Robinhood Crypto Review: Withdrawals Arrived, But So Did a Florida Subpoena

Robinhood built its crypto business on a simple pitch: no commissions, no withdrawal lockout, and a headline claim to be the lowest-cost place to trade. We opened an account, priced a Bitcoin buy through both of its routing options, and checked what Robinhood is being asked to explain to a state regulator.

The default screen isn't the cheap one

Open the app and place a market order, and Robinhood sends it to a market maker by default. That maker pays Robinhood about $0.95 for every $100 of volume it fills, a figure Robinhood discloses in its support pages but not on the order ticket itself. The cost to you shows up as a wider spread rather than a line-item fee, and independent estimates put that spread between 0.35% and 0.85% on Bitcoin and Ethereum. On a $95,000 Bitcoin buy, that range works out to roughly $330 to $800 of hidden markup before a single dollar of stated commission appears anywhere on the screen.

Switching to exchange routing actually saves money

Robinhood's alternative, exchange routing, sends your order to a partner exchange instead of a market maker and charges a disclosed fee between 0.03% and 0.85%, scaled to your trailing 30-day volume. Robinhood's own support article confirms it keeps no rebate from that route, so the incentive to hide cost in a spread disappears once you flip the toggle. The fee tier only helps if you remember to check it; the app does not warn you which routing option is active before you tap confirm.

Reading the tier before you trade

Robinhood's fee tier page lays out the exact math: your rate depends on your trailing 30-day exchange-routed volume, and whether a given order fills as a maker or a taker changes the number again. A trader doing a few hundred dollars a month sits at the top of the range near 0.85%, while someone running six-figure monthly volume drops toward 0.03%. That's a real, disclosed number you can plan around, which is more than most competitors publish for their own spread-based pricing.

Withdrawals, staking and the self-custody option

The bigger structural change is that Robinhood now lets you send crypto out to an external wallet and receive it back in, with no Robinhood-side fee beyond the network's own gas cost. That alone used to be a reason to avoid Robinhood for anyone who wanted real custody of their coins. Robinhood also offers an optional self-custody wallet and crypto staking, where partner fees run as high as 2.75% of whatever the stake earns, a cap worth checking against a dedicated staking provider before you commit a large balance.