Robinhood to allow customers to buy crypto using external wallets and apps

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev co-founded the online brokerage with Baiju Bhatt, another Stanford University graduate. David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Robinhood, an online stock brokerage that has expanded into crypto, on Thursday announced a new product for Web3 developers: Robinhood Connect.

The feature allows customers using external wallets and decentralized applications, or programs running on blockchains, to purchase tokens through the brokerage’s crypto exchange. Robinhood currently allows users to trade 18 cryptocurrencies on its platform, from mainstays like Bitcoin and Ether to memecoins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. The Web3 wallets

“Our conviction about the future of Web3 remains strong, and we have continued to build new products that put the accessibility and usability of crypto front and center for customers,” Johann Kerbrat, general manager of Robinhood Crypto, said in a statement.

The announced plugin is free for developers to build into Web3 applications, Kerbrat said Fortune. (Customers using Robinhood Connect may see small fees, including an existing 1.5% fee for buying crypto via a debit card or bank account.) Web3 wallets Phantom and Exodus plan to integrate the plugin into their platforms. And so does Giddy, another wallet, whose CEO Eric Parker said in a statement Fortune that Robinhood Connect provides “an easy way to buy and transfer crypto.”

Along with Robinhood Connect, the publicly traded brokerage announced upgrades to its existing crypto offerings, including a redesign of its homepage to emphasize crypto products, personalized price alerts and access to advanced charts beyond line graphs that show the current price of a digital asset.

The announcements continue the online brokerage’s steady expansion of crypto services despite growing regulatory uncertainty and recent scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which issued Robinhood an investigative subpoena in December, shortly after the fall of FTX, the notorious cryptocurrency exchange that declared bankruptcy in November.

Founded in 2013 as an online brokerage catering to non-professional traders, Robinhood dove into the crypto world in 2018 when it offered customers the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin and Ether, the original cryptocurrency for the Ethereum blockchain.

As the company, founded by Stanford University graduates Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, expanded the number of tokens it offered traders, it also expanded its crypto products.

Since 2021, the online brokerage house has been exploring the possibility of a Robinhood crypto wallet, or a one-stop shop where users can store crypto holdings. In 2022, it released a beta of a limited “wallet”, which allowed users to transfer crypto from Robinhood to other exchanges, such as Coinbase, Kraken and Binance. And in 2023, it released a more expansive offering similar to the popular wallet MetaMask, which allows users to store a variety of crypto offerings, including non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, as well as interact with decentralized applications.

Despite its continued commitment to crypto, the brokerage has seen declining crypto trading revenue on its platform amid Crypto Winter, reporting a 24% decline in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021.