Retail trading app Robinhood has appointed Christine Brown as the chief operating officer of its crypto division. The company announced the appointment in a statement on its website on Thursday. Brown, who is the current vice president of operations at Robinhood Markets, will now also oversee Robinhood Crypto following the appointment. Commenting on her new role, Brown expressed excitement at pivoting from traditional finance to the crypto space. “I couldn’t be more excited to lead our crypto operations, help our teams build amazing products, and deliver a great experience for our customers,” the executive added. According to the announcement, Brown’s …

Democratizing finance has been a dominant theme in recent years — with companies vying to create a level playing field and give amateur investors the same opportunities that hedge funds and institutional investors enjoy. There have been some successes along the way. Purchasing stocks is a lot easier now than it was a few years ago. The internet has helped to demystify the equities markets… enabling anyone to train themselves in technical analysis and access the latest intelligence. The costs associated with gaining exposure to shares have also tumbled. One of the companies that fired the starting gun on this …

Two trading apps have risen to the top of Apple's App Store in recent days. Robinhood holds the number one position, with Coinbase in second, at the time of publication on Friday. In third: popular social media platform TikTok. YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat hold the fourth, fifth and sixth positions, respectively. One possible conclusion is that folks are now more interested in swapping crypto and financial assets than they are in interacting on various social media platforms — a conclusion noted by CNBC in an article on Friday. Robinhood saw significant coverage in January when the company halted purchases of …

Massachusetts’ securities regulator is seeking to revoke the broker-dealer license of cryptocurrency-friendly stock trading app Robinhood in the state. William Galvin, the head of the state’s securities division, said in a new administrative complaint that Robinhood has “continued a pattern of aggressively inducing and enticing trading among its customers — including Massachusetts customers with little or no investment experience,” Bloomberg reports Thursday. The new filing is a follow-up to a complaint filed by Galvin’s office in December 2020, alleging that Robinhood’s marketing illegally targeted inexperienced investors. The state pointed to Robinhood’s recent activity, including a promotion that provides customers with …

Robinhood, a popular trading app targeting millennials and other inexperienced investors, has become a major hub for cryptocurrencies, offering further evidence that digital assets are garnering mainstream appeal. On Thursday, the company reported that 9.5 million users traded digital assets on its platform during the first quarter of 2021, a sixfold increase from the previous quarter. Robinhood provides commission-free trading for several major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin SV (BSV), Dogecoin (DOGE), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). It provides real-time market data for nearly a dozen more digital assets. That Robinhood’s crypto business is …

A platform that vows to make cryptocurrency and decentralized finance trading available to the masses is gearing up to launch its decentralized autonomous organization. Mute says that Voice Control is the first DAO to boast a dual-token system. The project aims to ensure that it is as simple as possible for enthusiasts with varying degrees of technical understanding to get involved — and this is being achieved through simple language and a visually unique decentralized application. Voice Control enables members to have their say — or delegate their votes to a trusted community member. This distinctive configuration helps ensure the …

GameStop Corporation, an American gaming and consumer electronics retailer, has announced its plans to sell up to 3.5 million GME shares following the stock’s massive and controversial rally. The firm announced Monday that it has filed a prospectus supplement with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, under which it may offer and sell up to 3.5 million shares of GME stock via an at-the-market, or ATM, equity offering program. GameStop said that its total global sales increased nearly 11% for the nine-week period ending April 3, 2021. GameStop noted that its common stock will be offered through American multinational …

Robinhood Markets Inc., a popular trading app that recently expanded its cryptocurrency business, has filed paperwork with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, to go public. The company confirmed Tuesday that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC relating to the proposed public offering of its common stock. Form S-1 requires companies to provide more detailed information on the planned use of capital proceeds., as well as a brief prospectus on the proposed security. While Robinhood didn’t specify when the IPO would take place, it confirmed that a public offering …

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has said the company is working towards increasing its cryptocurrency trading service. In a fireside chat posted on the broker’s YouTube account on Thursday, Tenev discussed plans to upscale its workforce and add more crypto trading pairs. Detailing the ongoing plans, the Robinhood chief remarked: “As much as people are bugging me on that on social media, I'm bugging our crypto team and our software engineers. We're going to try and get that done as fast as possible. And we'll see. We might add some new coins along the way.” In addition to increasing its crypto …

Though seemingly coming from nowhere for many, the themes behind the Reddit-fueled r/Wallstreetbets pump of GameStop feel familiar. Watching it unfold, I tried to figure out just why it had captured my interest to such a degree, and, to me, it was a spillover into the traditional markets of some pervasive themes driving crypto. Despite some competition in the narrative, I view the motivating force — and by it, I mean the social media-fueled spread of the message that drew enough widespread interest to have an impact in the market — behind the GME pump as analogous with what, at …

Retail-focused trading app Robinhood has revealed that the number of new monthly customers buying from its crypto platform this year is 15 times the 2020 average. According to the company’s new report “Crypto Goes Mainstream,” more than 3 million new users purchased from Robinhood Crypto in January, with more than 2.9 million new users having bought crypto during February so far. As such, Robinhood Crypto’s user base has expanded by 6 million in 2021 so far. By contrast, the platform revealed the largest number of new users transacting on Robinhood Crypto last year was 401,000 in July 2020 — when …

Hester Peirce, the commissioner for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission known by the nickname "Crypto Mom," welcomes the challenge of regulating decentralized finance. In a speech for a George Washington University Law School event on the digital economy, Peirce said decentralized finance, or DeFi, could be the alternative legacy financial system many are seeking given the surge in anti-Wall Street sentiment surrounding the short squeeze of GameStop stocks. The SEC commissioner said the technology could provide a "very good test" for the regulatory body in protecting investors and markets. "Although a work in progress with all the growing pains …