Came bearing fruit, Robinhood announced Thursday that it has officially rolled out its digital asset wallet after months of building hype around the product.
The popular investment app has initially launched the wallet for 2 million “eligible” users who applied for its waitlist in October last year. Robinhood beta tested the wallet on a limited 1,000 users in January before seeking a wider rollout.
Users can buy, sell, and trade several cryptocurrencies, including transferring to and from the crypto wallet as well. Previously, Robinhood allowed customers to trade crypto within its app without any source to transfer them out of the wallet. Presently, the wallet is not available for users in Hawaii, Nevada, or New York due to state regulations.
The company’s Chief Product Officer Aparna Chennapragada first shared the news at the Bitcoin conference in Miami, Florida on Thursday. Robinhood, which offers commission-free trading and investing on its app, has offered similar benefits for cryptocurrency trading as well.
Super pumped to announce on the #Bitcoin2022 stage that @RobinhoodApp has rolled out wallets access to the nearly 2 million people on the WenWallets waitlist.
— Aparna Chennapragada (@aparnacd) April 7, 2022
“This means customers have full access to their crypto to use it how they like —tipping on social media, paying for NFTs and more… with zero commission-fees,” Chennapragada wrote in a Tweet Thursday. However, the trading platform has warned on its website that NFTs sent to a Robinhood Ethereum address may get lost.
Meanwhile, that’s not all for the wallet. Robinhood has also planned a Lightning Network integration to allow for smaller Bitcoin transactions with low fees and high transaction throughput. The company said in a blog post:
“We will be adding the ability to transact on the Bitcoin Lightning Network, an open-source “layer-2” for Bitcoin transactions in the near future. Because these transactions occur “off-chain,” Lightning network transactions occur in a matter of seconds vs. minutes and for pennies vs. dollars, saving customers time and money. Network fees will vary based on demand in the Bitcoin network.”
On the other hand, the Lightning Network is not yet planned for several months, the blog post read.
