Robinhood starts offering digital currency wallets

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Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD), the online trading platform that shot to global fame during the Wall Street Bets saga in 2021, will officially offer digital currency wallets to 1,000 of its users.

The brokerage has long offered its users the chance to buy and sell digital currencies like BSV, BTC, ETH, and DOGE but hasn’t until now enabled withdrawals to external wallets.

It’s understood that Robinhood has a waitlist of 1.6 million users who want digital currency wallets. It will initially test the rollout with 1,000 selected users and aims to expand this to 10,000 customers by March. From then on, Robinhood will roll its wallets out to the rest of its millions of users so that they can both take custody of their tokens and interact with the respective blockchains.

Over the duration of the Beta program, we will be working to finalize the send and receive flows and add delightful QR scanning experiences, improved transaction history, and block explorer support so you can see your transactions on-chain— and more!https://t.co/db5afxwQWx

— Christine Hall (@christine_hall) January 20, 2022

Beta testers will be allowed to make up to 10 withdrawals per day worth $2,999. They’ll need to enable two-factor authentication to make the withdrawals.

Robinhood users and BSV ecosystem participation

Somewhat disconnected from the ‘crypto’ ecosystem and being a more mainstream platform outside the bubble of the industry, Robinhood has allowed its users to purchase and trade BSV since 2018.

The new Robinhood wallets will allow its millions of users to buy BSV and withdraw it to external wallets, which in turn will allow them to interact with the wider BSV ecosystem.

Robinhood users will quickly discover BSVs fast, almost fee-free transactions. Whereas they’ll pay anything between $2 and $200 in gas fees to withdraw their ETH tokens, they’ll pay a mere $0.0005 or less to withdraw BSV.

Once outside the walled garden of the Robinhood platform, Robinhooders will be able to use their BSV to interact with the ever-growing number of apps on the BSV blockchain. For example, they’ll be able to play CryptoFights and POWChess or trade digital currencies on TDXP.

If even a small percentage of Robinhood’s 20 million+ users interact with BSV, it will go a long way to changing the narrative and could lead to a wave of new BSV users. It will certainly lead many of them to question what they’ve been told about the original Bitcoin and to wonder why anyone tolerates the slow, expensive transactions on unscalable forks like BTC.

In any case, Robinhood’s rollout of its digital currency wallets is a welcome development. As one of the largest platforms to offer BSV to its users, it will certainly help with exposure and the opening of minds to what’s possible on Bitcoin SV and the original promise of Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash.

Watch: CoinGeek New York panel, Better Bitcoin Wallets for Consumers & Business