Vlad Tenev is the CEO of Robinhood. Jose Sarmento Matos—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Robinhood, the stock trading app that also lets users buy and sell crypto, announced early Thursday that it has officially launched crypto trading in the European Union, one month after it had signaled plans to do so in a quarterly earnings report.
As part of its push into the EU, Robinhood will list 26 cryptocurrencies, including 11 not currently available to its U.S. customers. Most notably, the company’s EU offering will include SOL, MATIC, and ADA—the respective tokens for the Solana, Polygon, and Cardano blockchains—which Robinhood delisted on its U.S. platform in June in the face of regulatory pressures.
“The EU has developed one of the world’s most comprehensive policies for crypto asset regulation, which is why we chose the region to anchor Robinhood Crypto’s international expansion plans.,” said Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s head of crypto, in a statement.
Robinhood’s expansion into Europe is one of the publicly traded company’s largest crypto announcements to come about since it formally launched its Web3 wallet in January. Despite seeing a decline in crypto revenues since mid-2021, the online brokerage has remained committed to the legally troubled industry—though things may be turning a corner as Robinhood disclosed crypto trading volumes were up 75% in November from the previous month.
Robinhood, perhaps best known for its role in the meme-stock trading craze in early 2021, first unveiled its crypto trading platform in 2018, listing only Bitcoin and Ethereum. Since then, the platform has sought to expand its offerings, making crypto a core part of its business model.
In the second quarter of 2021, revenue from crypto transactions accounted for approximately 41% of its total revenue, as the memecoin Dogecoin skyrocketed in price. In fact, in that same quarter, fees purely from Dogecoin trading accounted for almost 26% of its total revenue, according to its quarterly report.
Since then, Robinhood’s crypto business has fallen under regulatory scrutiny, and its transaction revenues from crypto trading have decreased. In August 2022, New York’s top financial regulator fined Robinhood’s crypto unit $30 million. In December 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued an investigatory subpoena to the firm regarding its crypto business. And in June, the SEC sued Binance and Coinbase, naming SOL, MATIC, and ADA as unregistered securities in its lawsuits. Robinhood delisted the cryptocurrencies from its exchange shortly afterwards.
Its decision to relist SOL, MATIC, and ADA in the EU—as well as other tokens the SEC named as unregistered securities, including SAND, MANA, and ATOM—suggests Robinhood is confident in the European regulatory regime, which passed comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation in April.
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