With its WonderFi acquisition complete, American trading platform Robinhood Markets is expanding its presence in Canada as it opens a new Canadian headquarters in downtown Toronto. Robinhood announced the office on Wednesday, saying it views Canada as one of its “priority markets” and wants to expand its presence in the country, both in cryptocurrency and beyond.
“We really want to bring more products to Canada.”
Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood
In an interview with BetaKit, Robinhood senior vice-president and general manager of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, said the company aims to demonstrate its “long-term investment and [its] commitment” to Canada with the space, which integrates multiple teams under the same roof.
Kerbrat described Canada as a “priority” market for the brokerage, which also offers stock trading and other financial services and tools in the United States (US) and United Kingdom, but not Canada. He said Robinhood is “excited to keep building on top of” its initial Canadian crypto offering as it looks to roll out broader trading services over time and bring more competition to the Canadian market.
“We really want to bring more products to Canada,” Kerbrat said. “We started with cryptocurrency because we saw that the market was ready to be disrupted with lower fees and better features, but the goal for us is to increase the type of products available at Robinhood Canada by adding more types of financial instruments and use cases.”
The new headquarters comes months after Robinhood officially launched in Canada with cryptocurrency trading services, following the close of its $250-million CAD acquisition of Toronto crypto firm WonderFi.
WonderFi offered Robinhood a shortcut to Canadian expansion: it owns two of Canada’s largest and oldest regulated crypto exchanges in Bitbuy and Coinsquare, which serve 300,000 Canadian customers and provide the regulatory licence to roll out Robinhood Canada. While Bitbuy and Coinsquare remain operational, Robinhood hopes to eventually migrate their users to its core app under the Robinhood brand.
Robinhood established an initial presence in Toronto when it set up an infrastructure engineering hub in the city in 2024. When the WonderFi deal was first announced, the company’s leadership and entire 115-person team was expected to join Robinhood’s then 140-person Canadian staff.
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But since then, WonderFi president and CEO Dean Skurka has left, and Robinhood has shed 10 percent of its overall workforce. While it remains unclear to what degree Robinhood Canada and WonderFi employees were affected, today, Robinhood says it has more than 200 staff in the country.
Though Robinhood declined to provide a specific hiring target for Toronto, the US brokerage had 21 job openings listed in the city at the time of publication, and its new Canadian headquarters reportedly has room for as many as 400.
Robinhood’s Canadian expansion means immediate competition for Canadian crypto exchanges like Netcoins and Shakepay, and major US peers such as Coinbase and Kraken. A move beyond crypto into self-directed investing and stock trading more broadly—something Coinbase has also signalled plans to do—would put Robinhood in the crosshairs of large domestic players like Questrade and Wealthsimple.
Kerbrat argued that more competition in the Canadian market will put pressure on fee structure and lead to greater innovation.
“Ideally, at the end of the journey for [Robinhood], we will become one of the larger players in the space where [Canadians] do everything in one application,” Kerbrat said. “But right now, we are focusing on crypto.”
Feature image courtesy Robinhood.