The famous trading app, Robinhood, announced a few days ago the launch of its crypto services in the European Union.
The app is already available for download and use in EU countries for both Android and iOS.
In addition, the waitlist for the United Kingdom has also been announced, which has not been part of the EU for a few years now.
Summary
Robinhood Crypto arrives in Europe
Robinhood was founded in 2013 in California by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, and is listed on the stock exchange with the ticker HOOD.
Its success is due to commission-free trading, and partly to the fact that they already added crypto trading in 2018.
In 2022 they also added a crypto wallet to the app, which allows users to deposit and withdraw cryptocurrencies. In the same year, they reported 22.8 million accounts, of which 15.9 were active monthly.
In the stock market, the company has a market capitalization of over 10 billion dollars, with a current price that is 44% higher than the beginning of the year.
However, it must be said that the current stock price is 70% lower than the debut price in July 2021, and even 85% lower than the absolute peak reached in August of the same year.
Despite making its debut on the stock market during the year of the boom, it did not have a particularly good 2023.
If, for example, the Nasdaq lost 16% during 2022, but then recovered 18% until today in 2023, the HOOD stock instead lost 55% in 2022 and only recovered 51% in 2023.
In other words, the Nasdaq has almost recovered all the losses of 2022 to date, while the HOOK stock is still 35% below the 2021 closing level.
The European market
Robinhood was born in the USA, and initially provided its services only to customers residing in the United States.
Now it has also landed in Europe, more precisely in the countries of the European Union, excluding Great Britain, Russia, and other smaller countries.
On Robinhood Crypto trading is not free, but you can trade over 25 cryptocurrencies at what they themselves define as “the lowest cost on average in the EU”.
The target audience they are targeting is the retail and popular one, so much so that trading on Robinhood is only done via the app.
The launch of Robinhood Crypto in Europe
To promote the launch in the EU, some promotions have also been launched.
The first one promises earnings up to 1 BTC by inviting friends to sign up.
The second one promises a monthly BTC cashback on trading volume.
The Robinhood Crypto app is available to all eligible iOS and Android customers throughout the EU, meaning those who are citizens of the European Union and over 18 years old.
Robinhood Crypto is a trading platform where users own their own cryptocurrencies, but these are securely stored on their behalf by the company.
In other words, it uses a custodial wallet, like any centralized exchange, and by 2024 the launch of support for other tokens is planned, as well as for crypto transfers and staking.
Crypto trading
Although the volumes of crypto trading generated by retail investors and speculators are currently very low, retail investors themselves are still the main players in this market.
In fact, while on Bitcoin and Ethereum there are also many trades generated by whales or large institutional investors, on smaller tokens, such as memecoins, those generated by small occasional amateur investors always prevail significantly.
Just to give you an idea, for example, if in the last 24 hours the total trading volumes of BTC have exceeded 31 billion dollars, and those of ETH have reached 13 billion, Dogecoin has not even reached 1.2 billion, and Shiba Inu has not even reached 250 million.
PEPE for example has achieved a total daily trading volume of less than 150 million dollars, and WSM (Wall Street Memes) has even remained below 35 million.
In other words, memecoins like WSM are currently being traded about a thousand times less than BTC.
Among the cryptocurrencies tradable on Robinhood, which are not many, there are not many memecoins, but there are several that do not attract many large investors, such as BCH (Bitcoin Cash), ETC (Ethereum Classic), UNI (Uniswap), or that are decidedly niche, such as COMP (Compound) or GRT (The Graph).
It is still possible that Robinhood’s entry into Europe could give the crypto markets an additional boost during the possible future new bull run.
