It seems that Americans turned their attention to the stock and cryptocurrency markets, trading platforms as Robinhood and Coinbase occupied the top two spots in the Apple App Store this week.
According to data from Sensor Tower, a mobile application data analysis company, Robinhood ranked first on Friday, followed by Bitcoin trading platform Coinbase, and TikTok is in third place. On Wednesday, Coinbase was listed on the Nasdaq, and the price of Bitcoin exceeded $64,000 for the first time.
The surge in popularity of financial apps highlights the boom in retail transactions during the epidemic and the “meme stock” culture surrounding names such as GameStop. In January of this year, a group of traders triggered a historic short trade on Reddit, after which GameStop, a video game retailer, became a household name.
Generally, social media and entertainment applications such as TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram are the most popular applications. The ranking reflects the download momentum of a certain application, rather than the cumulative total downloads.
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This is not the first time Robinhood has topped the list. In January of this year, at the height of the GameStop controversy, the agency became the most popular application in the Apple and Google App Stores. Another trading application Webull ranked second. Coinbase, Square’s cash app, and Fidelity also entered the top 10.
Robinhood shut down buyers of certain stocks during the GameStop trading boom and was fought back on social media. Its CEO was later subpoenaed to testify in Congress. But according to estimates by JPMorgan Chase Securities, Robinhood added about 3 million new customers in January alone.
Venture capital investors pay close attention to user engagement and downloads. Until recently, these indicators were mostly used to measure the success of social media applications.
Robinhood investors are now using similar indicators. In January of this year, the company was able to raise US$3 billion in the capital within a few days, and its investors told the media that this was because the company achieved amazing performance growth in response to public relations and regulatory crises.
Charles Schwab said on Thursday that it added a record 3.2 million new customers in the first quarter of this year, more than the number of new customers in the whole of 2020. The company’s CEO Walt Bettinger believes that “the market’s high attention to certain names through social media” is a factor that “significantly increases trading activity.”
(Via)
