The SHIB Army has been waiting for Robinhood to list Shiba Inu for quite a long time now. Right from starting social media campaigns to filing online petitions, they’ve dedicatedly tried out all possible options from their end.
In fact, just a week back tweets talking about Robinhood listing Shiba Inu in February this year went viral. Right after that, in a virtual WSJ summit, the US-based exchange’s CFO Jason Warnick said that the company has kept its “ears open” and is listening to what the community wants.
Regulatory uncertainty
In the same summit, Warnick later went on to talk about how the uncertain regulatory environment was making the company hold back its horses. He quite outrightly said that the company wanted more clarity from regulators before adding new tokens, in response to a petition from the Shiba Inu community asking Robinhood to list it. He added,
We’re a highly regulated company in a highly regulated industry, and we think it’s important that we get a bit more clarity from regulators.
At the time of writing, it was noted that over 556k people had already signed the petition when compared to mid-October’s 240k.
The petition goes on to highlight how Robinhood had massively benefited by listing DOGE on its platform and affirmed that Shiba Inu was a similar coin with “genuine potential.”
Warnick further went on to add that the exchange has no plans as of now to buy crypto for its corporate treasury as there weren’t compelling reasons strategically for their business to put any meaningful amount of their corporate cash into cryptos.
In November last year, Robinhood’s Chief Operating Officer Christine Brow, praised the Shiba Inu community for expressing what it wanted via the petition. Despite remaining tight-lipped about the listing, she too went on to lay emphasis on the regulatory bits. She said,
We think that the short-term gain to us is not worth the long-term trade-off for our users. We want to make sure that we are working and assessing everything from a regulatory perspective.
It is a known fact that Robinhood has started focussing more on regulators and compliances post last year’s feud with the SEC. In fact, just in December last year it partnered with blockchain data platform Chainalysis to meet compliance requirements.
Thus, as long as fog remains in the regulatory ambit, it doesn’t look like Robinhood would take the risk of listing another meme-coin. However, as soon as they get the clarity, it’d just be a matter of time until the exchange rolls out a proper listing roadmap.