The under-fire American trading platform Robinhood stated it would provide customers “the ability to deposit and withdraw” cryptoassets and has claimed that it has no crypto holdings – despite mounting suspicion that it could be one of the mysterious Dogecoin (DOGE) whales who control vast amounts of the runaway token.
In a series of tweets, Robinhood wrote:
“So much interest in crypto! To be crystal clear, we fully intend to provide the ability to deposit and withdraw cryptocurrencies, including DOGE. Robinhood Crypto does NOT currently invest in cryptocurrency or use any customer cryptocurrency for our own benefit.”
The potential DOGE connection is critical, as an increasing number of social media operatives – including man-of-the-moment Elon Musk – think they have reason to believe that a wallet that holds almost 28% of the DOGE currently in circulation secretly belongs to Robinhood.
According to Bloomberg, Tom Robinson, the chief scientist and co-founder of the blockchain data tracker Elliptic, said of the wallet,
“It almost certainly belongs to Robinhood. The timings of its creation, and the creation of the addresses that it received funds from, match the timings of Robinhood’s support of dogecoin.”
Meantime, Elon Musk has been wading into the argument with apparent relish.
In response to a dogecoin’s demand for Robinhood to stop “dodging DOGE questions and hiding behind scripted answers” and a request for “transparency,” Musk tweeted, “You’re right.”
And in reply to other DOGE fans who consider that “If the top whale wallet is Robinhood then I think dogecoin has a clear trajectory to the moon,” Musk wrote: “Sounds like it is.”
Nevertheless, it seems that Robinhood intends to play its cards close to its chest and stick with responses like the below.
Not everyone concurs with the theory that Robinhood is behind the wallet. Still, Redditors positing that the wallet may well belong to Musk himself – or a crypto exchange or an “early mining pool.”
Regardless, Robinhood appears set to push ahead with its crypto plans, although it did not set a date on the rollout of its new token-related services.
On social media, the reaction was mixed. Some Redditors welcomed what they called “big” and “great news,” but others dismissed it as a “PR” stunt – with others still claiming they would not be taking their custom to Robinhood.
On Twitter, the mood was similarly uncertain.
A couple of crypto-folks welcomed the news as “bullish.” But others claimed that the damage to the company’s reputation was already too crucial in the wake of the GameStop share pump – and Robinhood’s much-maligned role in the affair, a matter that even Musk has quizzed the company’s CEO on.
DOGE, ranked 13th by market capitalization, just recently traded at USD 0.0508 and is down by 6% in a day and 30% in a week. It rallied by 455% in a month and 1,768% in a year.
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