Key takeaways:
- Robinhood has launched a crypto transfer feature that allows users to send and receive digital currencies
- The California-based trading company won’t charge any transfer fees for the service
- Sam Bankman-Fired’s FTX crypto exchange has recently shown interest for acquiring the publicly traded trading platform
The highly-anticipated feature launches with no transfer fees
Popular trading platform Robinhood unveiled on Thursday the launch of crypto transfers. The new feature will allow Robinhood users to send and receive Bitcoin and a plethora of other supported cryptocurrencies directly on the blockchain.
The company shared the news in a Twitter post featuring a short video;
The new crypto-centric feature comes roughly two months after Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev announced the launch of the company’s own Web3 wallet, designed to streamline access to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi). At the time, Robinhood revealed that it will cover gas fees associated with swapping coins on behalf of its users by seeking out best market rates available among the third-party liquidity providers.
According to the California-based broker, users won’t have to pay any fees for crypto transfers. The decision to do so was potentially influenced by the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, which announced zero-fee trading on the US-focused platform last month, and expanded the promotion to thirteen Bitcoin trading pairs on its global platform earlier this week.
Robinhood has been integrating more and more blockchain functionality over the past year. The rapidly expanding catalog of supported digital currencies, a crypto wallet, and now crypto transfers, have apparently piqued the interest of FTX CEO and one of the richest people in crypto, Sam Bankman Fried, who bought $600M+ worth of Robinhood stock in May. In late June, Bloomberg revealed that FTX is exploring the acquisition of Robinhood.
