Cryptocurrencies

Robinhood Crypto Adds Illinois as Platform’s 29th State

The fee-free stock trading app Robinhood continued the gradual rollout of its cryptocurrency offering this week, announcing that Illinois had become the 29th state where Robinhood Crypto was available. Now Robinhood users in the Prairie State can buy and sell a selection of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum from within the app. As CCN reports, this is the latest expansion for the platform, which first launched earlier this year.

Announced in January of this year, Robinhood Crypto was originally available as a beta to users in just five states: California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, and New Hampshire. At the time the platform also only offered trading support for Bitcoin and Ethereum, although other alt coins could be added to a “watchlist” for price updates. Since then Robinhood has added Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and most recently Ethereum Classic to its line up of support currencies while also expanding the offering to several more states. Prior to this week’s announcement the latest states to get Robinhood Crypto were North Dakota and South Dakota.

Unfortunately for Robinhood and its investors in Illinois, this launch comes at a time when several cryptocurrencies are seemingly struggling — a far cry from the explosive growth coins were seeing around this time last year. After falling through a perceived price floor of $6,000 last month, Bitcoin is currently trading at around $3,300. Meanwhile Ether’s pricing has gone into double digits and the currency has lost its second-place standing, now falling well behind Ripple in terms of market cap.

Speaking of Ethereum, Robinhood Crypto’s expansion also comes on the heels of a head-scratching incident that saw Ether’s price “flash crash” on Coinbase Pro’s trading platform. According to The Next Web, the price of Ethereum dropped to just $13 on the exchange before quickly rebounding to $97. While this all happened in a matter of moments, crypto analyst Cole Garner shared screenshots on Twitter showing fulfilled orders of Ether for as low as $55. Initially the incident seemed reminiscent of another that occurred in June of last year and saw the same coin drop from $300 to 10¢ before bouncing back. In that case Coinbase ended up refunding affected users whose stop loss orders had been triggered. However it’s unclear what will happen this time around as the exchange said in a statement “Over the past 24 hours, all Coinbase platforms have operated as planned and no system-wide incidents have been identified.” This could suggest it was actually a user (and a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad trade) that caused the error.

Despite the rough patches the cryptocurrency markets have experienced in recent weeks, the continued expansion of Robinhood’s trading platform is encouraging. At the same time some traders are still waiting for a few changes to come to the app, such as introducing support for more coins and allowing users to transfer purchased currencies to a crypto wallet. Still, as Robinhood sets its sights on an initial public offering, it’s nice to know that the company still sees cryptocurrency trading as a viable ploy.

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