Charles Schwab has begun a phased rollout of direct Bitcoin and Ether trading for eligible U.S. retail clients, according to reporting from Cointelegraph on May 13. Trades clear at a 75-basis-point fee, with execution and sub-custody handled by Paxos. The launch puts Schwab in direct competition with Coinbase, Fidelity, and Robinhood for retail crypto flow — but the implication for users who already hold a Schwab brokerage account is genuinely meaningful.
For an existing Schwab customer with a taxable brokerage account, Bitcoin and Ether now appear next to stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds in the same trading interface. The same login, the same statements, the same tax document at year-end. That's the part that's easy to underestimate: most retail investors do not want to open a separate exchange account, manage a separate password, and file a separate 1099. Putting spot crypto inside the existing brokerage shell removes a meaningful onboarding friction for the kind of investor who has been curious but never crossed the threshold.
A 75-bps fee is meaningfully wider than Coinbase Advanced (sub-30 bps for active traders) or a spot Bitcoin ETF (typically 25 bps or less in annual expense ratio). For someone making a single allocation and holding, the ETF route is cheaper. For someone who wants the actual asset and the optionality of self-custody later — which the ETF doesn't give you — the Schwab spread is the price of convenience. The fact that Paxos handles custody means assets are held by a New York Department of Financial Services-regulated trust company, which is functionally what most retail users want anyway.
This is part of a steady decade-long migration that's now nearly complete: spot Bitcoin available in IRAs, spot ETFs trading on major exchanges, and now native spot trading inside the largest U.S. retail brokers. Each layer pulls in a different cohort. The ETF route brought in retirement and advisory channels. The brokerage rollout pulls in the buy-and-hold individual investor who never opened a Coinbase account. Whether this expands net demand or simply redistributes existing demand from Coinbase to Schwab is the open question, but the brokerage channel has historically grown the overall pie for any new asset class it has touched.
If you're tracking exchanges to make a buy decision, this changes the comparison set. Our exchange compare tool and exchange reviews focus on crypto-native venues, but for someone already inside Schwab, the relevant comparison is now Schwab versus a spot ETF versus opening a Coinbase account. For pricing, custody, fee structure, and tax handling, those three paths produce very different outcomes. The simple rule: ETF for tax-advantaged accounts, crypto-native exchange for self-custody and altcoin breadth, broker integration for the existing Schwab user who just wants spot exposure inside the brokerage they already use.