Good news crypto enthusiast. Robinhood, one of the largest mobile stock trading apps, has added both Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash to its mobile trading platform.
Now before you start loading up money onto the platform, Robinhood is currently only available to 17 of the 50 US States, so you'll have to check whether your state allows you to make a purchase. If your state is not among the 17 currently allowed, that's okay as Robinhood hopes to open trading for all 50 states by 2018.
Some pros to take away from this is that Robinhood should lower the costs for trades moving forward. As most of you are familiar with the larger crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, etc. currently these exchanges charge fees per trade. Robinhood charges no fees which provides a healthy level of competition for these exchanges to drop their current rates or face users leaving their platforms.
Not only that but Robinhood is highly regulated like any other financial services provider so you can rest assured your funds are safe.
Now most of you might be thinking, then how does Robinhood make its money? How can it feed its starving employees? While we’re not exactly sure how it works for cryptocurrency trades, Robinhood relies on the interest from holding stock funds in their accounts. They’re banking on the fact that they can get a large enough user base that could provide them slow payments each month/year, so at least there’s some revenue for them involved.
Overall, this seems like a positive development for cryptocurrencies. With a new competitor in the cryptocurrency exchange environment, we’re hoping to see lower trading fees for all moving forward and hopefully more security features. Plus, it now brings more people who would normally be trading stocks to get their feet into cryptocurrencies. A win-win for everyone.