Robinhood Acquires Cove Markets to Potentially Add Cross-Exchange Crypto Trading on Its Platform

Robinhood stock and crypto trading platform has acquired Cove Markets, a cross-exchange trading platform. The deal is intended to help crypto investors manage their cryptocurrency accounts in simple and cost-effective ways, Robinhood claimed in a blog post. Following this acquisition, the top partners of Cove Markets will join the Robinhood crypto team including co-founders Victor Glava and Scott Knudsen. The acquisition amount of the deal remains undisclosed on public domains. The cross-exchange nature of Cove Markets will help Robinhood bridge the gaps between crypto exchanges.

“Their wealth of experience in trading execution and crypto market infrastructure will help us to build more powerful trading capabilities, bringing the benefits of better competition in the crypto markets to our customers,” Christine Brown, Chief Operating Officer of Robinhood Crypto said in a statement commenting in the deal.

While Robinhood started to offer crypto-related services in 2018 along with its regular commission-free stock trading services, Cove Markets is relatively new at just three years old.

Cove Markets can facilitate cross-exchange trading options for several popular crypto exchanges like Coinbase Pro, Kraken, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp among others.

Cove Markets require users to create and fund account at one or more supported exchanges, open free account on its platform, and connect exchange API keys before starting to trade, its website explains.

As of now, it remains unclear to what extent would Robinhood use Cove Markets' existing technology and if it would introduce to its own platform.

Several crypto-focused financial service providers are turning to each other with partnership offers at a time when cryptocurrency space is registering growth.

In October, MasterCard entered into a deal with crypto-wallet platform Bakkt in order to allow merchants, fintech firms, and banks to accept and extend “a broad set” of solutions and services involving cryptocurrencies to its users.

This month, US-based crypto lending and saving firm Nexo partnered New York City-based Fidelity Digital Assets (FDA) to rope in large scale institutional investors to enter the cryptocurrency space.