Robinhood Crypto

Is Robinhood Crypto safe?

As a place to hold crypto, it is among the better-protected options in the US. Robinhood Crypto is part of Robinhood Markets, a Nasdaq-listed company with audited accounts. It holds a New York BitLicenseBitLicenseNew York's licence for crypto businesses, issued by the state's financial regulator (NYDFS). It is one of the strictest crypto licences in the US.More in the glossary, and in Europe it has a MiCAMiCAThe EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, which requires crypto exchanges and other providers to be licensed and supervised.More in the glossary licence from the Bank of Lithuania. Its crypto wallets have never been hacked. We score it 79/100, just behind Coinbase.

The record is weaker on conduct. New York's financial regulator fined the crypto unit $30 million in 2022, California extracted a settlement over withdrawals, and the parent broker has a long history of fines in its stock business.

Compliance problems at the crypto unit

In August 2022 NYDFS fined Robinhood Crypto $30 million. It found weak anti-money-launderingAnti-money launderingThe rules and checks that stop criminals from moving illegal money through banks, payment firms and crypto exchanges.More in the glossary controls during the 2021 trading boom, including a transaction-monitoring system that could not keep up, and breaches of New York's cybersecurity rules. The order also required an independent consultant to review the fixes.

In September 2024 Robinhood agreed to pay $3.9 million to the California attorney general. From 2018 to 2022 Robinhood did not let customers withdraw the crypto they bought, and California said it had not clearly disclosed where the coins were held. That changed in 2022, when Robinhood opened crypto transfers.

On 4 May 2024 the SEC staff sent Robinhood Crypto a Wells notice, saying it planned to recommend charges that the unit had operated as an unregistered broker and clearing agency, because some of the coins it listed were securities in the staff's view. On 21 February 2025 the SEC told Robinhood it had closed the investigation without action.

The parent company's broker-dealer business has a heavier record, including $65 million to the SEC in 2020 over order-routing disclosures, $70 million to FINRA in 2021 over outages and misleading information, and $45 million to the SEC in January 2025 over record-keeping, suspicious-activity reporting and data-protection failures, partly linked to the 2021 breach. Those cases do not involve crypto, but they are part of the group's conduct record.

Data security

Robinhood's crypto wallets have not lost customer funds. The data incidents involved people:

• November 2021: a caller talked a support employee into giving access to internal systems. About 5 million email addresses and 2 million full names were taken, plus more detail for a few hundred people. The attacker demanded a ransom.
• Late 2020: about 2,000 customer accounts were taken over, mostly with passwords reused from other breaches, and some were emptied. Robinhood then added stronger login checks.

Neither was a theft from Robinhood's custody, but leaked emails and names feed the phishing that targets crypto holders.

Custody and protection

Robinhood Crypto holds customer coins in omnibus wallets, meaning shared wallets with an internal record of who owns what. Its 2025 10-K says the "overwhelming majority" is in cold storageCold storageKeeping crypto keys on a device or medium that is not connected to the internet, which protects them from most online attacks.More in the glossary in facilities in the US and EU, with some coins in hot walletsHot walletA crypto wallet connected to the internet, such as an app or an exchange's online wallet. It is convenient, but more exposed to hacking.More in the glossary for daily operations, and that it does not use outside custodians except at Bitstamp. Robinhood also says it does not lend customer crypto. Since a 2025 change in SEC accounting guidance, customer coins no longer appear on the audited balance sheet; the filing describes them in the notes instead, so the accounts confirm the company's own finances more than the coin balances.

Two caveats. SIPC, which protects brokerage customers up to $500,000, does not cover crypto. And while Robinhood says it believes customer coins would stay customers' property in a bankruptcy, it has no formal legal opinion on this, and its filing points to the 2023 Celsius ruling, where customers ended up as unsecured creditors. That risk is shared by every US exchange and has not been tested for a regulated one.

Fees and spreads are not a safety issue, but check them

Robinhood advertises commission-free crypto trading but earns money from the spread and from payments by market makers. That is a cost question, not a safety one. It matters only in that a cheap-looking price can hide a wide spread on large orders, so compare the quoted price with a public exchange before a big trade.

Robinhood and Bitstamp

Robinhood bought the exchange Bitstamp in June 2025. Bitstamp runs as a separate platform with its own licences and serves mainly institutions and non-US retail customers. The Robinhood app remains the main crypto product for US retail users.

Bitstamp is also how Robinhood reached UK crypto customers. On 10 August 2026 Robinhood began rolling out crypto trading in its UK app, with more than 50 coins. The trades and the coins sit with Bitstamp UK Ltd, which is registered with the FCA as a cryptoasset firm, not with Robinhood U.K. Ltd, the stockbroker. Robinhood's own disclosure says crypto held through Bitstamp UK is not covered by the FSCSDeposit insuranceA government-backed scheme that repays bank customers up to a set limit if their bank fails, such as the FDIC in the US or the FSCS in the UK.More in the glossary or the Financial Ombudsman Service, unlike the shares in the same app.

How to stay safe

1. Turn on a passkeyPasskeyA way to sign in without a password. Your device holds a key tied to one website or app and unlocks it with your fingerprint, face or PIN.More in the glossary or authenticator app in Security and Privacy settings. Avoid SMS.
2. Only send crypto to addresses you have checked character by character, and save trusted ones for reuse.
3. Treat any call or text "from Robinhood" asking you to move funds or share a code as a scam.
4. For large or long-term holdings, transfer coins to a wallet you control.

How we scored it

Licensing (92) and audited reserves (90) are Robinhood Crypto's strongest factors. Legal record (55) is the weakest, combining the crypto unit's NYDFS and California cases with the parent's fines. Security history (74) reflects data breaches rather than any loss of crypto.