Subsequently a difficult first quarter, investing app Robinhood is doubling down on new product launches, particularly in its crypto unit, in hopes they will assist buoy the concern. CEO Vlad Tenev announced the company’southward plans to roll out non-custodial crypto wallets at the Permissionless DeFi briefing in Florida today, starting with a waitlist that’s already open.
The market place environment has posed challenges for the visitor as trading volumes have plummeted. Robinhood’s net revenue dipped 43% to $299 meg in Q1, with crypto trading revenue specifically falling 39% to $54 million (significant crypto trading deemed for about eighteen% of Robinhood’s total revenue before the stop of March).
Robinhood has been actively growing its crypto arm since the end of Q1 in a bid to concenter users and boost trading volume. In the last month or and then, the exchange has rolled out custodial crypto wallets to its users, listed four new coins including Solana and Shiba Inu, and appear information technology would integrate with the Bitcoin Lightning Network to enable faster, lower-fee transactions.
22 million customers interact with its crypto products today, Robinhood CTO Johann Kerbrat told TechCrunch in an interview. With a custodial wallet, Robinhood holds the individual key on behalf of a user, pregnant that users tin can invest in crypto by tracking its toll movements only they cannot direct transact with their crypto funds.
Now that it’southward launching a non-custodial wallet, users will be able to access and manage their ain digital assets, including cryptocurrencies and decentralized apps (dApps) including NFTs, Kerbrat said. Kerbrat sees two key areas of differentiation for Robinhood’south non-custodial wallet, which he said will support multiple blockchains — its user-friendly blueprint and no-fee setup for customers.
The rollout will start at the end of the summer, he added. The visitor’s goal is to have the wallet available to all users beyond the earth by the terminate of 2022.
Coinbase, another popular crypto substitution, too offers ii types of wallets — custodial and not-custodial — in two unlike apps, the latter beingness Coinbase Wallet. Coinbase Wallet is gratis to use but does pass on individual transaction fees to its users.
Robinhood, in contrast, won’t charge its customers whatever fees for using its non-custodial wallet, including network fees for trading and swapping crypto, Kerbrat said.
The Robinhood non-custodial wallet, which Kerbrat said still hasn’t been officially named, will operate as a standalone app. In addition to allowing users to store NFTs in the wallet, it will also serve every bit a point of connectivity to the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, giving customers access to DeFi protocols through which they can earn a yield on their coins by lending or staking them, Kerbrat said.
To ready an account, users won’t demand to share whatsoever personal information with the substitution unless they choose to connect their non-custodial wallet with their Robinhood app, he added.
“We want to make sure that at that place’s still a good tie betwixt the two products. If you want an on-ramp or off-ramp from fiat to crypto, you can use Robinhood, but you’re not forced to do it,” Kerbrat said.
Kerbrat hopes the announcement today volition encourage dApp developers and protocols to integrate with Robinhood’s wallet.
“We all the same call back that the principal reason why many people are not using non-custodial wallets is that it’s too complicated on height of the fees everywhere. And so nosotros don’t desire to merely exercise a projection — we actually desire to really help sympathize what’southward going on and integrate to dApps.
Robinhood’due south shares soared over 20% last week later FTX, a crypto exchange run past billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, disclosed that it had bought a 7.6% stake in the company. The stock was trading around $10 per share as of noon EST on Tuesday, however markedly below its 52-calendar week high of $85.
