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Robinhood to cut fees for crypto traders with Arbitrum integration

Robinhood to cut fees for crypto traders with Arbitrum integration
Fintech/VC/DealsDeFi
Robinhood will use the Arbitrum blockchain to process trades on its crypto wallet. Credit: Rita Fortunato/DL News
By
Aleks Gilbert
  • Robinhood will give its traders using its crypto wallet Arbitrum access to cut gas fees.
  • It is the company’s latest expansion into crypto.
  • The move comes as both fintech firms and Wall Street behemoths push into the market.

Robinhood is expanding its crypto wallet with an Arbitrum add-on that will cut traders’ transaction fees as traditional fintech firms increasingly move into crypto.

The stock trading app’s crypto wallet will enable its users to use Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer 2 blockchain, to process crypto trades.

This is the latest push by Robinhood to tap into the crypto market.

“We want to be kind of the on-ramp to the crypto world,” Johann Kerbrat, the general manager of Robinhood’s crypto arm, told DL News in an interview in December.

Robinhood expanding its services is the latest in a string of advances made by fintech firms like Revolut, PayPal and Venmo to launch and expand crypto services.

Wall Street giants like BlackRock, Fidelity, and JPMorgan have also muscled into the market through spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds and other digital asset services over the years.

These moves come as the price of Bitcoin is trading around the $63,000 mark — a level not seen since late 2021, which has also raised the value of Ether and other cryptocurrencies.

Robinhood’s Arbitrum wallet integration

Robinhood has made crypto a key part of its strategy over the years. The stock-trading app has about 11 million monthly users, according to its latest financial results.

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The company’s crypto arm drove its growth in the last quarter of 2023. Cryptocurrency revenue grew 10% year-over-year to $43 million, almost one-quarter of the company’s $200 million in transaction-based revenue between October and December.

The self-custody crypto wallet is part of that drive. Released a year ago, it lets users manage crypto without the aid of an intermediary.

In December, it launched a crypto trading service in the European Union.

While Robinhood doesn’t collect fees on transactions made through the wallet, users still have to pay gas — the transaction fees of the various blockchains the wallet supports.

Users can send and receive crypto on several blockchains, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Polygon, as well as layer 2s Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base.

Users have been able to trade crypto on Ethereum and Polygon via the 0x API and LI.FI decentralised exchange aggregators, respectively.

“Ethereum gas fees are an essential part of securing the network, but these same fees can hinder adoption,” Kerbrat said in a prepared statement.

Investor deposits in Arbitrum's DeFi ($)

“Accessing and transacting on L2s has historically been difficult to non-crypto natives, but Robinhood Wallet now helps strip away the complexities to help onboard those new to web3.”

Robinhood said it would partner with Arbitrum to enable swaps across blockchains “and other campaigns that lower the barriers to use web3 on Robinhood Wallet.”

Aleksandar Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at aleks@dlnews.com.