- Robinhood has turned on crypto trading inside its main UK app, with Bitstamp, the exchange it now owns, handling the trading and custody behind the scenes.
- Crypto now appears alongside stocks, ISAs, options and futures. It isn’t ISA-eligible and isn’t covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
- Bitstamp’s FCA registration is anti-money-laundering supervision, not a guarantee that your coins are protected if something goes wrong.
Robinhood’s UK customers can now buy crypto in the same app they hold their ISA in. The two sit a couple of taps apart on the same screen. Only one of them comes with the protections most British savers assume come as standard.
Buying crypto inside a familiar investing app makes it feel like the rest of your portfolio. It isn’t treated like the rest of your portfolio. Cash and shares held with a UK-regulated firm are covered up to £85,000 by the FSCS if that firm fails. Crypto isn’t covered at all: by anyone, for any amount.
That’s not a criticism of Robinhood specifically. It’s true of every crypto product sold in Britain today. But it matters more when the crypto is sitting on the same screen as products that are covered, because the app can’t show you where the safety net stops.
What’s actually launched
Until now, Robinhood’s UK app was a stocks business. British customers could buy US and UK shares, hold them in a Stocks and Shares ISA, and more recently trade options and futures. Crypto was the missing piece.
It arrives through Bitstamp, one of the oldest crypto exchanges in Europe, which Robinhood bought in a deal that closed in 2025. Rather than build a UK crypto operation from scratch, Robinhood has plugged the exchange it already owns into the app it already runs. Bitstamp does the matching of buyers and sellers and holds the coins; Robinhood provides the front door.
That structure is worth understanding, because it means the entity you’re dealing with when you buy crypto in the app is not the same entity you’re dealing with when you buy a share.
The ISA point, plainly
You cannot hold crypto in a Stocks and Shares ISA. HMRC’s rules on what qualifies don’t include cryptoassets, so nothing bought in the crypto section of the app goes inside the ISA wrapper, no matter that the wrapper is right there in the same menu.
The practical consequence is tax. Gains on shares inside an ISA are free of capital gains tax. Gains on crypto held outside one aren’t: disposals count towards your annual CGT allowance, and selling, swapping one coin for another, or spending it can all be a disposal. Anyone assuming the app’s ISA covers everything in the app would be in for an unpleasant surprise at the end of the tax year.
What FCA registration does and doesn’t mean
Bitstamp’s UK arm is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a cryptoasset firm. That sounds like a stamp of approval, and it’s often reported as one. It’s narrower than that.
Registration means the firm is supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes: that it checks who its customers are, monitors for suspicious activity and reports it. It is not authorisation of the products themselves. The FCA has said repeatedly that crypto is largely unregulated in the UK and that consumers should be prepared to lose all the money they put in.
So the honest summary is: the firm has to know who you are, and it has to follow financial-crime rules. If the coins are lost, stolen or the business fails, there’s no compensation scheme behind them, and your route to the Financial Ombudsman Service may be limited depending on which activity your complaint concerns.
How this differs from an exchange account, or holding it yourself
There are broadly three ways to own crypto, and a mainstream brokerage app is a fourth thing sitting between two of them.
Buy through a crypto exchange and the exchange holds the coins for you, usually with the option to withdraw them to a wallet you control. Hold them yourself and you control the keys and everything that follows from that, good and bad. We’ve explained that trade-off properly in our guide to self-custody, and it’s the part of crypto that has no equivalent in ordinary investing.
Buying inside a brokerage app is the most convenient of the options and the one where you’re furthest from the asset. The company holds the coins, and whether you can move them out to a wallet in your own name is a product decision rather than a right. That single question (can I withdraw, or is this a price exposure I can only sell back to the app?) decides whether you own crypto or own a position in crypto. It’s the first thing worth checking in the app’s terms.
The AI widget in the corner
Robinhood has been rolling out Cortex, its AI research layer, and part of that is a digest feature that summarises news and market moves for the assets you’re looking at.
It’s a summariser. It reads coverage and compresses it. That’s genuinely useful and it is not the same as analysis, a recommendation or a forecast, however confident the tone reads. A digest that says sentiment has turned negative is describing what other people have written, not telling you what will happen, and nothing generated by it is regulated financial advice.
What to watch
Whether withdrawals to external wallets are supported at launch or added later. That’s the line between a crypto account and a crypto-flavoured trading product, and it’ll tell you which one this is.
Beyond that, the FCA’s broader crypto regime. The regulator has been consulting on bringing trading platforms and custody inside proper authorisation rather than AML registration alone. If that lands, the protection gap described above narrows, and the sentence “crypto isn’t covered” starts needing footnotes. Until then, it’s the plain truth of every crypto product sold in the UK, including this one.