Coinbase is a popular choice for buying bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies.
Todd Haselton | CNBC
Watch out for social media, financial apps are becoming a more popular form of entertainment on people’s phones.
Robinhood and Coinbase trading platforms have secured the top two spots in Apple’s App Store this week, while Americans are focusing their attention on the stock and cryptocurrency markets.
Robinhood got the no. 1st place Friday, followed by cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase, according to Sensor Tower data. TikTok was third. The rise in popularity comes when Coinbase debuted on the Nasdaq on Wednesday and Bitcoin surpassed $ 64,000 for the first time.
The rise in popularity underscores the boom in retail during the pandemic and the “meme stock” culture around names like GameStop. The video game marketer became a household name in January after a group of marketers on Reddit sparked a brief history.
Usually, social media and entertainment options like TikTok, Reddit and Instagram are the best apps. The ratings reflect the momentum of downloads from a given application, not necessarily from the total accumulated downloads.
This is not the first time Robinhood has been ranked number one. In January, at the height of the GameStop controversy, the brokerage firm was the most popular app in Apple and Google app stores. Webull, another commercial application, was the second. Coinbase, Square’s Cash App and Fidelity also placed in the top 10.
Robinhood, which closed the side of buying certain shares during the heyday of the GameStop frenzy, experienced a setback on social media and its CEO was later testified before Congress. But Robinhood still added about 3 million customers in January alone, according to JMP Securities estimates.
Venture capital investors observe the commitment and download the numbers closely. Until recently, these metrics had been used primarily to measure the success of social networking applications. Robinhood investors now use similar metrics. It was able to raise $ 3 billion in capital for a few days in January, which investors told CNBC was due to its remarkable growth as it faced a regulatory and public relations crisis.
Charles Schwab said Thursday that he added a record 3.2 million new customers in the first quarter – more new accounts than in all of 2020. CEO Walt Bettinger credited “greater market attention to some names through of social media “as a factor that” significantly strengthened business activity. “
– Steve Kovach of CNBC contributed the information.