Revolut customers residing in 49 U.S. states can now buy, hold and sell bitcoins (BTC) and ether (ETH) on the digital bank's crypto platform.
A new incentive for companies that want to enter the crypto sector
The British fintech company entered the United States in March and waited to affirm its main products in the country before launching additional services with cryptocurrencies, said Edward Cooper, head of the crypto sector of Revolut.
Revolut obtained regulatory authorization to do so thanks to a collaboration with the New York-based trust company Paxos. Paxos also announced this week the launch of a new brokerage API service, which allows customers to provide purchase, sale, dispatch and custody options.
With Paxos Crypto Brokerage, the company acts as a custodian for its customers, such as Revolut, and manages the regulatory compliance aspects. "The interesting thing is that it is really lowering the entry barrier for companies that want to enter the crypto sector," said Chad Cascarilla, CEO of Paxos.
"You can connect to our APIs and we will provide you with the regulatory and technological capacity for a crypto offer aimed at buying or selling." In all US states except Tennessee, Revolut allows customers to round up their transactions by converting loose change into cryptocurrency.
Revolut also offers customers the possibility of a conversion to BTC and ETH (discover the quotations in real time) among 28 global currencies, with plans to extend to other cryptocurrencies in the future. In Europe, Revolut supports litecoin (LTC), bitcoin cash (BCH) and XRP. The company charges 2,5% for each crypto transaction made by standard customers and 1,5% for premium customers.
Future perspectives
With around one million customers in Europe carrying out cryptocurrency transactions, Revolut crypto arm is a "profit center" for the bank, Cooper said. The company's next targets are in the Asia-Pacific region: Australia, Singapore and Japan, he added.
"We will first launch the main product and then see what steps we need to take to launch the crypto product," said Cooper. Regardless of its expansion in the United States, the bank recently changed the ownership rules for cryptocurrencies, making users the legitimate owners of their coins.
Revolut is also suspending the possibility of making crypto payments with traditional cards in Europe from July 27 and has no intention of introducing this function in the United States.
"We received some feedback from users in Europe who made payments and did not expect their crypto balances to be spent," said Cooper. "We want to improve this aspect ... We will do it and we will probably have specific cryptocurrency cards."
