The Robinhood platform restricted the trading of cryptocurrencies this morning, after the price of the Dogecoin virtual currency increased by over 300% in just 24 hours.
According to CNCB, Robinhood users noticed that instant purchases for cryptocurrencies no longer worked on Friday morning, and the company later confirmed that it had introduced restrictions.
“Due to extraordinary market conditions, we have temporarily disabled the instant purchase option for cryptocurrencies,” a Robinhood spokesman said.
The Dogecoin virtual currency was launched in 2013, being an allusion to Bitcoin and the “Doge” meme, two of the most popular items on the internet that year. The company’s logo is composed of a gold coin, similar to Bitcoin, on which appears the head of a Shiba Inu dog.
Dogecoin was successful and the market value of the company exceeded 100 million dollars in the year of launch, but later decreased, in 2014 being worth only a third of that amount.
Dogecoin started to grow strongly yesterday, and now the value of the company is 7 billion dollars, due to the large volume of transactions in the last 24 hours.
The virtual currency Bitcoin has also increased by almost 20% in the last 24 hours.
Robinhood’s restrictions on virtual currencies come less than a day after the company restricted from trading shares of companies such as GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry and others intensely promoted on the Reddit group WallStreetBets.
