Retail trading app Robinhood has recently reported an increase in the number of new users, as they line up for a share of the cryptocurrency gains.
The company, in a blog post, stated that it has grown its user-base by 6 million this year. The report also states that the number of monthly customers in February buying from its crypto platform this year has increased by 15 times compared to the number the same time in 2020.
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Last year, the number grew by 401,000 within a single month, as the firm averaged about 200,000 monthly customers.
Seven tradable assets offered on the platform
The company even had to stop trading for some stock as a result of overwhelming trading demand in January. It provides only seven tradable crypto assets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, Dogecoin, Bitcoin SV, as well as Bitcoin Cash.
However, it doesn’t have any trading size limits, but the average transaction size is still put at about $500. For the previous year, Robinhood only managed to achieve average trade of half the amount. This year, the average trade has grown bigger than the transaction size of $500, prompting Robinhood to place a trading stop on some stocks earlier this year.
The company also came under fire from investors and the SEC for its decision to limit the number of trades on some stocks.
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Number of retail traders surge
Robinhood became attractive to traders because of the intuitive user interface of the platform. It also offers educational articles that teach investors about investments in cryptocurrencies. However, the educational articles are targeted at newbies that don’t have the technical knowledge about operating a more technical trading platform.
Another attractive feature of the platform is the offer of zero trading fees. However, it makes most of its money from spreads between makers and takers.
Now, more investors are looking to trade on the Robinhood platform than envisaged. It shows that retail investors are gradually competing heavily with their institutional counterparts after months of dominance by the latter.
