Robinhood opens UK crypto trading with no fee but the FX spread

What happened

Robinhood said on 10 August that it is 'launching access to crypto trading in the UK, enabling customers to trade digital assets directly through Bitstamp UK Ltd, in the single Robinhood app alongside their stocks & shares ISA, equities, options and futures'. More than 50 cryptoassets are included, among them bitcoin, ether, XRP and Hyperliquid, and the release says the service carries 'zero trading fees, including no account maintenance or custody fees'. The asterisk on that phrase leads to the one charge that remains: 'Robinhood UK customers will pay a 0.10% FX fee - with a 0.30% weekend FX fee on conversions completed on Fridays 17:00 ET to 17:00 ET Sundays.' The company positions the launch against the domestic competition, saying its product 'provides a transparent, low-cost alternative to many incumbent UK platforms, which often rely on opaque pricing structures and apply wide spreads that can erode customers' returns', and adds that it 'will begin rolling out to eligible UK customers this week'. 'A new wave of UK investors sees digital assets as an important part of a diversified portfolio', said Jordan Sinclair, President of Robinhood U.K. Ltd and GM of Bitstamp UK Ltd. 'With today's launch, we're taking another major step toward becoming the all-in-one investment platform for the UK.' Alongside it the company introduced Robinhood Cortex Digests for Crypto, a generative AI feature that 'analyses breaking news, market data, technical indicators and Robinhood's proprietary insights' to explain what is moving a price. The trading is provided through Bitstamp UK Ltd, registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a cryptoasset service provider, and the release states plainly that cryptoassets held through it are covered by neither the Financial Services Compensation Scheme nor the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Why it matters

A zero-fee crypto business still has to earn something, and this release says where. The trading fee, the custody fee and the account fee are all gone, and what is left is the currency conversion, at 0.10 per cent on weekdays and 0.30 per cent from Friday evening in New York to Sunday evening. For a British customer buying a dollar-quoted asset in sterling that conversion is not an occasional cost, it is the cost of every trade, so the charge has moved off the line the customer compares and on to the line beneath it, where it triples for two days a week. That is worth setting beside the release's own complaint about incumbents whose spreads 'erode customers' returns', because a weekend FX fee is a spread by another name. The structure also shows how a licence gets used. Robinhood U.K. Ltd is an FCA-authorised firm for brokerage, and it cannot itself sell cryptoassets in Britain; Bitstamp UK Ltd, the exchange the group bought in June 2025, holds the cryptoasset registration and does the trading, while the customer sees one app. That is what the acquisition was for, and it is the cheapest route into a jurisdiction where the permission is the scarce thing. The release also draws its own perimeter twice over: the compensation scheme and the ombudsman do not reach these holdings, and Robinhood Chain, the group's Arbitrum layer-2 that it says has done more than $18bn of decentralised exchange volume and holds more than $840m since 1 July, is described as neither provided by the UK entity nor authorised or regulated by the FCA.

What is not settled

The release gives no launch cohort, no timetable beyond 'this week' and no fee schedule for anything other than the conversion, so the effective cost of a round trip for a sterling customer is not stated in one place. It does not say whether the UK assets differ from Bitstamp's own list, whether staking or lending will follow, or what happens to the ISA relationship for customers who hold both. Nor does it say what the FCA registration permits: Britain is moving cryptoasset activity from the money-laundering registration regime to full authorisation, and the release names the registration without naming the transition, while the FCA's own register could not be opened at this desk to check the entry. The dating of the announcement was itself unsettled: CoinDesk published on 7 August, carrying the same Sinclair quotation and the same sentence about rolling out this week, three days before the company's own newsroom dated the release 10 August, and The Block published on the 10th. On the figures for Robinhood Chain, the volume and total value locked come from the company and no third-party measure is cited.