Robinhood Hints Launch Of Crypto Staking And Lending Services

Robinhood hints launch of crypto staking and lending services after it decided to bulk out of the upcoming crypto wallet as we reported earlier in our cryptocurrency news.

Robinhood held a roadshow before its IPO on Thursday and the company said that it had invested in crypto staking, lending, and wallet services. In addition to the announcement of the crypto wallet, the trading app Robinhood hints at the launch of crypto staking and lending services. At the company’s roadshow that was broadcast online a day ahead of its IPO, the CFO Jason Warcnik said that the platform is making a lot of investment in things that customers want like lending, staking and wallets and he added:

“We think there’s a big opportunity in front of us, and we look forward to delivering more products for customers.”

The Melo Park-based trading app company now allows customers to buy and sell crypto but traders cannot earn interest on their holdings or move crypto to the external wallets. Robinhood said it will offer a new wallet as soon as possible and the executives repeated this promise a day ago but didn’t provide a launch date. Earlier this month, a spokesperson for the company said that the company’s wallet will interface with decentralized finance protocols which could explain Warnick’s reference to lending as it is a very popular service among DeFi protocols. The company will go public through an IPO and the shares are expected to sell at around $40 under the HOOD ticker.

Last week, Robinhood disclosed more plans to raise over $2 billion via its IPO and the company expects to earn more revenue of up to $574 billion this quarter which is an increase from the $522 million in revenue that it posted in Q1. To promote the IPO to potential investors, the companies often hold roadshows to meet with the investors via confidential meetings. The institutional investors buy this stock at a cheaper rate and dump it on the investors when the IPO launches. Robinhood on the other hand is letting customers purchase a huge chunk of its IPO shares and puts them on equal footing with the institutional investors. That is why it chose to live-stream the roadshows and have executives field questions from its 18 million customers.

The move is similar to what Coinbase did when it went live in April through a direct listing and held a roadshow on Reddit. The open nature of the roadshow meant that some questions from the online crowd were funny like “What’s your favorite planet?” and the CEO Vlad Tenev answered, “Definitely Pluto.” This can be expected as 17% of the revenue of the app in the first quarter of the year came from meme-spiked crypto trading and 34% of crypto revenues or around 6% of its total revenue came from DOGE traders.