New crypto trading services are entering Canada. Is that good for investors?
Two US brokerages just walked into Canada's crypto market within 48 hours of each other, and the timing tells you everything.
The Revenue Math Behind the Push
Look at the numbers. Robinhood pulled US$901 million in crypto transaction income in 2025, a 44% jump year-over-year and more than a third of its total transaction-based revenue. Then the floor dropped out: Q1 2026 crypto transaction income fell 47% versus a year earlier, per the company's 10-Q filing. CEO Vladimir Tenev told shareholders in a 2026 proxy statement that the firm would "double down" on AI and crypto this year. That's what a broker does when its existing verticals take a hit and it needs a fresh fee engine.
Webull's parent (Nasdaq: WEBULL) doesn't break out crypto transaction revenue separately, so there's no clean comparable number for the Canadian unit. Robinhood's SVP and GM of crypto Johann Kerbrat told The Globe and Mail there's "a lot of enthusiasm in Canada for crypto assets." Webull Canada CEO Michael Constantino called the crypto addition a "natural progression" alongside the recent 24/7 U.S. equities launch. Same playbook on both sides: cross-sell, broaden the revenue base, hope the cycle turns.
Suitability, Slippage, and Counterparty Risk
Here's where I get cold. FAIR Canada's Jean-Paul Bureaud flagged the real issue bluntly: consumer demand and product appropriateness aren't the same thing. Without hard suitability rules attached to these Canadian rollouts, complicated and highly volatile instruments land directly in retail accounts that may not survive another 50% drawdown. I don't need a regulator to spell it out — bolting crypto onto a brokerage app without proper risk controls turns the platform into a liquidation engine for the user's own book.
For traders thinking about moving size into either app, the verdict is simple. These are brokerage wrappers, not deep crypto-native venues. Order book depth, latency under stress, and liquidation behavior under load are not what these platforms were built for. Treat the crypto module as an on-ramp and a rebalancing tool, not as your execution venue. If you need serious liquidity, you're still routing to a dedicated exchange with real depth and a tested liquidation stack.
