Robinhood moved to limit customers from swiftly shopping for cryptocurrencies Friday as the costs of two widespread digital cash surged.
In a post on its website, Robinhood stated it quickly disabled “Instantaneous Deposits” for cryptocurrency purchases. Which means customers received’t have the ability to purchase digital currencies with cash they add to their accounts till the deposit settles, which may take as much as 5 enterprise days.
Robinhood imposed the restrictions amid large rallies in each Bitcoin — the world’s largest cryptocurrency — and Dogecoin, an alternative coin based mostly on an web meme that began as a joke.
Dogecoin’s value had spiked by greater than 348 % to roughly 5 cents as of 8:35 a.m. thanks largely to a Reddit discussion board that’s been pumping it up — identical to a message board has precipitated GameStop’s inventory to blow up.
Bitcoin, in the meantime, was just lately up practically 20 % at $37,566.14 after Tesla CEO Elon Musk talked about the cryptocurrency in his bio on Twitter, the place his posts are recognized to maneuver markets.
Robinhood didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. However a spokesperson for the startup told CNBC that it turned off the “immediate shopping for energy” characteristic for cryptocurrencies “as a consequence of extraordinary market circumstances.”
“Prospects can nonetheless use settled funds to purchase crypto,” the spokesperson advised CNBC. “We’ll maintain monitoring market circumstances and speaking with our prospects.”
Dogecoin has change into the favored cryptocurrency on Reddit’s “SatoshiStreetBets” message board, a hub for crypto merchants named for Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Customers on the positioning talked about pushing the worth of a single Dogecoin as much as $10 — which might be an enormous feat on condition that it was price barely greater than a nickel even after Friday’s surge.
Musk added gas to the hearth by tweeting a fake magazine cover for “Dogue,” a dog-themed sendup of Vogue. The SatoshiStreetBets crowd took that as an indication that Musk supported their efforts to spice up Dogecoin’s worth.
“Elon heard us,” person AbduMad wrote on the message board on Thursday.
