Robinhood’s Crypto COO Leaves, Founds New Crypto Startup

Robinhood Markets, Inc., a financial services company based in California, will see its Chief Operating Officer for Crypto, Christine Brown, leave the firm after almost five years of leading its crypto division.

Brown joined Robinhood in 2017, after having worked at Google. She has since overseen the firm’s crypto business and introduced several crypto services for Robinhood’s investment app platform.

According to initial reports, Brown is purportedly founding her own crypto startup, although no other detail has been disclosed with regards to this matter. Robinhood, however, has confirmed that Brown is indeed leaving the firm.

“We’re so grateful to Christine for her contributions to Robinhood over the past five years – from leading our self-clearing initiative to scaling the Robinhood Crypto team. We’re excited to follow her entrepreneurial journey going forward,” shares Robinhood COO Gretchen Howard.

As itself a financial technology startup, Robinhood was able to begin offering crypto services back in 2018, drawing in a significant number of users. Robinhood’s revenue in terms of crypto, however, has suffered a plunge, based on its earnings report for Q4 2021, which showed that it has only earned $48 million from crypto out of the total  $363 million, which is short of the year’s projections of $448.2 million.

Crypto revenue for Robinhood has since declined to 18% of the firm’s transaction-based revenue. Part of the reason why the firm’s revenues from crypto has been in decline is due to Robinhood’s perceived slowness in listing and adding more tokens and coins to the platform, as compared to rival platforms such as Coinbase, which has in contrast committed to accelerating its listings process.

Despite this, Robinhood is set to grow its crypto offerings in 2022 and has since rolled out a beta testing phase for its new wallet functionality which will enable its users to move their holdings in and off-platform easily. This new wallet feature is said to be launching by the end of Q1 2022.

“Robinhood has set aggressive goals to start opening its crypto platform up to customers internationally in 2022. The company believes in the immense potential of the crypto economy and sees a big opportunity in serving customers across the globe,” the company said.

Clearly, crypto remains a key focus for the company and it will be interesting to see how it competes against rivals in what is becoming an increasingly crowded crypto industry. Brown’s departure will likely mean a changing of the guard for Robinhood Crypto, and it will be worth watching to see who takes on the mantle of leading this fast-growing crypto arm.

Disclaimer: 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.