Robinhood launches crypto transfers in Europe in push overseas

Retail investing platform Robinhood on Tuesday announced that it’s offering customers in Europe the ability to transfer cryptocurrencies in and out of its app, broadening its product capabilities in the region as it presses ahead with international expansion.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the company said that it’ll allow customers in the European Union to deposit and withdraw more than 20 digital currencies through its platform, including bitcoin, ethereum, solana, and USD coin.

The move effectively gives Robinhood’s European users the ability to “self-custody” assets — meaning that, rather than entrusting your cryptocurrency to a third-party platform, you can instead take ownership of it in a fully owned wallet that holds your funds.

In December last year, Robinhood launched its crypto trading service, Robinhood Crypto, in the EU for the first time. The service allowed users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, but not to move them away from the platform, either to another third-party platform or to their own self-custodial wallet.

Johann Kerbrat, general manager of Robinhood’s crypto unit, told CNBC that he thinks the EU has the potential to become an attractive market for digital currencies, thanks to crypto-friendly regulations being adopted by the bloc.

“The EU can become a very attractive market next year,” Kerbrat said in an interview. He pointed to the EU’s landmark Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), regulation, which sets out harmonized rules for the crypto sector across all 27 of the bloc’s member states.

Once MiCA is fully in place, Kerbrat said, every EU country will fall under the same unified regime.

“In terms of total addressable market, [the EU] is as big as the U.S.,” he told CNBC, adding, “it’s definitely an interesting market for us.”

Robinhood added that, for a limited time, the company will offer European customers the ability to get 1% of the value of tokens deposited on its platform back in the form of the equivalent cryptocurrency they transfer into Robinhood.

Robinhood is rolling out new features in the EU at a time when U.S. crypto firms are sparring with regulators at home. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission has sued several companies including Coinbase, Binance and Ripple over claims that they’re all dealing in unregistered securities.

Each of the platforms has contested the SEC’s allegations, stipulating that tokens marketed and sold on their platforms don’t quality as securities that should be registered with the agency.

“We are disappointed by the way U.S. regulation is happening, where it’s basically regulation by enforcement,” Kerbret told CNBC. “We are not super happy to see that.”

Robinhood is regulated by the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) at a federal level in the U.S. It also holds a BitLicense with New York State Department of Financial Services.