Robinhood Officially Enters Canada After Closing WonderFi Acquisition

The WonderFi acquisition provides Robinhood regulated crypto operations in Canada and expands its workforce and buyer community.

Robinhood Markets has accomplished its $180 million acquisition of WonderFi, a Toronto-based supplier of digital asset services. With the deal, Robinhood is getting into the Canadian market by buying a longtime operator of regulated crypto exchanges.

As a part of the acquisition, WonderFi’s two regulated crypto buying and selling platforms, Bitbuy and Coinsquare, will turn out to be a part of the Robinhood model. Canadian clients might be invited to make use of the Robinhood app, which affords a flat 0.5% charge per CAD commerce, together with the corporate’s person interface, person expertise, and world infrastructure.

Main Canadian Crypto Push

In its official press launch, Robinhood said it would proceed supporting WonderFi’s current institutional relationships in Canada whereas constructing on the institutional enterprise it has developed via Bitstamp. The growth is a part of Robinhood’s broader technique to construct an built-in world monetary ecosystem.

Following the acquisition, Robinhood now has greater than 1 million worldwide funded clients, together with roughly 300,000 funded clients that got here via WonderFi. WonderFi staff will be part of Robinhood’s current Canadian workforce of greater than 240 staff. Robinhood established its Canadian headquarters in Toronto in 2024 as an engineering hub, citing Canada’s robust expertise expertise pool.

In a press release, Johann Kerbrat, SVP and Basic Supervisor of Robinhood Crypto & Worldwide, stated

“WonderFi has intensive expertise working regulated crypto platforms that serve newbie and superior crypto customers alike, making it an excellent accomplice to speed up Robinhood’s mission in Canada. We’re happy to have closed our acquisition and sit up for delivering progressive, user-centric investing merchandise to Canadian clients.”

The deal comes months after Robinhood reported a pointy decline in crypto buying and selling exercise in the course of the first quarter. Crypto transaction income fell 47% year-over-year to $134 million, whereas crypto buying and selling quantity dropped 48% to $24 billion. The corporate additionally missed analyst expectations for earnings and income, regardless that web revenue elevated 3% to $346 million.

Layer 2 Plans

In February, Robinhood launched the general public testnet for Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 community constructed utilizing Arbitrum expertise. The testnet provides builders early entry to the community forward of a deliberate mainnet launch later this 12 months and permits them to construct and check functions utilizing commonplace Ethereum instruments.

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In accordance with the corporate, a number of infrastructure suppliers, together with Alchemy, Chainlink, LayerZero, and TRM, had already begun integrating with the community.