Robinhood names new COO to oversee its crypto operations

Robinhood has named a new chief operating officer with experience in product management and operations to oversee its crypto platform, the team behind the online brokerage announced Thursday. 

Christine Brown has served as the vice president of Robinhood Markets' Product Operations since 2017. According to the announcement, while at Robinhood, she developed and scaled the platform's Operations Department. Brown will keep her VP role alongside her new role. 

“For the past few years, I’ve been focused on building traditional financial infrastructure, but I’ve always been fascinated with cryptocurrency and its potential to create a more open financial system,” Brown said in the statement. “As we continue to pursue our mission of democratizing finance for all, I couldn’t be more excited to lead our crypto operations, help our teams build amazing products, and deliver a great experience for our customers.” 

Robinhood's crypto team has tripled this year with new hires in engineering, security, and compliance. 

"We’re making great progress towards building deposit and withdrawal features for Robinhood’s crypto product," the announcement stated. 

The announcement comes days after the platform experienced crypto order failures due to a surge in popularity for meme-themed cryptocurrency Dogecoin. 

Robinhood Crypto had about 9.5 million users trading on the platform in the first quarter of 2021, a nearly 460% from the platform's 1.7 million traders in 2020's final quarter.