On Monday (16 July 2018), the Californian FinTech startup Robinhood, announced, via its blog and Twitter account, that its “Robinhood Crypto” platform now offered trading support for a fifth cryptocurrency: Dogecoin (DOGE). This is the tweet the company sent out to announce the news:

This news came just four days after Robinhood had announced support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC):

Robinhood’s commission-free crypto trading service got a rolling launch on 22 Feb 2018, with support for buy/selling only Bitcoin and Ethereum, and availability in only five U.S. states (California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, and New Hampshire). With yesterday’s announcement, the service now supports trading of five cryptocurrencies. Also, over the fast few months, the number of states the service has expanded to has increased to seventeen.  

As CryptoGlobe reported on 24 June 2018, according to Robinhood’s founder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev, this is how Robinhood decides which additional cryptocurrencies customers should be able to trade:

“We look at a combination of factors, one of them is obviously what have the regulators said about it.. we also look at what the team behind the coin is doing, are they legitimate, what are their backgrounds..and then customer demand and things like the stability and resilience of the coin against protocol level attacks like 51% attacks for instance – which we know happened to bitcoin gold a couple of weeks ago..which was very eye opening.”

On 24 January 2014, Weiss Ratings, the company behind the monthly Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings, shortly after its January 2018 had been released, explained why its rstings team had given DOGE the same overall rating (C) as XRP:

“Why doesn’t Ripple get a higher grade? Like Bitcoin, it gets an A for fundamentals, but it scores poorly on our Risk Index due to repeated price crashes. Its Technology Index gets clipped due to heavy centralization and control by its creators.

How come Dogecoin is rated on par with the likes of Ripple? This is indeed surprising. But the numbers are the numbers, and they include surprising facts: Dogecoin’s usage is greater than that of Bitcoin Cash. Its usage is also greater than that of Dash and ZCash combined. Of course, that alone is not enough to bump it up above a C. But it certainly does pull it up from the D range.”

Finally, perhaps, the addition of Dogeoin, the most light-hearted cryptocurrency out there, to the Robinhood app is not as surprising as it might appear at first given the popularity of the app with U.S. millennials.

As of press time, according to CryptoCompare, Dogecoin had a market cap of $328.63 million, and was trading at $ 0.002850, up 14.23% in the past 24-hour period.