【2019 Archives】

It's been a while019 Archives but Robinhood is finally opening its Crypto Wallets to more users.

The company announced the news at the Bitcoin conference in Miami on Thursday: More than 2 million users who signed up for the waitlist for Robinhood's Crypto Wallets now have full access to the service.

There's a notable exception, though: Crypto Wallets isn't available in Hawaii, Nevada, and New York "due to local regulations," said Robinhood, so people there will have to wait a little longer to get access.

The company first launched the Crypto Wallets beta program in January 2022, initially rolling it out to just 1,000 customers.

The feature allows users to transfer cryptocurrencies in and out of their Robinhood Crypto account. Some features include the ability to scan QR codes to easily send crypto, as well as mandatory two-factor authentication to protect your account.

There's still no way for users to see their private keys, which means that they don't get full control over their coins and depend on Robinhood to keep them safe.

The company also said it's working on enabling Bitcoin Lightning Network transactions "in the near future." Lightning Network is a system that makes Bitcoin transactions cheaper and faster, while also helping reduce Bitcoin's overall carbon footprint because the transactions happen off-chain and miners aren't needed to validate them.

"Our goal is to make Robinhood the most trusted and easiest to use crypto platform. We're excited to bring even lower costs to our customers by integrating with the Lightning network," Vlad Tenev, CEO and co-founder of Robinhood, said in a statement.