Robinhood's Top Crypto Executive Announces Departure

Crypto executive Christine Brown, who was overseeing Robinhood’s cryptocurrency initiatives is leaving the brokerage firm, she confirmed via her Twitter account.

Brown had spent five years at the company after leaving Google in 2017.

“After 5 amazing years at RobinhoodApp, I’m moving on to start something new,” Brown tweeted.

According to a source familiar with the matter, Brown is starting a crypto startup. However, further details about her company are yet to be revealed. “As for what’s next, I’m excited to be staying in the crypto space—more from me soon!” Brown said in her Twitter thread.

“I joined RH (short for Robinhood) when it was under 100 people — before we even offered a crypto product. Watching us grow through IPO and serving more than 22 million users has been the greatest professional experience of my life,” her tweet continued.

At Robinhood, she helped build a “self-clearing firm, standing up a Product Operations team, and supporting scaling crypto business.”

Robinhood’s chief operating officer Gretchen Howard further confirmed her departure in a statement with The Block saying “We’re so grateful to Christine for her contributions to Robinhood over the past five years - from leading our self-clearing initiative to scaling the Robinhood Crypto team. We’re excited to follow her entrepreneurial journey going forward.”

Meanwhile, two other ex-Robinhood employees have launched Atlantic Money, a money transfer service, to solve challenges that suers experience while transferring money globally, Blockchain.News reported.

Neeraj Baid and Patrick Kavanagh describe Atlantic Money as the world’s first fixed-fee money transfer service that promises to be a better deal than other foreign exchange (FX) services and pitch itself as a second-generation challenger to Wise, PayPal, and Revolut, the report added.

The Block reported that Robinhood first began providing crypto services in 2018. However, the company has seen a decline in its crypto activity in the last quarter of 2021, even though the excitement surrounding the crypto industry helped Robinhood gather more users.

In January, Robinhood’s crypto wallet went live and allowed its first 1,000 users to make crypto withdrawals, Blockchain.News reported. While in November last year, Robinhood Markets had announced that 1.6 million people were on the waitlist for its cryptocurrency wallet.