Charles Schwab is launching direct bitcoin and ethereum trading

A new service called Schwab Crypto will give brokerage clients the ability to trade bitcoin and ether directly, Charles Schwab $SCHW announced.

The capability will be available in the coming weeks, according to CNBC. Each transaction through the new service will carry a 0.75% fee. That puts Schwab above Robinhood, which does not charge commissions on crypto trades, though well below Coinbase's retail fee ceiling of 4%. Paxos has been tapped as the custody partner; client crypto holdings will be held in a dedicated account that sits apart from standard brokerage assets.

CEO Rick Wurster had flagged the move months in advance. "What we hear from many of our clients is that they have 98% of their wealth here at Schwab and they might hold a percent or 2% at some digital native firm to hold their crypto, and they really want to bring it back to Schwab because they trust us [and] they want it to sit alongside their other assets," Wurster told CNBC last July.

With the new offering, Schwab enters territory already occupied by Robinhood, a platform that has long combined equity and cryptocurrency trading in a single app. The competitive pressure runs both ways: Coinbase has been offering no-commission stock trades since January, and Kraken announced its own equity trading expansion this week.

The rollout reflects a broader shift across Wall Street, where a more permissive posture from the Trump administration on digital assets has emboldened firms to act. Recent moves include Goldman Sachs $GS filing to introduce a bitcoin income ETF and Morgan Stanley $MS bringing its Bitcoin Trust to market. Among the traditional brokerages, Fidelity Investments has been at this longest — the firm introduced a no-fee crypto trading app in 2023 and has been active in the digital asset space since at least 2013.

Shares of Schwab dropped 5% on Thursday, with investor sentiment also hit by a disappointing first-quarter revenue result disclosed earlier that day.