Robinhood reportedly testing spare change investment and crypto price volatility protection feature

Trading service provider Robinhood Markets Inc is planning to introduce a new feature that would let traders invest spare change and help protect users from crypto price volatility, Bloomberg reported.

The upcoming feature will be called “round-up investments,” which was found as a hidden code inside a version of its iPhone app distributed to beta testers earlier this month and was discovered by iOS developer Steve Moser.

The application code also shows that the company will also introduce a rewards program that will give bonuses to those who will use the round-up feature and invest their spare change.

The spare change investment strategy has become increasingly popular among retail traders, and most rival apps such as Acorns, Chime and Wealthsimple, offer the program.

Although the code in Robinhood’s app doesn’t indicate from where the spare change will come, other apps typically connect to a debit or credit card and round up spending done by a user to the nearest dollar and automatically invest that difference.

Besides the spare-change investment, the code also indicates that Robinhood is working on another feature, “price volatility protection,” to better guard crypto traders.

“To protect your orders against price volatility, we may sometimes skip your recurring orders or buy less than your chosen amount,” a message in the code reads.

Earlier this year, Menlo Park-based company struggled with turbulence in cryptocurrency trading and suffered an outage after the price of Dogecoin surged and then crashed.

On Saturday, during a live-streamed roadshow, an event typically held in private for institutional investors, CEO Vlad Tenev said the platform is working on building up a crypto business.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to provide our crypto customers with the functionality that they’ve been asking for,” Tenev said.

“We want to introduce new features safely, and there’s a lot of items we have to get right from the start. For instance, making sure we get security right is a top priority,” without explicitly mentioning a volatility feature, he said that introducing options like crypto wallets will be a priority.

“There is more we can do with direct deposit and debit cards, particularly given the opportunity to connect rewards with our brokerage and crypto offerings,” CFO Jason Warnick said in response to a question on the firm’s growth strategy.

Picture Credit: CNBC