Robinhood is working on a non-custodial wallet for customers

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Robinhood is working on a non-custodial wallet for customers

This week, Robinhood announced that it was working on a non-custodial wallet that allows customers to keep access to their private keys. The wallet will allow the trading of non-fungible token, or NFTs.

The customers will be able to use DeFi and NFT services inside the wallet because of the fact that Robinhood will not charge network fees. There is a waitlist of more than 500,000 users waiting for the Beta versions of the Web 3 wallet to be available in the summer. The non-custodial wallet will be unveiled later this year.

Robinhood's non-custodial crypt market may be attractive in an ecosystem dominated by few rivals. MetaMask is sometimes criticized for slow speeds and poor design that is not user-friendly, and Coinbase, while growing in popularity, shocked investors when it declared this month that customers' virtual assets could become the company's property in the event of bankruptcy.

There are still some risks associated with a non-custodial wallet for first-time users. A user would not be able to access their money if they lost their private keys. Robinhood told Decrypt that it was planning to provide safeguards for users with less familiarity with private keys.

There is some ambiguity about the costs of transactions, which are typically high on the Ethereum network, due to the high gas fees. Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood's Chief Technology Officer, told Decrypt that the company will work with its partners to get the best price, but was short on details what that might entail.

However, critics point out that Robinhood may be arriving too late to the non-custodial wallet space, and recently laid off 9% of its workforce, due to the departure of key staff, like Christine Brown, the former CEO of the company.

FTX's CEO Sam Bankman-Fried announced a nearly 8% stake in Robinhood last week.