
all
you lot tin practice is buy, hold, and sell your cryptocurrencies. In other words, you
can’t
transport your Bitcoin to some other cryptocurrency wallet, spend information technology on real-globe purchases, or receive Bitcoin from other people. It doesn’t accept well-nigh as much functionality as most leading cryptocurrency exchanges do.

Robinhood as well offers far fewer educational resources and other features. Information technology is mainly a place where you can buy, hold, and sell Bitcoin and a few other types of cryptocurrency. If yous buy Bitcoin on Robinhood and it goes up in value, you can sell information technology and make money. Merely there aren’t many other reasons to use Robinhood for your cryptocurrency needs.

Finally — and this point won’t utilize to investors who only want to buy Bitcoin — more avid cryptocurrency traders will detect that there are other platforms with far more than cryptocurrencies to choose from than the seven Robinhood offers. If you want to invest in Bitcoin and the other well-nigh popular digital assets, Robinhood probably has what you need. But if y’all’re thinking of putting some of your money in smaller, up-and-coming cryptocurrencies, you might desire to expect elsewhere. For example, Coinbase offers more than than 90 tradeable coins.

Should
you
use Robinhood to buy Bitcoin?

The short answer is that it depends
why
you lot desire to buy Bitcoin. If your goal is to pay for purchases using Bitcoin, or if yous desire to send Bitcoin to friends or to an external Bitcoin wallet, Robinhood is not the best option for yous. On the other paw, if your goal is simply to concord Bitcoin and benefit from rising prices over time, Robinhood can be an easy and depression-cost way to do it, especially if you’re already using the platform for stock trading.