Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Crypto: “We’re Excited To Continue To Invest There”

On Wednesday (2 November 2022), Robinhood Markets, Inc. (Nasdaq: HOOD) Co-Founder and CEO Vlad Tenev talked about crypto during his company’s Q3 2022 Earnings Call.

Robnhood, which was founded in April 2013, is an American financial services firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It is well-known — especially among U.S. millennials — for its mobile app that makes it very easy to do commission-free trading of stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies.

According to the transcript of the earnings call provided by The Motley Fool, here are the main highlights of the Robinhood CEO’s comments on crypto during the Prepared Remarks and the Q&A Session:

“We want everyone to have safe, easy and low-cost access to the power of the decentralized web, which we believe is the future operating system of financial services. So after building a wait list of more than one million people since May, we’re excited that we rolled out the beta of the Robinhood Wallet, our self-custody Web 3 wallet to the first 10,000 customers last month...

“While it’s early, we’re hearing from customers that they love the simple and intuitive mobile experience and they really love the no gas fees.  They also tell us that they’d like us to add more blockchains to increase the breadth of coins available for them to swap and trade. We’re encouraged to see this enthusiastic early response and we’ll keep enhancing the wallet. And we’re planning to roll the Robinhood Wallet out internationally. So we’re excited that this will be our first product available to people all over the world…

“We also continue to roll out more coins over the past quarter in a deliberate and considered manner. One of these was our first stable coin USDC from Circle. As part of this rollout, we’re creating a new free educational program called Learn and Earn that gives our customers the ability to earn crypto simply by learning about it. We’re excited to roll this out and give our customers even more reasons to engage with our awesome educational content…

“We’re very selective about the coins that we list on the platform. We have a rigorous coin listing framework, which we believe is best-in-class. We’re also not engaged in crypto lending. We custody coins…

“… we’re going to be a global company… So we think crypto is a big part of that, and we’re excited to continue to invest there. We’ve been making a ton of investments in the past year despite it being crypto winter. And we want Robinhood to serve the entire world and offer low-cost, extremely simple and affordable and easy-to-use services to a much broader market… So there’s going to be a lot of work done to invest and innovate in crypto and to expand international as well...

“We have been hearing from some of our crypto enthusiasts that they want at the very least to be able to view their NFTs in wallet. I think trading NFTs in app is a little bit complicated with the recent Apple guidance. So we’re keeping an eye on that. But I think it’s highly likely that we’ll add the ability to view NFTs and for people to custody them.“