Brokerage app Robinhood expects to make its long-awaited crypto wallet available to all customers by early 2022.
On Monday, news broke that Robinhood was testing a wallet to enable cryptocurrency transfers after a hidden image of a waitlist page for users was discovered in the beta version of the app.
Robinhood users can now join said waiting list to get early access to the wallet as it is rolled out. Testing is to begin next month, Robinhood announced Wednesday.
“We want to make sure our systems are scaling and that we’re prepared to handle the full load,” Christine Brown, Robinhood’s chief operating officer, told CoinDesk.
“So we’ll be giving people from the waitlist access first and then we’ll have general availability out to 100% by early 2022,” Brown said.
Users can also jump up the waitlist by referring other people. A user referring a friend who then joins the waitlist themselves will move up the list “by half”, Brown explained.
Aside from the waiting list, Robinhood is also opening an “alpha” programme, whereby a very small group of users will be invited to get hands-on access to the wallet, which is in the final stages of development, to provide feedback on its features and functionality.
Robinhood has seven cryptocurrencies available to trade on its platform, all of which will be supported in its wallet “from the get-go,” according to Brown.
“When wallets?”
Robinhood began offering crypto trading in 2018 with the service seeing an acceleration in take-up over the last 12 months. Some 9.5 million customers traded cryptocurrencies in Q1 2021, up from 1.7 million in Q4 2020.
Last month, the company reported that crypto trading accounted for 41% of its revenue in Q2 2021, with more than 60% of its customers trading cryptocurrencies at some point.
Amidst this surge in demand, the lack of facility to transfer their crypto assets elsewhere has been a source of some consternation from users.
“If you go to any of our Twitter posts, you can see users saying, “I want to withdraw my crypto – when are you releasing wallets?”” Brown said.
Robinhood has spent several months reassuring users that an expansion of crypto features including a wallet to enable transfers in and out of the platform was in the works.
Read more: How $33B Robinhood Ended Up Being Worth Less Than Coinbase
