Crypto trading restricted on Robinhood amidst BTC, DOGE surge
2 min readTL;DR Breakdown
- Robinhood temporarily halts trading of BTC, DOGE
- Firm says it only turned off instant crypto buying
Popular crypto trading platform Robinhood was in the news on Thursday for restricting the trading of GameStop’s stock.
Similarly, the crypto trading platform has imposed some restrictions on cryptocurrency trading just as Bitcoin and Dogecoin prices continue to rise in the last 12 hours.
A Robinhood spokesperson who confirmed the report to CNBC said that it is because of extraordinary market conditions saying the firm turned off instant buying power for crypto. He said settled funds, however, could still be used to buy crypto.
“We’ll keep monitoring market conditions and communicating with our customers, the spokesperson assured.
What Robinhood crypto trading users are saying
Earlier today, users of the crypto trading platform said that the platform has been halting their instant deposits for buying cryptocurrencies. As a result, only deposits that were deposited in users’ accounts were available for trade.
According to Robinhood, new deposits could take close to five days to clear.
A group of retailers known as WallStreetBets (WSB) on Reddit recently pumped GameStop’s stock price. A similar group of people (but likely not the main subreddit itself) turned its sights on Dogecoin. This made the “meme crypto’s” price explode in just a day, surging by up to 800 percent.
Owing to pump actions, GameStop’s (GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings’ (AMC) stock were temporarily limited on Robinhood as DOGE and BTC were involved in WSB’s campaign.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk changed his Twitter profile description to just “Bitcoin,” which also led to BTC’s price spiking by nearly 20 percent.
The crypto trading firm only recently limited trading of DOGE and BTC.
Exchanges like Coinbase, Binance are also experiencing outages on their platforms.
Coinbase is currently investigating a site outage that occurred amid the price rally. Similarly, Binance, at a point, suspended all withdrawals to address a large increase in requests from new unique users.
