Robinhood Ends Support for All Tokens Named in SEC Lawsuit as Securities

The trading platform will end support for Cardano (ADA), Polygon (MATIC) and Solana (SOL) on June 27th.

AccessTimeIconJun 9, 2023 at 2:31 p.m. UTC
Updated Sep 29, 2023 at 11:50 a.m. UTC
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Robinhood (HOOD), the popular trading platform, will end support for Cardano (ADA), Polygon (MATIC) and Solana (SOL) on June 27th - the three tokens that were named as securities in recent the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase.

"Based on our latest review, we’ve decided to end support for Cardano (ADA), Polygon (MATIC), and Solana (SOL) on June 27th, 2023 at 6:59 PM ET," Robinhood said in a blog post. "No other coins are affected and your crypto is still safe on Robinhood," the post added.

Users are able to continue trading and transfer of the three tokens on the app until the deadline. After support stops on June 27, tokens left in a user’s account will be automatically sold for market value, Robinhood said.

The decision comes as part of the company’s regular review of cryptocurrencies, Robinhood said. However, those were the only tokens that were listed on the trading platform, that were named as securities by the recent SEC lawsuits.

After the delisting, the platform will offer the trading for 15 different crypto currencies, including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), dogecoin (DOGE), and avalanche (AVAX) - all of which were not included in the SEC lawsuit as securities.

Robinhood said during a recent industry testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives that it tried to register as a special-purpose broker for digital assets but couldn’t get the SEC to guide the trading platform into crypto compliance, though the agency's staff seemed to want to help.

“When Chair Gensler at the SEC in 2021 said, ‘Come in and register,’ we did,” said Robinhood Markets' chief compliance lawyer Dan Gallagher in his testimony. “We went through a 16-month process with the SEC staff trying to register a special purpose broker dealer. And then we were pretty summarily told in March that that process was over and we would not see any fruits of that effort,” he added.

Both Solana and Cardano have rejected the claims of the tokens being a security, while Polygon declined to comment earlier to CoinDesk about the matter. The three tokens were mostly unchanged on Friday, after taking a hit earlier this week, following SEC lawsuits.

Update (June 9, 15:32 UTC): Adds more context on Robinhood's efforts to register with the SEC.

Update (June 9, 16:33 UTC): Updates headline, lead and fourth paragraph to say Robinhood will end support for all the tokens it had on the platform that were named by the SEC lawsuits as securities.

Edited by Aoyon Ashraf.

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Aoyon Ashraf

Aoyon Ashraf is managing editor with more than a decade of experience in covering equity markets

Helene Braun

Helene is a New York-based reporter covering Wall Street, the rise of the spot bitcoin ETFs and crypto exchanges. She is also the co-host of CoinDesk's Markets Daily show. Helene is a graduate of New York University's business and economic reporting program and has appeared on CBS News, YahooFinance and Nasdaq TradeTalks. She holds BTC and ETH.


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