Despite legal hurdles, Robinhood decides to acquire Bitstamp crypto exchange 

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Robinhood will acquire one of the oldest crypto exchanges, Bitstamp, for $200 million.

Robinhood is a US-based stock & crypto platform. This platform was started as a stock platform but later jumped into the crypto business. During the big bull run of the popular meme Cryptocurrency Dogecoin (Doge) under the influence of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Robinhood generated a very large amount of profit via Dogecoin transactions. Later the company allocated a huge amount of investment in its crypto-related business activities. Currently, this crypto exchange is under legal hurdles for providing crypto trading services.

On 6 June 2024, Robinhood announced that it would acquire Bitstamp crypto exchange for $200 million in cash. 

To help & complete this deal, Barclays Capital Inc. served as the exclusive financial advisor to Robinhood, and Galaxy Digital Partners LLC served as the exclusive financial advisor to Bitstamp.

It is expected that Robinhood will complete the acquisition deal in mid of 2025. 

Bitstamp crypto exchange was established in 2011 & currently serves crypto trading services in multiple jurisdictions, including the EU, UK, US, & Asia with the help of 50 crypto licences. 

This is very big news for Robinhood as well as the Bitstamp crypto exchange.

Following this news, today the trade price of Robinhood ($HOOD) stock surged 4.2%. 

Robinhood, Crypto, & SEC 

A month ago, Robinhood received a Wells notice from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for providing crypto assets trading. 

As per the SEC’s concerns, Robinhood provided trading of those crypto assets which are unregistered securities. 

It means the US SEC body might initiate enforcement action against Robinhood for alleged violations of federal laws governing securities brokers.

It is worth it to note that Robinhood crypto team was already aware of the potential SEC’s lawsuit, so this platform already delisted all those crypto assets from the platform which were labelled as unregistered security token in the SEC’s lawsuits against other crypto companies.

For instance, Robinhood delisted Cardano (ADA), Polygon (Matic), Solana (Sol) cryptocurrencies from the platform in June 2023 to avoid potential legal action. 

Read also: A Chinese student faces 4 year & 6 months of jail sentence over launching a crypto token