Coinbase has a serious competition in the market now, with the zero-fee trading app, named Robinhood. Robinhood recently announced its plan to enable the user to buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum last month. The company now strives to be good at their promises. Starting it from today, itself, the company won’t take its commissions from people trading in Bitcoin or Ethereum out there in five states of the United States, namely: California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire, with plans to expand to many more states later. Users in these states will be able to buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum with no extra fees.
If you aren’t in one of the states covered, you can still monitor and track market data and prices of all 16 cryptocurrencies in the Robinhood App. The Robinhood app also gives access to its users to its news feed, which provides users latest news on Cryptocurrencies in its latest version of the app.
Robinhood sees this strategy as a power play to gain wide user base for its existing service that lets people trade stocks, ETF’s and options without charges. Robinhood’s super stylish retro-future Tron Interface of the App is responsible for standing it apart from the crowd in terms of UI. The sleek UI provides a seamless experience to the user while trading, monitor prices and going through the news feed. Robinhood includes 16 digital currencies in its app that include: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ripple, Ethereum Classic, ZCash, Monero, Dash, Stellar, Qtum, Bitcoin Gold, Omisego, NEO, Lisk, and Dogecoin.
Robinhood Crypto first announced this feature last month, with one million people signing up in just four days after the announcement was made.
That amount of interest added up 1 million new users to its user base, totaling up to almost 4 million now. Those users have transacted more than $100 Billion to date, saving $1 Billion in commission fees while Coinbase users pay somewhere between 1-4% of the trading amount as trading fees.
That amount of interest added up 1 million new users to its user base, totaling up to almost 4 million now. Those users have transacted more than $100 Billion to date, saving $1 Billion in commission fees while Coinbase users pay somewhere between 1-4% of the trading amount as trading fees.
On most stock trading platforms, like E*Trade and Scottrade, customers pay flat trading fees of about $7 per trade that basically keeps the companies up and running. Founded in 2013, Robinhood doesn’t charge any fees by running a lean operation centered around engineers and its app. It makes money on the interest of cash its customers keep with it, or by selling monthly Robinhood Gold subscriptions that let users borrow money to trade with.
This business strategy has let the startup to raise $176 million in total, setting up its valuation at $1.3 Billion. And with its free crypto trading, it may have found a way of luring in a fresh class of amateur investors. Keeping security locked tight will be critical, especially given disastrous breaches at other crypto companies. But as crypto draws a new generation into the world of finance, Robinhood wants to help them play the market, day or night.