Robinhood Restricts Crypto Trading Amid Bitcoin and DOGE Pump

After imposing restrictions on the trading of GameStop’s stock, Robinhood has turned off instant deposits for cryptocurrencies as well.

2 min read

Jan 29, 2021

Cryptocurrency exchange Robinhood has imposed some restrictions on cryptocurrency trading just as the prices of Bitcoin (BTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE) surged, CNBC reported today.

“Due to extraordinary market conditions, we’ve temporarily turned off Instant buying power for crypto,” Robinhood’s spokesperson said told CNBC, adding, “Customers can still use settled funds to buy crypto. We’ll keep monitoring market conditions and communicating with our customers.”

Earlier today, some users reported that Robinhood’s trading app had been halting their instant deposits for buying cryptocurrencies. Because of this, only deposits that were already made to users’ accounts in the past were available to trade—and new deposits can take up to five days to clear, Robinhood explained.

As Decrypt reported, after a group of retail traders, known as WallStreetBets (WSB) on Reddit, recently pumped the price of GameStop’s stock. Then 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%.

Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk changed his Twitter profile description to just “Bitcoin,” which similarly led to BTC’s price spiking by nearly 20%—and the elimination of $420 million worth in short positions.

Yesterday, Robinhood similarly “made a tough decision to temporarily limit buying for certain securities,” including GameStop’s (GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings’ (AMC) stock. Both of these assets were involved in the recent WSB’s campaign.

However, Robinhood did not impose any limitations on the trading of DOGE and other cryptocurrencies—until now.

Other crypto exchanges are experiencing outages or other issues as well. For example, Coinbase is currently investigating a site outage that occurred amid the price rally. Similarly, Binance today suspended all withdrawals “in order to address a large increase in requests from new unique users.” It's all happening today.

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