Are Robinhood, eToro, & Other No-Commission Apps a ‘Gateway’ to Crypto?

Robinhood–and other user-friendly, commission-free trading applications–have seemingly seen a massive uptick in new users since the coronavirus began.

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Robinhood in particular reported in early May that its user count had passed the 13-million-mark. Previously, Robinhood reported that it had achieved 10 million users in December of 2019; prior to that, Robinhood reported that it had 3 million users in February of 2018, 6 million users in October of 2018, and then 10 million users in December of 2019.

Robinhood increased its user count by 241.67% from January to June

In other words, from February of 2018 until the beginning of December of 2019, Robinhood increased its user count by an average of roughly 330,000 new users per month. From the remainder of December 2019 until June of 2020, however, more than 3 million new users were added to the platform–an increase to nearly 500,000 new users per month.

While Robinhood hasn’t released any official data on how many new users came during or after the month of March, when quarantines and widespread global panic began to rise. However, Haider Rafique, chief marketing officer at cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin, pointed out to Finance Magnates that there was a massive uptick in website traffic to Robinhood’s home page.

Indeed, according to data from SimilarWeb, the total number of visits on Robinhood’s website was steadily increasing in the months prior to the global outbreak of COVID-19, from 9.6 million in December, to 12.8 million in January, to 15.6 million in February–an average increase of roughly 3 million new page views per month.

However, in March, the number of page views skyrocketed to 29.7 million–an increase of 14.1 million new pageviews. In April and May, the surge leveled off at roughly 32.8 million page views per month, representing a 241.67% increase from December to May.

eToro, Webull also saw impressive growth in site traffic, new users

This surge in new users and website traffic certainly wasn’t unique to Robinhood, although Robinhood may have seen the largest surge in new users during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Social trading platform eToro (which also offers commission-free trading) also reported an increase to 13 million users in May of 2020; eToro previously reported having surpassed 12 million users in December of 2019.

Yoni Assia, founder and chief executive of eToro, told Finance Magnates that “on eToro, we have seen a 400% increase globally in new users coming to eToro and investing for the first time in the first 4 months of 2020 compared with the same period last year,” according to new investor data that was accurate as of 11 May 2020.

eToro’s website traffic also saw a bump during the pandemic, from an average of roughly 12.7 million page views from December to February to an average of 20.1 million page views from March to May; from…