Revolut Launches Bitcoin Withdrawals As Customers Demand Surge

Revolut, one of the world’s largest mobile financial services platforms, historically has allowed users to purchase bitcoin on the platform, but not transfer it to wallets that they control. This comes four years after it first provided crypto trading services to some users, and a year after it extended trading to all 7 million users worldwide.

Withdrawal Will Be For Metal Paid Plan Customers

In a post to its blog at 10am this morning, which was quickly deleted here, but not before AltFi saw it, Revolut announced that Metal paid customers will get beta access to transfer their Bitcoin holdings out of Revolut.

Exclusive access will be first given to its top-tier Metal customers in the United Kingdom. Revolut also aims to expand withdrawals to other client tiers in the future, as it has users in the United States, Australia, and other countries.

Revolut’s premium users have been able to trade Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum since 2017, but they have only been able to withdraw it as fiat until now.

Related article | AAX to Support 11 Global Currencies for Deposit and Withdrawal

To begin with, Revolut users will be able to add three external addresses and withdraw between 500 to 1,000 pounds a month, with Revolut also introducing two-factor authentication to ease security concerns.

Nik Storonsky, Founder and CEO at Revolut, noted that users had demanded withdrawals:

“Crypto withdrawals have been a heavily requested feature within Revolut’s crypto community and we’re delighted that we can begin the gradual process of rolling it out. Customers can lock down wherever they feel safest — whether it’s Revolut, into hot or cold storage, or to another exchange.”

He noted that this is just one of the features the company has in plans for its users in the near future.

“This is just the start of a long list of new crypto features we plan to launch so we can offer customers one of the best crypto products on the market,” he added.

In total, Revolut offers over 20 different crypto tokens which can be bought and sold (and possibly soon traded) through its app, including Ethereum, Litecoin, XRP and Uniswap.

Revolut is a London-based company that provides bank accounts, debit cards, currency exchange, commission-free stock trading, cryptocurrency trading, and foreign exchange services to its customers. Customers in Europe, Canada, Singapore, Japan, the United States, and Australia can use the service.

Fintech Firms Are Jumping On Crypto

In response to the global pandemic, the digital banking apps and other fintech services in the financial sector have been rolling out crypto services for their users since late last year.

Revolut move follows a similar pathway to Paypal which launched U.S. crypto trading in late 2020, with many noting at time that coins bought on the platform would not be able leave.

Related article | Venmo, PayPal, Cash App: Who Is Next To Support Bitcoin, Crypto

Featured image from Pixabay, Charts from TradingView.com