On Tuesday morning, the fintech trading platform- Robinhood added four new crypto tokens, bringing its total to 11. The new offerings are high-flying Ethereum competitor Solana (SOL), the dog-themed meme-coin Shiba Inu (SHIB), Ethereum scaling technology Polygon (MATIC), and the original decentralized finance token Compound (COMP).
SHIB surged almost 25% an hour after the news, with the others jumping in the high single digits.
However, each of these tokens has struggled in 2022, with SHIB in the lead by only losing 17% on the year. COMP, SOL, and MATIC are each down approximately 40%. By comparison, Bitcoin is only down 15% year to date, and it broke even on the year last week before sinking again.
Ever since Robinhood began offering crypto trading in 2018, customers had been clamoring for the opportunity to buy and sell more tokens. SHIB was a focus of investor interest in particular, as it is perceived as a complimentary token to Dogecoin, which became one of Robinhood’s most traded assets when it was added in the summer of 2018. However, the company avoided listing SHIB until now because of fears about its outsize volatility, even for crypto.
Speaking last Thursday at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Robinhood Chief Product Officer Aparna Chennapragada noted that Bitcoin is the top recurring ‘buy’ asset for the company so far this year, with Ethereum coming in third and Dogecoin falling into 6th place.
While Robinhood’s 11 tokens its significantly higher than PayPal’s four (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash), or Block’s Cash App exclusive focus on Bitcoin, dedicated crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and FTX offer dozens and sometimes hundreds or thousands of assets and trading pairs
