Schwab Opens Bitcoin and Ether Trading to All Clients, Adds Crypto Transfers, Plans Three More Coins by Year-End

Charles Schwab says its crypto product is no longer a pilot. At the company's Fall Business Update on Thursday, Oct. 15, CEO Rick Wurster said the rollout to retail clients is complete.

"All clients can now access Schwab Crypto," Wurster told investors. "We are rolling out the ability for clients to transfer their crypto holdings to Schwab, and we are launching access to three new coins by the end of the year."

That caps a launch that started with an April announcement and an early-access program that began in May.

What Schwab is selling

Schwab Crypto offers direct trading in two assets: bitcoin and ether. Eligible clients can buy and sell through Schwab.com, the Schwab Mobile app and the thinkorswim platform. Crypto positions show up alongside stocks, bonds and ETFs in the same account view.

The fee is a flat 0.75% per transaction. Orders run from $1 to a maximum of $2 million. On a $10,000 purchase, that is $75.

Trading runs nearly around the clock, apart from scheduled maintenance.

Who holds the coins

Schwab is not running its own crypto plumbing. Paxos handles trade execution and sub-custody. Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB is the primary custodian for client holdings, and the crypto sits in a separate account operated through that bank.

Paxos received a conditional approval for a national trust charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in December 2025. Schwab was also a founding backer of EDX Markets, an institutional crypto trading venue that uses Paxos as its custodian.

At launch, clients in New York and Louisiana were excluded because of state-level regulatory constraints. Schwab has not said in its latest update whether that has changed.

From closed loop to transfers

The April launch did not support deposits or withdrawals from external wallets. Clients could only buy and sell inside Schwab. The transfer capability Wurster described is the first change to that closed-loop design.

The update did not spell out how broadly transfers will work, including whether clients can move coins back out to outside wallets. That is the practical question for anyone weighing Schwab against a dedicated exchange.

The revenue angle

Wurster framed crypto as a source of transaction-based revenue for the firm. That is the point of a 0.75% per-trade fee on a platform with scale: Schwab reports more than $13 trillion in client assets and roughly 40 million active brokerage accounts.

Schwab has not disclosed how many clients have traded crypto or how much revenue the product has produced since early access began in May.

Crypto is also not Schwab's first move here. In June, the firm launched near-24/7 crypto futures trading on thinkorswim, covering bitcoin, ether, Solana and XRP. It has also run the Schwab Crypto Thematic ETF (STCE) on the New York Stock Exchange since August 2022, at a 0.30% expense ratio, and it offers access to third-party spot bitcoin ETFs.

So clients now have several routes to the same exposure at different price points: a 0.30% thematic ETF, third-party bitcoin ETFs, futures, and the 0.75% spot product.

The firm has also signaled interest in exploring stablecoin issuance, according to reporting from Ledger Insights. No timeline has been disclosed.

What comes next

Schwab has committed to adding three new coins before 2026 ends. The company has not named them in the remarks quoted from the update. The Defiant reported that Solana, Avalanche and Chainlink are the planned additions.

Schwab has not given a launch date for any of them. With just under 11 weeks left in the year, the deadline is Dec. 31.