Robinhood enables Solana staking for customers in Europe

Robinhood’s European crypto branch launched Solana staking.

The feature will offer roughly 5% APY at launch, though that could vary as staking rewards change, Robinhood Crypto general manager Johann Kerbrat told Blockworks in an interview. 

This puts Robinhood Crypto a tick below Coinbase, which offers an estimated reward of 5.42% for Solana stakers. The Phantom wallet offers Solana staking with an APY as high as 7.58%.

The firm chose Solana for its first staking product because SOL’s one of the most popular tokens among its EU customers, and staking on Solana is simpler than on Ethereum, Kerbrat said.

Read more: Robinhood’s crypto trade volume rose 10% in February

(Bitcoin is the most-held crypto among EU customers, Robinhood said in a press release.)

Kerbrat mentioned that the company was drawn to Solana’s shorter bonding period — the amount of time it takes before newly-staked assets begin earning yield. Solana’s bonding period is roughly two days, while Ethereum’s varies from a few days to a few weeks.

When asked if Robinhood Crypto would add staking for additional assets — like Ethereum — in the future, Kerbrat said “we are definitely thinking about it,” but declined to go into specifics. 

Robinhood Crypto launched in December as a crypto trading app in the European Union. The entity is registered and regulated in Lithuania, according to a Robinhood blog post. The company’s crypto arm noted that its app is highly downloaded by users in Poland, Italy and Lithuania.

Read more: Robinhood looks to jumpstart crypto trading revenue via EU expansion

Robinhood Crypto lists 33 tokens, as opposed to Robinhood’s US trading app, which only offers 15 crypto assets — even fewer in New York and Texas. 

SOL and Solana memecoins including BONK and DogWifHat are available in the EU but not the US.

Robinhood’s US arm delisted Solana — among other cryptocurrencies alleged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to be unregistered securities — in June of last year after the agency filed lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance.

Robinhood’s crypto efforts in Europe are perhaps overshadowed by the company receiving a Wells Notice from the US SEC for its crypto listings last week. 

Read more: Robinhood discloses Wells notice over its crypto business

Robinhood and Robinhood’s EU crypto branch are “completely separate entities with different business models and different structures, and so at this point, the business in Europe is completely isolated from what’s happening in the US,” Kerbrat said.

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