- Charles Schwab launched Schwab Crypto, letting retail clients buy bitcoin and ether directly at a 0.75% fee per trade.
- The fee undercuts Fidelity’s 1% but trails Robinhood’s range of 0.03% to 0.95%, landing in a deliberate middle ground.
- Schwab’s move joins Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in Wall Street’s accelerating crypto embrace under a friendlier regulatory climate.
Charles Schwab introduced Schwab Crypto on Thursday, a spot bitcoin and ethereum trading product rolling out to retail clients in the coming weeks. The $11 trillion brokerage is betting its brand recognition and existing client base can pull crypto holders away from digital-native platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood.
The product charges a flat 0.75% fee on every crypto trade. That puts Schwab cheaper than Fidelity Crypto’s 1% buy-and-sell fee but above Robinhood, which charges between 0.03% and 0.95% depending on trade size. Coinbase retail fees can hit 4%. Schwab’s pricing lands in a deliberate middle ground—low enough to compete on cost, high enough to matter on revenue.
“What we hear from many of our clients is that they have 98% of their wealth here at Schwab and they might hold a percent or 2% at some digital native firm to hold their crypto, and they really want to bring it back to Schwab because they trust us,” said CEO Rick Wurster. The pitch is consolidation—clients who already hold stocks, bonds, and retirement accounts at Schwab can now park their bitcoin alongside everything else.
Wall Street’s Crypto Arms Race Is Accelerating
Schwab’s timing isn’t accidental. The Trump administration’s friendlier regulatory stance toward crypto has given traditional financial firms cover to stop waiting and start launching. In the past week alone, Morgan Stanley rolled out a spot bitcoin ETF—the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT)—and Goldman Sachs filed for a bitcoin income ETF. Fidelity, Schwab’s biggest rival, has been in crypto since 2013 and launched a dedicated trading app in 2023.
Meanwhile, the traffic is moving both directions. Coinbase began rolling out commission-free stock trading in January. Kraken followed suit this week. The wall between traditional finance and crypto-native platforms is crumbling from both sides at once.
Schwab already had crypto exposure—clients hold roughly 20% of all spot crypto exchange-traded products through the brokerage. But direct trading is different. It removes the ETF wrapper and puts actual bitcoin and ethereum in a Schwab-branded account, custodied by Charles Schwab Premier Bank and executed through Paxos, an OCC-regulated blockchain infrastructure provider.
What Schwab Crypto Actually Offers—and What It Doesn’t
The mechanics are straightforward. Schwab clients open a separate crypto account linked to their brokerage. Paxos handles sub-custody and trade execution. No wallets, no seed phrases, no navigating decentralized exchanges. It’s the Schwab experience applied to bitcoin and ethereum—research tools, educational content, and customer support included.
“Whether you’re new to crypto and looking for a firm you know and trust, or you already own digital assets, our goal is to be the destination of choice for retail investors who want to incorporate digital assets into their portfolios,” said Joe Vietri, Head of Digital Assets at Charles Schwab.
The launch is limited to bitcoin and ethereum, with plans to add more cryptocurrencies over time. Transfer capabilities—allowing clients to move existing crypto holdings into Schwab—aren’t available yet but are on the roadmap. That’s a notable gap: anyone with bitcoin on Coinbase or in self-custody can’t bring it to Schwab today. For now, it’s buy-and-hold only.
A Schwab survey of 460 cryptocurrency investors found three priorities when choosing a trading platform: low transparent pricing, brand familiarity, and confidence that assets stay secure. The 0.75% fee addresses the first. The Schwab name handles the second. The Paxos partnership—backed by OCC oversight—covers the third.
Schwab shares fell 5% on Thursday, dragged lower by a first-quarter revenue miss reported earlier in the day. The crypto product launch was overshadowed by the earnings disappointment, though the long-term revenue implications of capturing even a fraction of Schwab’s 36 million brokerage accounts into crypto trading could be substantial.
Schwab’s crypto clients will maintain accounts through Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB, which serves as custodian responsible for safekeeping and record-keeping.
