Robinhood appears to be adding four cryptos including Shiba Inu and Solana

Quick Take

  • Robinhood has added new pages for four cryptocurrencies, claiming that they can now be bought and sold.
  • It doesn’t appear the coins are available for trading yet.

Update: Robinhood has now confirmed the listings in a blog post. It says the coins are now available to buy and sell.

Robinhood seems to be adding four major cryptocurrencies to its roster, according to its website. These are the memecoin Shiba Inu, blockchains Solana and Polygon, and DeFi lending protocol Compound.

The exchange has added specific pages for each of the four coins, with a message that prospective traders can sign up to buy or sell each of the coins. It doesn't appear that the coins are available to trade yet, according to various comments on Twitter.

Robinhood and Coinbase have been engaged in a bit of a competition when it comes to memecoins. Robinhood added Dogecoin early on, as it shot up with the backing of Elon Musk — making up 62% of its quarterly crypto revenue in Q2 2021. Coinbase, which only added Dogecoin in June 2021, was much faster quicker to the draw for Shiba Inu. It added Shiba in September 2021, only a few months after it had started gaining traction. Shortly after, Shiba saw a big price spike from $0.00002 to $0.00008.

Now it seems Robinhood has followed suit on Shiba, albeit seven months behind.

Shiba was launched in August 2020 but didn't gain any hype until memecoins like Dogecoin started taking off. Shiba was similarly themed around the Shiba Inu breed of dog, but with a much higher total supply of tokens. The project claimed, however, that half of its token supply had been burned, which typically refers to a process where tokens are sent to an address that cannot be accessed. But in this case, the tokens had been sent to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin who decided to sell a chunk of the tokens and donate the proceeds to charity.

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Solana is a proof-of-stake blockchain that offers fast transactions at low speeds. It has recently faced degraded performance, according to Solana status, meaning that transactions can be slow to be processed.

Polygon is a blockchain that is often seen as a sidechain to Ethereum and has a similar focus on high performance. But it has struggled with deep transaction reorgs, where long strings of blocks in its blockchain are changed retroactively.

Compound is the sixth-largest DeFi protocol on the Ethereum blockchain, according to DeFi Pulse. It currently looks after $6.3 billion in assets.

Robinhood has not made an announcement for the listings. We have reached out to the brokerage and will update this article should we hear back.


© 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

About Author

Tim is the Editor-In-Chief of The Block. Prior to joining The Block, Tim was a news editor at Decrypt. He has earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of York and studied news journalism at Press Association Training. Follow him on X @Timccopeland.