Schwab just launched spot BTC and ETH trading for retail clients today, feels like people are sleeping on this
Charles Schwab went live with spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for their retail brokerage clients today. Not futures, not ETFs, actual spot crypto sitting in your Schwab account.
This is the same firm that manages something like $9 trillion in client assets. The average Schwab customer is older, more conservative, and has probably never touched a crypto exchange in their life. Now they can buy BTC and ETH right next to their index funds without ever downloading Coinbase.
Meanwhile BTC is holding around $80K and barely reacting to back to back hot inflation prints. CPI yesterday came in at 3.8% YoY and PPI today blew past expectations. Normally you'd expect risk assets to dump on that but bitcoin has been weirdly resilient.
The conviction holder numbers are interesting too. Nearly 4 million BTC are now held by wallets that haven't sold through any of the recent volatility. That's roughly a 300% increase since late 2025.
With Schwab giving traditional investors a direct on-ramp, do you think this is the kind of thing that pushes us past the $80K-$85K range we've been stuck in?