This is It: PayPal (PYPL) and Robinhood Announced Crypto Withdrawals to Third-party Wallets

Headquartered in London Revolut has been around since 2015 as a private financial technology company that offers banking services featuring fiat currency exchange, debit cards, virtual cards, Apple Pay, interest-bearing "vaults", commission-free stock trading, commodities, as well as wide scale operations with crypto. Gaining momentum, Revolut is expanding into new markets such as Japan. In 2020 it became profitable and, with a £4.2 billion valuation became the UK's most valuable fintech. In January 2021 it applied for a UK banking license.

After Elon Musk tweeted about stopping to accept Bitcoin and the Chinese government renewed its crypto crackdown riff, about a half trillion dollars was scrapped from the market causing pain among the crypto newbies. Some crypto exchanges and coin wallets apparently experienced problems securing stability of their online planforms amid panicking exodus (that later resolved by itself, as we certainly know) but classic brokers such as Robinhood’s subordinated branch Robinhood Crypto, the app known for its outages during Dogecoin trading surges, managed to stay online throughout the entire crypto chaos period. Christine Brown, Robinhood Crypto's new COO, said the engineering team has increased fivefold since January and “mans the desk at all hours”.

But Robinhood’s crypto offerings, up until now, were rather limited compared to the specially designed crypto trading services on other apps. Robinhood customers could only buy and sell something akin to a micro Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s shares showing them the amount of crypto Robinhood holds on their behalf. Unlike Coinbase (COIN) or Binance, Robinhood didn’t allow its customers to transfer crypto to wallets outside of its platform.

Now everything is about to change in a big way. She said “We want to make sure that we build an experience – not just the technical foundation of sending and receiving coins, but the user experience around it – that is intuitive, that makes sense, and that reduces risk for our users.” I.e. instead of reluctantly running behind their numerous crypto-only-focused peers, Robinhood endeavors to be innovative and offer some different experience to its crypto enthusiasts.

Meanwhile, PayPal’s blockchain, crypto and digital currencies business unit head Jose Fernandez da Ponte, said during Coindesk's Consensus event: “We want to make it as open as possible, and we want to give choice to our consumers, something that will let them pay in any way they want to pay. They want to bring their crypto to us so they can use it in commerce, and we want them to be able to take the crypto they acquired with us and take it to the destination of their choice.”

Intensifying competition is an extremely good sign for all investors - especially, those who are procrastinating because of crypto infrastructure security doubts. Hypothetical merging of crypto exchanges with classic online brokers is capable of increasing attractiveness along with prospective market capitalizations of the most acclaimed coins in order of magnitude. So let’s stay tuned for these and similar developments!