Robinhood Crypto Lead Christine Brown Leaving to Start Crypto Venture

Robinhood Crypto COO Christine Brown—the top executive within the Stock trading app’s crypto subsidiary—is leaving the company.

In a Twitter thread today, she expressed thanks for her time at the company. Brown confirmed to Decrypt she will be starting her own crypto venture.

“I joined [Robinhood] when it was under 100 people—before we even offered a crypto product,” she tweeted. “Watching us grow through IPO and serving more than 22m users has been the greatest professional experience of my life.

Brown has been with Robinhood since 2017 and in April 2021 transitioned from VP of Product Operations into Robinhood Crypto COO—the company’s first.

Brown’s tenure has been marked by the pursuit of a dedicated crypto wallet. Robinhood users can buy and sell seven different cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin—but they can’t send them to a private wallet. In other words, the company holds users’ crypto for them so they’re unable to port it elsewhere to, say, trade on decentralized exchanges or buy NFTs.

The company announced a beta release of the wallet in January 2022. It says it currently has 250,000 wallet users.

Robinhood COO Gretchen Howard said in a statement, “We’re so grateful to Christine for her contributions to Robinhood over the past five years – from leading our self-clearing initiative to scaling the Robinhood Crypto team. We’re excited to follow her entrepreneurial journey going forward.”

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated to include confirmation from Brown about her new role. The number of wallet users has also been added.