The $12 trillion brokerage has begun a phased rollout of Schwab Crypto, offering direct bitcoin and ether trading through the same interfaces its clients already use for equities, with Paxos handling execution and custody sitting at its Premier Bank subsidiary.
Charles Schwab has started rolling out direct bitcoin and ethereum trading to its nearly 39 million active brokerage accounts — a move that embeds cryptocurrency access into the same platform where millions of Americans already hold their retirement savings, index funds and individual stock positions.
The product, branded Schwab Crypto, runs through Charles Schwab Premier Bank, the firm's banking subsidiary, which serves as custodian for clients' digital assets. Paxos, the OCC-regulated infrastructure provider, handles trade execution and sub-custody behind the scenes. Clients see their crypto holdings alongside their traditional portfolio on Schwab.com, the Schwab Mobile app and the thinkorswim trading platform — no separate account, no new login, no unfamiliar interface.
Pricing is set at 75 basis points on the dollar value of each trade. That's not the cheapest in the market — Robinhood's spread-based model and Coinbase's Advanced tier both come in lower for active traders — but Schwab isn't chasing the active-trading crowd. It's chasing the 55-year-old financial adviser in suburban Ohio who has $3 million in client assets and has been fielding bitcoin questions for four years without a compliant answer. For that adviser, 75 basis points on a position that might represent 2 per cent of a portfolio is a rounding error compared to the operational cost of opening accounts at a crypto-native exchange.
The launch is deliberately narrow. Only bitcoin and ether are available at the outset, with Schwab citing their combined share of roughly three-quarters of total crypto market capitalisation as justification. Additional tokens will come later, along with deposit and withdrawal capabilities that would let clients transfer existing holdings to Schwab. For now, the only way in is to buy through the platform — a constraint that ensures all assets stay within Schwab's custody framework from the moment of purchase.
Schwab's entry matters less for what it adds to the crypto market and more for what it confirms about traditional finance. When bitcoin spot ETFs launched in January 2024, they gave advisers a way to get exposure through a vehicle they already understood. But an ETF is still a wrapper — it tracks the asset, it doesn't hold it directly, and it trades on stock-exchange hours. Spot crypto trading through a brokerage account removes the wrapper entirely. The adviser can now buy bitcoin for a client the same way they buy Apple shares, and the client sees it in the same portfolio view.
The competitive dynamics are worth watching. Robinhood has spent years building its crypto business and now lists assets as obscure as Zcash in New York; eToro recently paid $70 million for self-custody wallet provider ZenGo. Coinbase, Interactive Brokers and Fidelity all have crypto offerings of varying depth. But none of them oversee $12.2 trillion in client assets. Schwab's distribution advantage is its moat — not technology, not token selection, but the simple fact that the money is already there.
CEO Rick Wurster, who took over from Walt Bettinger in January, has been signalling this move since last year. In a November 2025 interview, he said Schwab's clients "want to buy crypto" and that the firm intended to offer direct trading once the regulatory environment allowed it. The CLARITY Act's progression through Congress and the SEC's evolving posture on broker-dealer requirements appear to have provided the green light Schwab was waiting for.
The phased rollout means not all accounts have access yet — Schwab is onboarding clients in waves, likely stress-testing its operational infrastructure before opening the floodgates. Given the brokerage's scale, even modest adoption rates would move meaningful volume. If 5 per cent of Schwab's active accounts made a single $1,000 bitcoin purchase, that alone would represent nearly $2 billion in demand.
For crypto-native exchanges, Schwab's arrival is the kind of competition they've been bracing for since the ETF approvals. The argument that traditional finance would cannibalise crypto's user base rather than expand it is about to be tested in the most direct way possible: the same platform, the same account, the same app — just a new asset class sitting next to everything else.
