Fresh off the presses from TechCrunch, the popular stock trading app with zero commission trading, has just announced they will be adding free cryptocurrency trading onto their platform starting this February.
How are they doing this? Well apparently they don't really plan on making any money from it. According to co-founder Vlad Tenev, "we're planning to operate this business on a break-even basis and we don't plan to profit from it for the foreseeable future." Instead the focus seems to be on growing the number of users, their overall exposure, and catering to the users they already have.
According to TechCrunch, 95% of Robinhood users surveyed said they'd invest in cryptocurrency if it was added to the platform.
This comes as the market has been down for weeks now compared to the end of 2017 where plenty of cryptos were rocketing and increasing. It should be interesting to see how this will effect prices, if it even will at all, but this could be a small sign that the markets will change for the better by February and that the January blues wont be continuing much longer.
This also legitimizes and opens up the market to new investors. Robinhood has roughly 3 million users right now, and this could potentially attract even more to their platform with the addition of cryptocurrencies.
We've seen in the past small events sometimes rocket prices and while it's unlikely this will, it could be a small trigger to trigger the start of cryptos starting to reach new highs in near future.
In any case, it seems cryptos will continue to get more popular this year. Many have continued to doubt the value of Bitcoin recently (myself included somewhat), but as more entry ways open up the first place to invest is still usually Bitcoin.
Robinhood plans to start out with only Bitcoin and Ethereum, and only do it in a few US states, but you'll be able to track many other cryptocurrencies on the app as soon as it launches.
Perhaps Bitcoin may sustain itself purely on the basis of it's name, and it's continuation of being the primary coin to use to trade other coins with on the exchanges.
For the full story check out TechCrunch's article here: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/25/free-cryptocurrency-trading-app/