Robinhood Crypto COO on NFT craze: 'We'd be silly to not look at it right now'
Robinhood Crypto Chief Operating Officer Christine Brown discusses the appeal of NFT's for retail investors and for her own company.
Video Transcript
CHRISTINE BROWN: So here's what I love about NFTs. Today, the number of 18- to 29-year-olds who are actively investing, right, who have any investment, is less than 30%. So investing has a whole lot of barriers to entry, whether it's economic, educational, emotional. NFTs bring that barrier down a little bit more, right? We've all hung something on the wall. We've all put something on a refrigerator.
DAN ROBERTS: But you can hang it on the wall, Christine.
CHRISTINE BROWN: I know. I know. But the-- the jump from, hey, art, music, things that are real and let's make that digital is a lot easier than investing, which the majority of young individuals today aren't doing and saying, OK now, there's a digital component to this, right? The jump is just a little bit easier. And I think it's an easier entry point for some users. So we are thinking about it. Again, can't spoil the roadmap, but it is something that, you know, we'd be silly to not be looking at right now.
DAN ROBERTS: I like that we'd be silly to not look at it. You know, when we talk about NFTs or really any of this, and we talk about young investors-- because that's really, you know-- a core part of Robinhood's focus is these new retail investors. We talked about these [? YOLO ?] traders from, you know, Reddit-- maybe it's college students. I remember talking to Vlad when-- when Robinhood first launched. And the idea was we're making buying stocks really easy, you know, swipe of a finger.
Especially when it comes to crypto, there are critics who see dangers with that. They say it shouldn't be so easy. You know, are those things you think about? We talked about cybersecurity. But when you think about safety, I mean, there are some perceptions that crypto is somehow more volatile and unsafe. And what do you guys think about that? And how do you approach, you know, onboarding new people? Even with NFTs, the big prices get all the headlines. And then people point to it and say, this is all out of control, you know?
CHRISTINE BROWN: Right. Right. Well, I think it starts with education, right? I think especially when you talk about younger investors, what they're often doing is starting small, investing a little bit of money and getting experience in the market, right, seeing what it's like. How do they feel? How do they react when something goes up, when something goes down?
And I actually think that's very worthwhile experience to get early on in your investing kind of life cycle. So that when you are a more mature investor, when you do have more money to play with, that, you know, you've already kind of tested the waters. You already understand how you show up to things. So I think education is a big part of it.
Robinhood has really leaned in hard there. We have an entire Learn product, which goes through all of the basics, investing 101. It includes a lot of crypto kind of features as well. And we're going to continue building on top of that.
