Robinhood CEO: It's 'Very Foolish' to Rule Out Bitcoin

More than 1 million people signed up to trade cryptocurrencies in the days after mobile trading app Robinhood first announced the feature, co-CEO Vlad Tenev said at CB Insights' Future of Fintech conference on Wednesday.

The co-founder of the investing app and web platform was bullish on bitcoin despite the price declines seen over the last few months, saying "This asset has staying power, significant staying power."

"It's very foolish to say bitcoin is done."

Robinhood, a micro-finance investing app which sought to open access to stock trading to the general public, jumped on the cryptocurrency wagon earlier this year, as previously reported by CoinDesk.

Tenev said Wednesday that "Around that time a lot of the biggest crypto exchanges and brokerages a lot of the exchanges were just not staying up. [They were] down for days at a time. [We're] focused on stability and reliability. We were able to sustain the customer orders hundreds of thousands of accounts."

At present, according to Tenev, the company is trying "To get people into the overall ecosystem."

"What we've seen a lot is people hearing about us because of crypto, opening accounts and become sort of customers of the entire Robinhood ecosystem," he said.

That being said, "Blockchain as a concept has become a little bit over-rated," he noted, explaining that startups are trying to jump on the bandwagon by using decentralized ledgers where a normal database would suffice.

Still, Tenev admitted that "We want to be there as a market leader over the span of decades."

CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.