Announced at Consensus 2023 on April 27, “Robinhood Connect,” a fiat-to-crypto onramp, supports decentralized applications (DApps) and self-custodial wallets. Positioned as a competitor to similar services like Coinbase Pay and MoonPay, Robinhood Connect essentially allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies using a credit or debit card directly within their self-hosted wallet or native DApp.
Robinhood Connect has the ability to integrate with Web3 projects, as developers can embed services directly into applications. This allows customers to access their Robinhood credentials natively within DApps without having to open the Robinhood website or app separately to log in and make transact ions.
Currently, the service is only available in the MyDoge, Giddy, and Slingshot ecosystems, but support for Exodus and Phantom has been announced soon.
Robinhood Crypto general manager Johann Kerbrat explained in a company blog post that the service was developed with the hope of getting more people into the cryptocurrency space: "Cryptocurrencies and Web3 have the potential to make the future of the financial system better, but we recog nize that significant barriers to wider adoption remain."
The market for fiat-to-crypto services like Robinhood Connect is not terribly crowded, but Robinhood is one of only a few traditional finance-related companies entering the space.
As of January 2023, Robinhood claims to have 23 million user accounts and $74.7 billion in assets under custody. This is significantly lower than the 110 million verified users that Coinbase claims, but the amount of assets is still similar (Coinbase says it holds $80 billion in assets on the platform). By comparison, rival companies MoonPay and Webull have an estimated 5 and 13 million users, respectively. Along with the launch of Robinhood Connect, the company also announced several changes to the Robinhood app, such as the ability to execute advanced orders through stop orders and stop limit orders.
The new service and app upgrade comes a few months after the launch of Robinhood's own-brand self-hosted wallet on the iOS App Store, which currently holds a 3.9-star rating and is 144th most downloaded in the finance category.
