Robinhood is finally rolling out a beta version of its non-custodial crypto wallet to 10,000 customers on its waitlist after announcing the product in May, its CTO and general manager of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, told TechCrunch. The product is called Robinhood Wallet and will be the company’s first internationally available app, Kerbrat said.
The company revealed new details about the offering in conjunction with the beta launch, most notably that it will launch exclusively with Polygon, a popular layer-two blockchain that plugs into Ethereum and makes the network faster and cheaper to use.
This means beta users will be able to purchase the Polygon MATIC token on Robinhood’s main exchange app and transfer it to their Robinhood Wallet. They will also be able to access dApps directly on the Polygon network, including DeFi apps such as Uniswap, Balancer and Kyberswap, and metaverse games such as Decentraland, a spokesperson for Polygon said in an email to TechCrunch.
Over time, the Robinhood team plans to build out multichain support for the wallet beyond the Polygon ecosystem, Robinhood crypto product manager Seong Seog Lee told TechCrunch.
“I think there are two or three main considerations [around going multichain],” Lee said. “The first is, we do want to get this initial wallet out into the world and see what user feedback is like. I think the demand for multichain is something that we’re going to keep at the forefront if a lot of users are asking for it … I think number two is, if we think that going multichain ends up delivering a better, more liquid decentralized trading experience, that’s also something that will prompt us to go multichain. And the third is, in the future, as we look into use cases like NFTs, we think multi-chain might be a great, great way to achieve that goal.”
Robinhood rolled out a custodial crypto wallet to its users earlier this year and says it plans to complete a full rollout of the non-custodial wallet to 1 million+ users on the waitlist after the beta is complete, sometime before the end of 2022.
Beta users will be able to fund their wallets using USDC stablecoin tokens, trade and swap crypto and connect to dApps to earn yield, according to the company. However, NFT marketplace integration and the ability to view NFTs within the Robinhood Wallet won’t be available until the public launch later this year, Kerbrat said.
Notably, Robinhood says it won’t charge Robinhood Wallet users network or gas fees for transactions, differentiating its non-custodial offering from other popular non-custodial wallets such as Metamask and Coinbase Wallet.
Lee said the gasless swap feature, in particular, is “an important step in lowering the friction for users to get started doing on-chain things.”
“We wanted to keep the features of what a decentralized trading experience allows you to do, which is swap from coin to coin. But at the same time, we wanted to simplify that into a mobile-friendly user interface,” Lee said.
Robinhood lets users manage their own crypto wallets in push to spur trading
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