From Base to Robinhood: Why trading apps are going social

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A new financial app trend is emerging: Just add posting.

Last night, Robinhood unveiled “Robinhood Social,” an upcoming new tab within the Robinhood app that will let Robinhood users see and create posts about stocks and crypto tied to real trades and follow others’ accounts. There’s a “For You” page and a “Following” page, too. 

Sounds a lot like Crypto Twitter, if you ask me. 

But Robinhood’s also deploying these social media features to help show traders new assets to buy — which could ultimately keep users on the app longer and make Robinhood more money. Traders may also copy others’ trades, as TechCrunch has pointed out, which is a tune-change from Robinhood’s prior concerns about the practice.

“Most people today use social media before trading, especially our active traders, yet social media is overrun with clickbait, marketing bots, fake profiles and doctored screenshots,” Robinhood VP of product Abhishek Fatehpuria said during the company’s “Enter The Mainframe” event on Tuesday. 

Robinhood thinks it’ll be able to establish itself as a trusted SocialFi platform because users are tied to Robinhood trading accounts. 

But Robinhood isn’t the only consumer finance app pushing heavily into SocialFi features — Coinbase continues to add lots of social media features into the beta version of its wallet overhaul, too. Yesterday Base said users will be able to create posts from the Base app’s homepage and buy each other’s posts, much like what Zora also offers. Zora’s being integrated into Base (and Zora posting via the Base app now accounts for a notable portion of Zora’s overall activity).

Upstart players have also been trying to forge a name for themselves in the SocialFi space. 

FOMO lets users track others’ trading activity by tying accounts to Twitter handles and letting them buy and sell tokens all on one mobile app. And Pump has made livestreaming a big part of its site — and recently added “Pump Chat” to its mobile app.

This year, we’ve even seen Kraken release a Venmo-like app hilariously dubbed Krak, which displays a list of your friends on the app and lets you send them crypto (they compare sending money on Krak to sending a DM).

A trend is clearly emerging: US crypto exchanges see social features as a key part of crypto’s future growth. 

But will this latest SocialFi push amount to little more than a limited-time experiment — like the since-forgotten CoinbaseNFT? 

I think this latest social push is going to stick around for a while, though it could run out of steam if traders get tired of juggling multiple apps. 

Robinhood and Coinbase may be angling to swipe some of Twitter’s market share in the finance sector and retain users by becoming more like the “everything apps” WeChat and Naver have already become.

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