Ep. 578 The Future of Crypto Trading with Robinhood

— TRANSCRIPT —

 

SPEAKERS

Bryce Paul, Brendan Veihman

 

Bryce Paul  00:09

All right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls now I hope everybody’s having a fantastic morning, noon or night wherever you guys are in the world. You certainly in the right place. You guys are at the crypto one on one podcast. And we have a another fantastic guest. This bull market has been crazy. So far, it’s been like six or seven, maybe eight weeks of bull market. It’s been a ton of fun. But, Brendan, I noticed you’re wearing a you’re wearing an interesting color shirt. Does that tend to match the sentiment of the really the first pullback in this bull market that we feel? You

 

Brendan Veihman  00:42

know, I’m wearing a red shirt tonight red shirt, a bright red shirt. And for those of you who aren’t watching on the YouTube channel, you’re gonna want to check it out because that’s where you’re able to get all of the video. For all you Spotify for all you Apple Music list. Definitely check out the YouTube. Yeah, Bryce. I’m rocking a bright red shirt today to symbolize the first real pullback that we’ve seen in a while in the crypto markets. But you know, despite us seeing a little bit of a pullback, I’m still not that worried. There’s so much technical and fundamental development. That is still happening. And I still think the best is yet to come. Despite a little pullback here. Yeah,

 

Bryce Paul  01:19

the long term future is bright. This is just an incredible, incredible, you know, emerging new market that’s just got innovation pouring out of its ears. It feels like every single time we talk to somebody, we get more and more bullish. We’ve got an amazing guest joining us today. Joe Hahn Carrboro, who is the GM of crypto at Robin Hood. So Joe Hahn, welcome to the crypto 101 podcast. We’re excited to to dive in with you today.

 

01:47

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited.

 

Bryce Paul  01:51

I know we’re gonna have a lot of fun. You know, Robin Hood is a big company. But you didn’t just one day wake up and just start working there. There’s there’s a history there’s a backstory to who’s Johan Cabret is, and we want to know that we want to kind of know, you know, you’ve got an extensive background in engineering, we want to know kind of what you were doing and how you became the GM of crypto at Robinhood. Especially, you know, leaving household names like Uber and Airbnb to kind of come over to the crazies in crypto with us.

 

02:22

Yeah, I mean, so it’s a long story. So I don’t want to, you know, be very boring. But basically, when I was pretty young, when I was 1617, I started a company. At the time were building payments rails for for applications and ecommerce websites and things like this. And you know, at the time, it was mostly just credit cards and debit cards, right? And that’s more or less when the first Bitcoin white paper started to be published in you know, and the first time I read it, maybe a year later, I was like, this is actually something that could be cool. So that that was really my first deeps in the crypto world and then, you know, became an engineer, like you said, a different companies. And I worked at a at a privacy coins where we were building a new layer one. And then, you know, Jordan, Robinho does as a head of engineering for the crypto space, and then, you know, became the general manager after that, but really excited, it’s a huge opportunity. For me, it’s also, you know, really exciting to work on an application that is used by so many people and everything that we do is being utilized and, you know, tested by by millions of customers. And so that’s, that’s why like, amazing for for an engineer and, and now for the leader of the business. Ya know, it’s

 

Bryce Paul  03:51

incredible. And like, you know, I love that story. Like you read the Bitcoin white paper, you were kind of blown away, you’re like, This is crazy. It was it right at that moment, you know, Krypto came onto your radar as a, you know, for the first time or have you heard about it in the past? And did that sort of moment, you know, when was the first time you maybe you could think about like, Oh, I’m gonna go put money in the market or, you know, that kind of thing?

 

04:14

Yeah, so that was really early stage. It was like 2010. And so at the time, like, I, you can hear from my accent, right? I’m not from the US, I was from France. And it was, it was pretty difficult to even just buy bitcoin by crypto so early man, right? It was pretty early. And so at the time, I was just like running a few miners. And, you know, started to accumulate a crypto and started to understand like the value prop compared to what I was offering was my startup and, you know, it’s still an issue today, right? Like if someone use a credit card, you actually always have a risk of fraud and for a merchant, there is also like settlement delay. So if if You know, you pay somebody with a credit card, they will only get the money actually in the account in like two or three days. And then there’s always a risk of contesting the child and all these things. And at that time, I was like, wait, you know, Bitcoin actually solve this, like you can just pay somebody the bitcoin is landed, and there is no moral issue of fraud or chargeback or anything like this. So that was kind of the idea. Of course, many issues, you know, is with, with Bitcoin in terms of like, scale at the time, how many people can use it can accepted the delay for the transaction. And so that was kind of preventing, like a global adoption on day one. But I think we’re getting there, you know, like, in a lot of places, and so, still very excited about this space.

 

Brendan Veihman  05:45

And Johanne, you know, I don’t think Robin Hood needs any kind of introduction, I’m sure the majority of listeners out there are very familiar with what Robin Hood is and what kind of work that you will do over there. But for the people who maybe aren’t as familiar, maybe they’re not as plugged into the smartphone space. And they’re not as plugged into the like, phone and application side of things. Can you briefly just describe like what Robin Hood does and what your mission is? Yeah,

 

06:10

so Robin started in 2013. Since then, we have about 23 million customers a bit more than that, actually. And, and really, the mission has been to democratizing finance for whole, and making a lot of, you know, complicated product accessible to everybody. And so, at this point on Robinhood, you can trade stock options, crypto, you can open a retirement account, you can also get yield on the cash that you hold on the platform. And so, you know, the idea that behind Robin Hood is to basically have one app to manage all your finance. Yeah, no,

 

Bryce Paul  06:51

and it’s gotten a lot of success. I mean, 23 million users is a heck of a lot of people. And would you say kind of your main competitor, like Robin Hood has a whole kind of outside of even crypto, like the main competitor is Charles Schwab. And like, you know, kind of those those classic brokerage accounts? Or is it more, you know, Coinbase, or something else like that? Yeah, I

 

07:14

mean, I think, you know, it’s a variety of competitors for for us, yeah, on the on the brokerage side, you know, it will be more like Schwab or fidelity or something like that. And for us on the crypto side, you know, Coinbase is obviously one of our main competitor. And, you know, we tend to build our product in a way that you actually don’t have to choose between multiple company to manage all your finance. And I think one of the big key advantage of Robinhood is that, you know, if in November, you’re excited about, you know, any kind of stock, you can invest in that stock. And then in December, if you want to move from equities to actually crypto, you can do it with within the same app, and without having to transfer money between different platform and all these kind of things. So I think, you know, it’s very powerful for people to really be able to just have one control over older finance.

 

Bryce Paul  08:10

Yeah. And I’m curious, I would love to know, kind of just, you know, catch us up, you know, catch us up with where we are at with Robinhood crypto. So as the General Manager, you’re kind of overseeing all crypto operations. And I’m just curious to know, what can people leverage the platform, you know, I want our listeners to go check it out. What can they expect? Are they going to just be using it to trade? Are they doing Defy? Are they swapping? Are they sending coins? Like a wallet? What what’s all income encompassing here? Yeah,

 

08:41

you know, I think things changed a ton since I joined. So you know, we launched crypto at Robidoux. In 2018. At the time, we only had Bitcoin and Aetherium, you could only trade you could not send or receive crypto from your account. Since then, we did a lot of things. So now we have about 15 coins, or assets on the platform. One of them is a stable coin. We stable coin. It’s USDC. And then we added Of course, crypto transfer, which was one of the top requested features from from our customers. So if you’re eligible states you’re able to receive or send crypto from your account. And we’ve also kind of, you know, changed the way the the overall UI and UX is for for crypto. So now you have advanced charts. You also have new order types where you can place a stop loss for example. We also created a new home tab where you can see all your crypto and insight on the crypto. And so, you know, little by little what we do at Robin Hood is we go talk to our customers and we asked them like what’s missing? What do you want on the platform? And you know, they tell us and we tried to incorporate it in the product in the in the next release. And so that’s on the on the custodial Have a platform. And in March of this year, we also launched a self custody wallet. For all iOS customers, it’s available worldwide. And I think we already have like hundreds of 1000s of downloads in around 40 plus countries. And so we self custody wallet is really like kind of your gateway to get to anything web three. So of course, you can transfer from your Robinhood account to that self custody wide, if you don’t want to get your coins on Robin Hood, but if you want to self custody them, or if you want to access web three dabs or anything like that, you know, you can use this app. So that was a big, big step for us. I think it was gonna fall first, like who ran into the web three world. And I’ve been really excited to see like people using it more and more. Yeah,

 

Brendan Veihman  10:48

I mean, you mentioned Robin Hood’s latest update of custody where users can send and receive crypto. So I’m curious, like, which Kryptos are available for this? Is it just like select ones? Maybe the big ones like Bitcoin? And Aetherium? And also, is this full self custody? Or is Robin Hood acting as the custodian of sorts here?

 

11:08

Yeah, so on Robin Hood, the main object custodial platform, you can if you’re eligible, so there is a state where we are not offering it yet. But if you’re eligible, you can send the state, New York. But we are working, you know, on it, and we’re hoping to offer it soon. But if you if you are like not in the States, and if you’re eligible, you can receive us and all the cryptocurrencies that we offer on the platform. So that’s the 15 that we have. And on the south coast of the wallet side, we don’t play any role in the custody. So it’s your private key, it’s your your key your coin, there are risk with it, you know, obviously, we try to tell people and explain them that, you know, this key is very important, and they need to make sure to save it in a secure space. But once they have this with self custody wallet, they can do anything that they would like on the web Sweet World of any type of token that they can get on taxes and things like this. And Robin Hood has no access at all on this thing. That’s awesome.

 

Bryce Paul  12:19

I love it. It sounds like you guys are, you know, kind of playing both angles, right? You’re able to kind of offer people two different solutions and say, Hey, you guys choose whichever, whichever one you kind of want. I’m curious, though, as well, you mentioned 15 coins that Robin Hood lists? Are you kind of the gatekeeper that or what’s the criteria, the listing process that goes into being one of those lucky, you know, small select cohort of coins?

 

12:45

Yeah, you know, I think I’d Robinho, we took a very, kind of a very different approach from other other platform like, we we wanted to make sure that we’re not going to least have enough coins, and then those coins have issues, and you have to delete them. And, you know, we see somebody with wallets and stuff, engineering up kids. And that is also, you know, we we want to make sure that what we offer on the platform go through a very rigorous vetting. And so we have an entire committee that meets regularly to check the the assets on the platform make sure that everything seems seems correct, and that the risk is correct, as well. So he goes from, you know, analysis on legal compliance, security, technical things, and, you know, it’s a very, very long and varied process. And our goal is to make sure that it’s not just, you know, an asset on the platform, we want to make sure that we can send it correctly, for example. So, if the network ash rate is very low, and you know, there will be risk of doing double spending or things like this, for example, we will have a discussion that we need to put a bandaid on the on the website or the we need to think about removing this asset, like this kind of things. And then we revisit the list of assets continually. And I think one of the main question for us also is, you know, what do our customer wants. And so that’s something that we listen to a lot. Making sure that we offer the the asset that people are asking us. Yeah, that’s incredible.

 

Bryce Paul  14:29

And so I want to get into some of these web three apps that might be accessible through the Robin Hood platform. Um, tell us about that. Can people kind of go and you know, you know, get into Ave or compound or maker Dow, maybe NF T’s maybe the ability to hit a staking service along the way. Yeah,

 

14:47

so the wallet is made in a way where, you know, we want to give you access to anything that you want to do in the web space. So if you go directly to a DAP, you can connect your wallet Um, you know, it’s a system that many wallets use now using wallet connect. So it’s very simple. We also have a dab section where we help you kind of navigate through all these tabs. And, you know, our goal is to give you what, what you want. So if the customer wants to go on a deck, see if they want to go to a sticking service, if they want to do games, like we see a lot of people interacting with games on social network lately. You know, they can do it, and it’s very simple for them.

 

Brendan Veihman  15:31

And I’m curious from a customer standpoint, where, or I guess, what areas are you seeing the most demand in?

 

15:39

You know, it really depends of the of the market. And kind of how is crypto in the news. So, you know, in the past year, I think we were more in a kind of in a more quiet market, I will say, you know, Bitcoin was not in the news every morning. And so we saw a lot of focused on a little bit more active traders asking us for features. So that’s why we really doubled down on, you know, feature like advanced charts where they can do technical analysis on it and, you know, build their strategy. When, you know, earlier this year, when web three was was still very top of mind, for a lot of people, we had a lot of requests around NF t. So we built a way to support NF TS within a wallet, you can see all your NF T’s you can, you know, interact with it. And so it’s kind of a, you know, a constant feedback loop, right? Like we do regular round of what we call user research, but it’s really just us going to customer and asking them, like, Why do you like, Why do you hate the platform? And let’s try to find, you know, ways to bring what you’re looking for in different competitors, or what you’re missing in rehab into revenue? And

 

Brendan Veihman  16:53

I’m sure customer demand probably varies as well. I mean, we saw the big AI boom, last year and everyone, everyone wanted to be a part of AI. And then we see

 

Bryce Paul  17:02

took crypto off of their freaking investing website or something, didn’t they? They like put their like, we just like do innovation investing now, like at the very bottom? I’ll never forget that. Who was that Bryce? I think that was paradigm. Side? No, I,

 

17:19

I think you know, that’s something that you were asking me earlier, like, why I joined Robin Hood. And it’s something actually that I loved about a company that when we launched crypto at Robin, it was February of 2018. You know, it was like, the bottom of the bottom of the last winter. And at the time, you know, I’m sure that Robin Hood was always getting the question like, why are you launching crypto Is it dead? And, you know, when we talk with leadership, we’re always thinking about building for the long term. And I think that’s really something that is exciting for me is like, you know, even this year, we didn’t change any kind of investment in terms of resources at the company, we, we kept working on crypto because we want it to be there when the next cycle calm. And when our customers are going to ask for more crypto future they will be actually ready to use and not just, you know, in development. And that’s something that I was, you know, blown away when when I joined Robin Hood at the time. So instead

 

Brendan Veihman  18:14

of kind of playing to all these niches and all these little hype bubbles, you’re more focused on like the long term outlook, right? You’re looking at the bigger picture. And so instead of looking at, I guess, like the short term of like, hey, AI is really high, let’s start offering all these AI tokens and all these AI features, you’re more looking at the crypto space as a whole and say, let’s put ourselves in the best position so that, you know, two years, three years, five years from now, we can really kind of be like a leading horse in this race.

 

18:41

Yeah, exactly. I think you know, for us, we see crypto as a financial framework of tomorrow, like we we see blockchain as a way to solve so many issues in the current traditional finance system of today. And, you know, we think that this is a this is a very long term play, this is not just like a six months play. So that’s why when there is like something high being on on the crypto market, like we don’t lose that coins right away, or if there is an NFT suddenly being, you know, the discussion at dinner tables, like we don’t necessarily act on it, we want to be we want to be the platform that you will come to and you know, make really thoughts or decision not necessarily just trying to get on the latest hype.

 

Bryce Paul  19:30

Ya know, there’s definitely a fine balance to strike right there between, you know, kind of moving fast and breaking things and listing everything and kind of following the momentum and the hype and listing things and delisting things and, you know, offering new products and taking them away and like it gets to be kind of crazy and so kind of taking that longer term approach more stability is probably the right way. I do kind of have a follow up though to that because you know, if you think about it holistically what would be in a Deal kind of partner for Robin Hood, you know who, you know, as you’re kind of looking at the crypto landscape? Are you thinking, you know, out of your problems that crypto could solve? Would it be something like, Hey, you know, we could get better, you know, interest from this defy platform, or we could get lower fees from from this layer to are like, what would be an ideal sort of partnership, if you were to kind of go down that path?

 

20:25

Yeah, you know, we already have a decent amount of Wagner at Robin and crypto to, to power, like the entire kind of system and machinery. And for us, I mean, to your point, you know, pricing has always been top of mind, we, we always thought that, you know, if we want people to get into this space, we need to make the experience more magical. And you know, I am, I’m from the people that think that if you want to get into NFT, but you have to go from Fiat to crypto, pay a fee transferred to your wallet, pay a fee by NFT. And pay a fee. You know, at the end of the day, like the experience was not magical, you just paid a lot of fees in every every places. So Robin Hood, we made a very conscious effort to build a system that always to offer best price. And something that we actually published a couple of months ago is that on average on Robin crypto, you will get more crypto for your monies and other platform that, you know, we also mentioned. And that was really, really important for me, I really wanted to make sure that if we want more people to come into the crypto space, we’re not going to limit them and not going to take advantage of them by charging them more and more during, you know, during the cycle. And so this year, if you look at what we did, we first went completely transparent on our pricing. We did that in each one, where we now display to us the spreads the entire spread of the of the audience that you’re going to place. And we tell you how much Robin Hood is making from this older.

 

Bryce Paul  22:06

Really nice ad. So that’s a cool feature. That

 

22:10

was something that you know, customer were asking a lot they were, you know, telling us that they had a lot of trouble to compare pricing, because some platform tells you they charge a fee, but they also have a hidden markup on the spread some platform this charge markup some platform destroy your fee, you know, it was getting so confusing. So we took the you know, the approach of just like if we’re fully transparent, people can can compare. And then in September we published on our website, you can you can go look at it, like we publish a comparison of how much crypto you will get for a specific amount of Euro. And we refresh we study every month, currently. And the goal for us is to really show to people like if you go on Robinhood, you will you will get more crypto for Euro. And I think if we all do that, we will get more people excited to get into the crypto world.

 

Bryce Paul  23:04

I agree. I think I think transparency builds trust, right. I mean, that’s been the whole the whole basis of blockchain. Right. And it’s cool to hear that you guys are kind of incorporating that. And I think one of the things you know, that crypto doesn’t have is it doesn’t have market closes. Right. It’s 24/7 365, which presents quite some challenges for a brokerage I’d imagine. And, you know, I guess you know, also one thing it doesn’t have is circuit breakers. So we see Bitcoin go up 25% Today, and then down 25%, the next day, and alarms are going off and all that stuff. And you know, there’s no ability to kind of shut down, like the trading for a certain a certain coin or anything like that, as there is in the stock market as centralized institutions have their right to do to protect their customers and all that kind of stuff. Robin Hood has exercised that right in the past to shutdown sort of, you know, buy side or sell side of certain assets. How do you kind of deal with crypto in that complex? Right there?

 

24:05

Yeah, you know, I think we worked a lot on our platform to really make it even more robust that he was at the time, like, back in 2021. We are, you know, very, very wide days in terms of volume that we were dealing with. And so since then, and that’s really when I joined as a head of engineering for for the crypto business. We we are running on a system with pretty crazy what we call load test. And so we simulate basically how much volume we can generate, how much you know, customer demand we can have on the platform. And we generate this load test that like multiples of what we’ve seen like for, you know, top days and hours to basically build our systems and our platform in a way that will always kind of be able to Just staying like the demand that customer will have. And for us, like, you know, that’s the most important thing we, you know, to your point or on trust, we want to build a trust that if you need us because you want to, you want to take advantage of the market crashing and you want to buy or you want to exit your position. You know, we shouldn’t be there, and we should be able to be there for you. And so, you know, a lot of our engineering resources are just dedicated to that alone.

 

Brendan Veihman  25:27

And Johanna, we have a really big event around the corner. You might be familiar with it the Bitcoin ETF I mean, it feels like it is so close and we are partying as he Bryce’s is everyone I’m

 

Bryce Paul  25:40

gonna get the food ready, baby, I’m gonna be champagne.

 

Brendan Veihman  25:44

Yeah, I mean, it’s an exciting thing. It’s something that a lot of us have been waiting for, for so long. But I’m curious, I guess how you think that the Bitcoin ETF will affect your business over at Robinhood?

 

25:56

Yeah, you know, I think it’s a it’s an interesting one, I think what I’m really excited about is that, you know, it will bring legitimacy to the assets. And, you know, it’s, it’s going to be something that everyone will now be able to access, you know, if they retirement account or something, they will be able to get exposure to it. I think as a crypto person, what’s a bit sad for me is like, these coins are locked into the ETF. And so for Rita, you know, I think we will have still a lot of demand for for people that want to buy on a platform like Robinhood, and move to their self custody wallet or use them somehow and, you know, still, you know, we’ll be interested to actually own the the actual crypto. And I think the other part is that pricing wise, it will still be better to buy on spot on Robin crypto, from, from what I’ve seen so far, like, our pricing will still be better. That’s

 

Bryce Paul  26:58

awesome. That’s really good to hear. I’m really excited about these, I think like you said, it’s gonna bring legitimacy, it’s gonna be better transparency. One of the other angles I’m thinking about is the ability for these big institutions who it’s been expensive to outlay just cold, hard cash to buy bitcoin, right? Especially when rates are so high, you know, there’s, there’s a higher hurdle. And there’s never been really a capital efficient way to really get into the crypto market for these billion dollar institutions. For little guys like us Sure, we could go buy spot crypto, no big deal, but the ability to like kind of, you know, have these elaborate sort of option strategies with this Bitcoin ETF and have a super liquid market, and then also kind of being able to margin that right and have some level of capital efficiency from margining. The ETF it’ll be heavily incentivizing all sorts of different institutions to now take a look at it as a diversification sort of asset and then be able to bring it in the portfolio not have the drag of of all the things that portfolio managers don’t like. So it’s gonna be huge. I can’t wait. And I think it’s gonna be a huge boom for businesses like Robin Hood, and, and all this I think it’s gonna be the tide that lifts all boats. So I truly can’t wait for that. And, and one other thing, kind of in tandem with the ETF? Why I’m so bullish on 2024 I think it’s going to be a beautiful year, is the Bitcoin halving. You’ve lived through three of them. I’ve lived through three, but I wasn’t really around back in the first one, right? And so you around for all three halvings. You were an investor in crypto since the early days. And I kind of want to know, do you see this having unfolding in a similar way, as a driver of that hype cycle? You know, this is gonna be April 2024. For all of our listeners. It’s, you know, what kind of makes Bitcoin a little bit more scarce every every four years. It’s happening again. And it seems like every time about 12 to 18 months after the halving, we reached a new all time high. It’s happened every time it’s gonna happen again.

 

28:55

Yeah, I mean, you know, for me, it’s a it’s not a question again, sir. Like, I’m more on the engineering side and less on the prediction side, but I think what’s the question that I always tell people is, like, you know, you have to also think that the holiday delving now is like, it’s a force one. So, you know, people, you know, like, you already start starting to analyze, like, what happened in the first three times? And, you know, the question is, like, is it already priced in in the market? And, you know, will there actually be an impact on that on on the price that’s, that’s a, that’s TBD, I think. But the more interesting thing for me to think about is, you know, the impact on the miners, you know, a lot of the miner right now are not going to be efficient enough after the alving to generate, you know, return on investment from from the miners. And so I think that’s going to be something that I am going to follow closely. I also think it’s a good opportunity for some of this miner to you know, they are going to buy a new machine No new miners, and they will be able to use more clean energy and things like this. So, you know, excited to see what’s what’s going to be the impact there. But what I know for sure, it’s like that will be a lot of question after other famous April, I think, what is it now? I’d say probably for teens or 20s. There, I think. Yeah, that’s

 

Bryce Paul  30:19

1. Yeah, it’s targeted for like April 23 2024, something like that, and give or take a window of maybe 10 days or something.

 

30:25

Yeah. So you know, what we’ll see in four months, I guess now.

 

Brendan Veihman  30:30

It’s starting to get close. It’s really starting to get close, which gets me excited for one Magellan. Before we let you go. I saw that Robin Hood was expanding its crypto services over into the EU. So I’m curious, from your experience, how have other countries reacted to crypto in comparison to the United States? Because it’s easy for someone like me, or Bryce or you that live here? You know, to think of a certain way about crypto, but do people overseas in different countries and different continents, think of it differently? Are they just as excited?

 

31:05

Yeah. You know, so all Europe offering, where are we excited about it? happened last week. So I’m still recovering from from the launch. And you know, everything that happened that day, it’s, you know, it’s a lot of work that comes into fruition. And that moment, when you when you press a button and everything goes live, you’ll always you know, you’re kind of scared, worried that something will go wrong. And when things are starting to work correctly, you’ll see the first signups you see the first user, like going through the flow. You know, it’s always a very special moment. So yeah, it’s the adrenaline is very high that night. And I think even the morning, we were all like, super excited. Yeah, I think for for your question on, you know, how are people using it? I think it really depends on the countries. And I think that’s the beauty of crypto is, you know, in the US, we we have a pretty good payment system, like, again, go anywhere else with coffee and pay with your credit card. We also have banks over here, that’s for sure. We take it for granted. Absolutely. And some countries, they didn’t really have like the period of banks from the 1980s or 1990s, that that we had. Some countries have hyperinflation, some countries I’ve, you know, not necessarily a bank at every corner. And so for for for us, you know, we always thought about how do we bring our products to more people on the planet. And that’s kind of what was the idea was, was a wide at a time really giving an options for anyone with a smartphone to be able to have a custody wallet. But it’s, it’s really exciting when you go to some of these countries, and you see like, you know, how they are adopting the crypto to do anything, you know, some some are buying Bitcoin, because they want to fight against the inflation of the currency, somehow using USDC for payment method or any kind of, you know, USD stable coin. So, you know, for me, Europe, it’s also close to my heart, since I’m French, like I mentioned before, and we are pretty excited to you know, just start with a simple offering, well over 25 plus crypto over there. The thing that is very exciting about it is you will get bitcoin back for every trade that you place on the platform. And you also get up to Yeah, it’s a pretty exciting offering that I we really wanted to get in place. And you also get up to one Bitcoin, when you sign up and when you refer friends on the platform. And yeah, there will be there will be multicam at this point. So simple product. You know, at Robinhood we want everything to be very simple. We want to invest a lot on education, we think that people need to learn before doing any kind of investment. And so we’ll we’ll see where it takes us.

 

Bryce Paul  34:06

Man, I love it, Johan that sounds incredible. And there’s just a ton of exciting things in the future both for Robinhood and crypto broadly. We just want to ask a final question. Kind of just like, you know, if somebody who’s watching this right now is a brand new crypto user, maybe they’re just getting in, they saw the prices are high. They’re excited, or maybe they’ve been here through the bear market. Either way, you know, what’s some advice that you would give to somebody who’s just in the crypto market right now?

 

34:35

Yeah, I think you know, for me, the main important thing I said usually is like, learn about the space and so start with very small amount, you know, things that’s you you’re not too worried about. And slowly try to also focus on one or two aspects of the crypto world. It’s a bit too easy to get lost into you know, Web three taxes and FTS all this kind of stuff and also all the different chain that exists. But you know, I think, for example, on Robin Hood, we have a lot of education content. We explained to you what if What is even like cryptocurrency? What is the difference between the difference, consensus mechanism like proof of work proof of stake and, and slowly getting to it. And, you know, I think the important part also is to have a bit of fun on what you’re trying to do, especially when you get into the demo web three space, like when you try to get an FTS or games and things like this. You know, think about what is it and why you think it’s useful before really getting into it.

 

Bryce Paul  35:46

I love it. I think that’s, that’s incredible advice. You know, kind of learn about it, get the knowledge, gain the conviction, gain the belief, because that will be tested through any market, right? If you don’t have the belief and the knowledge, you’re gonna be selling at the worst possible times when they’re trying to scare you out of the market. And so make sure that you are equipped in order to stand the test of time. I love it. Joe, Han, thank you so much for joining us today on the crypto 101. Podcast. Robinhood is a pretty easy website to access Robin hood.com, it’s pretty easy to find it’s typically on one of the top sort of apps on the Apple store in the finance and business department. But is there any sort of other initiatives or links that you want to drop here any sort of any last sort of communications before we sign off for the day?

 

36:37

No, really, you know, go on the website, look at auto pricing and, you know, give us feedback. I think that’s that’s really something that you know, the the entire team that I have at the company or working on crypto, we actually listen to feedback and we try to get as much as possible, so don’t hesitate to share it with me or with the team. And, you know, hopefully we’ll get more people in the crypto pie and more people on boarded into crypto thanks to Robin Hood and thanks to the rest of the crypto community.

 

Bryce Paul  37:12

Amen. I think that’s a great mission here and I’m with you. So we’re gonna do our part you’re gonna do your part, everybody at home listening is gonna do their part. And we’re all going to have a great future together. Anyhow, Joe, Han, thank you so much for joining us and back on again soon.

 

37:29

Anytime. There was another fun anytime