When you trade Robinhood cryptocurrency, a simplified crypto trading service offered by the Robinhood financial app. Also known as Robinhood Crypto, it lets you buy and sell digital assets without paying commissions—but you can't send coins off the platform or use them outside Robinhood. That’s the big catch. You’re not owning crypto the way you would on Coinbase or Kraken. You’re owning a claim to it, locked inside Robinhood’s system. It’s like buying a concert ticket but not being allowed to leave the venue with the merch.
Robinhood supports a handful of major coins: Bitcoin, the original and most widely traded cryptocurrency, Ethereum, the foundation for most DeFi apps and smart contracts, Dogecoin, a meme coin that gained massive popularity through social media, and a few others like Solana and Polygon. But if you’re looking for newer tokens, niche DeFi coins, or anything not on their approved list, you’re out of luck. Unlike decentralized exchanges, Robinhood doesn’t let you explore the full crypto ecosystem. It’s a curated store, not a marketplace.
That limitation shapes everything else. You can’t stake your ETH to earn interest. You can’t use your Bitcoin as collateral for a loan. You can’t send crypto to a friend’s wallet or use it to pay for goods on-chain. Robinhood keeps everything centralized, which makes it easy for beginners but dangerous if the platform ever goes down or changes its rules. And while fees are $0, the spread—the difference between buy and sell price—is often wider than on other platforms, meaning you pay more in hidden costs.
People use Robinhood for crypto because it’s simple. No wallet setup. No seed phrases. No risk of losing keys. But that simplicity comes at a cost: control. If you want to truly own your crypto, you need to move it off Robinhood. If you just want to speculate on price swings without the hassle, it works fine—for now.
Below, you’ll find real reviews and breakdowns of crypto platforms that actually let you own your assets, scams that mimic Robinhood’s name, and guides on how to spot the difference between trading on a brokerage and holding real crypto. Some posts expose fake airdrops tied to Robinhood. Others compare its fees to real exchanges. And one dives into why people in countries with banking restrictions still avoid Robinhood—even when it’s the only app that seems easy.
Robinhood offers zero-fee crypto trading with a simple interface, ideal for beginners and stock investors. But it lacks staking, crypto-to-crypto swaps, and self-custody-making it unsuitable for serious traders.
Categories