Robinhood to add cryptocurrency trading

Robinhood Financial LLC, which makes a popular free stock-trading app, is getting into cryptocurrency. The move gives fellow financial-technology startup Coinbase Inc. a new competitor.

Digital currency trading marks the first paid product, other than trading on margin, for Robinhood, which made a name for itself by letting anyone buy and sell small amounts of stock without fees. The company said it’ll only charge for cryptocurrency transactions to recoup the costs associated with trading the assets and won’t take a commission. Robinhood plans to roll out the option gradually and hopes to have it available to customers in most U.S. states by midyear.

The product should be popular among Robinhood’s young customer base. According to a recent survey, more than half of Bitcoin holders are from the ages of 18 to 34. Robinhood said its average customer is 30.

Coinbase and Robinhood were founded around the same time about five years ago and are part of a small crowd of fintech startups with valuations exceeding $1 billion. Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, makes money by charging the buyer and seller a fee. It’s easy to see why Robinhood wants in on the action. While Robinhood added more than 300,000 accounts in November and now has more than 3 million users, Coinbase has grown more rapidly, to more than 13 million as of late last year.

“Bitcoin has a resiliency to it,” said Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood. “This is something that we also feel like really fundamentally aligns with the mission of the company — to make the financial system more accessible to the rest of us.”

However, Robinhood already missed a major boom. After rising more than 14-fold last year, Bitcoin has fallen about 20 percent since the beginning of the year. Stripe Inc., an online credit-card processor, said Tuesday that it would stop taking Bitcoin as a form of payment due to the high fees and long transaction times.

This new venture won’t be easy for Robinhood. Even the biggest exchanges are suffering from slow trading and other issues as demand has skyrocketed. Complaints about Coinbase, for instance, have surged recently. Coinbase didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment but said earlier this week that it added a former Twitter Inc. executive to its ranks to lead customer service and vowed to substantially increase its support staff. Robinhood says it has also added to that department recently.

“There will be a wait list, and we will onboard customers at a rate at which we can support them,” Bhatt said. “We’re not strangers to trading operations. We’ve been doing this for years now in public markets, and we’ll take what we’ve learned from doing this and apply it to crypto.”

The slow rollout should help. Starting Thursday, all Robinhood customers will be able to have watch lists for Bitcoin and other crypto-assets like Ethereum and Ripple. Trading will be available for some customers next month. A Robinhood spokesman declined to say which exchange it will use, but he said the company will add multiple ones over time, with the goal of getting customers the best prices.