Charles Schwab began rolling out spot cryptocurrency trading to retail customers in the U.S. on Tuesday, opening direct BTC and ETH access to an initial cohort of clients on its newly launched Schwab Crypto platform, the brokerage said in a post on X. The firm manages roughly $12 trillion in client assets and serves around 35 million accounts.
The launch ends a multi-year wait. CEO Rick Wurster first signaled the plan in July 2025 and confirmed a first-half 2026 timeline last month, according to CoinDesk reporting. The platform initially supports only bitcoin and ether, with broader asset coverage and full client access expected during the phased rollout. Schwab will offer the service through its Charles Schwab Premier Bank entity and bundle it alongside the equities, fixed-income, and banking tools its retail base already uses.
The pricing structure positions Schwab squarely between incumbents. The firm will charge a 0.75% fee per crypto trade, according to CNBC, lower than Fidelity’s flat 1% and well below Coinbase’s tiered retail fees that can reach 4%. Robinhood, the closest direct competitor on the brokerage side, runs a variable model between 0.03% and 0.95%. Schwab’s flat structure is designed to be predictable rather than aggressive.
The move arrives in a market where institutional crypto rails are consolidating fast. Spot bitcoin ETFs have now accumulated $58.72 billion in cumulative net inflows since their January 2024 launch, per CoinDesk data, though that remains below the $61.19 billion October peak. Meanwhile, eToro reported Q1 crypto revenue down 38% year over year, and Coinbase posted a first-quarter net loss of $394.1 million. Crypto-native venues are losing pricing power exactly as traditional brokerages enter spot.
BTC traded around $80,300 at the time of the announcement, down roughly 1% on the day amid broader risk-off sentiment tied to inflation data and the ongoing Trump-Xi summit. The market implication is structural rather than immediate. With Schwab live, Fidelity already in retail, and JPMorgan filing for tokenized treasury products on Ethereum, the distinction between crypto exchanges and traditional brokerages continues to narrow — and the next wave of retail flow may bypass crypto-native platforms entirely.
