Key Takeaways
- Charles Schwab — the largest US retail brokerage, with about 38.9 million accounts and roughly $12 trillion in client assets — launched direct spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading in mid-April 2026.
- Schwab charges a flat 0.75% trading fee, undercutting Fidelity Crypto's 1% and sitting well below Coinbase's standard retail fees, which can reach 4%.
- Your Schwab Bitcoin is not covered by SIPC or FDIC insurance, and at launch you cannot withdraw it to an outside wallet — it lives only inside Schwab.
- This is a convenience milestone, not a safety upgrade. Bitcoin bought through Schwab is still Bitcoin — volatile, custodial, and not legally the same as holding your own keys.
What Schwab Crypto Actually Is
On April 15, 2026, Charles Schwab announced "Schwab Crypto," a new service that lets retail clients buy and hold Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) directly inside their existing Schwab account. No separate app. No new login. No crypto exchange to verify into. If you already check your 401(k) rollover or IRA balance on Schwab, a Bitcoin line item will soon sit right next to your ETFs.
Under the hood, the service is operated by Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB, with custody and trade execution handled by Paxos — a blockchain infrastructure firm that holds both a New York trust charter and oversight from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In plain English, Schwab is the front door; Paxos is the vault in the back room.
The rollout is phased. Schwab employees got access first, then early-waitlist customers, and finally the firm's full client base. Only BTC and ETH are available at launch, with more assets likely to follow.
Why This Is a Bigger Deal Than It Looks
Thirty-nine million people is a lot of people. Schwab opened 1.3 million new brokerage accounts in the first quarter of 2026 alone — up 10% year over year. For most of those clients, Schwab is not a side account. It is where their retirement lives.
That is why Coinbase and Robinhood stock prices both dipped the day of the announcement. Wall Street understands what is happening: a $12 trillion incumbent with enormous built-in distribution just walked into a market that crypto-native platforms used to own. The $175 billion sitting in Bitcoin ETFs already showed that traditional-finance wrappers can pull serious retail demand. Schwab's launch extends that pattern into direct spot trading.
Regulators paved the road for this. In 2025, the OCC clarified that nationally chartered banks can provide crypto custody, which is exactly the lane Schwab's bank subsidiary is driving through. That same year of rule-making — documented in our piece on how US banks got the green light to hold crypto — is what made a product like Schwab Crypto possible in the first place.
The Fees: Cheaper Than Most, Not the Cheapest
Schwab's flat 0.75% fee is a notable undercut of Fidelity Crypto at 1%. Against Coinbase's standard retail interface, which can charge up to 4% on smaller trades, the gap is even larger. On a $1,000 Bitcoin purchase, Schwab costs $7.50. The same trade through Coinbase's retail interface could cost up to $40 — a 5x difference for the identical asset.
Robinhood still beats Schwab on pure headline pricing, with spreads as low as 0.03%. But for the typical Schwab customer — someone who values a single, regulated account over shopping for a few basis points — the math is very clear.
The Catch: You Are Not Actually Holding Bitcoin
Here is where careful readers need to slow down. Buying Bitcoin on Schwab is not the same as owning Bitcoin in the way a crypto-native user would define it.
Schwab (through Paxos) holds the private keys. You hold a claim on Bitcoin, not on-chain Bitcoin. If you want to understand why that distinction matters, our piece on what a private key actually is lays out the stakes. The short version: whoever controls the key controls the coin. In a custodial setup, that is not you.
At launch, Schwab Crypto is also a closed loop. You cannot deposit Bitcoin into your Schwab account from another wallet, and you cannot withdraw to a hardware wallet or send it to someone else on-chain. If you want the ability to move your coins yourself, you will need a self-custody crypto wallet, not a Schwab account.
For many users this tradeoff is fine. Convenience wins. But it is a tradeoff worth naming out loud.
No SIPC. No FDIC. Read That Again.
This is the single most important sentence in the article: crypto held at Schwab is not covered by SIPC or FDIC insurance.
When you hold stocks at Schwab, SIPC covers up to $500,000 in client assets if the brokerage fails. When you hold cash in a Schwab bank account, FDIC covers up to $250,000 if the bank fails. Neither applies to "Schwab Crypto." If Schwab or Paxos were to experience a catastrophic failure, your Bitcoin claim would be treated differently from your stock or cash balance.
Schwab discloses this clearly in its risk documentation. The problem is that most people will not read it. A 55-year-old who has trusted Schwab with a retirement account for two decades may reasonably assume the same protections extend to a new line item in the same dashboard. They do not.
What This Moment Actually Represents
The honest framing is this: Schwab Crypto is a normalization event, not a protection upgrade. It is the point at which buying Bitcoin becomes as routine as buying a stock for tens of millions of Americans who would never have opened a crypto exchange account on their own.
That has real consequences. More casual investors will buy Bitcoin. More of them will misunderstand what they are buying. Many will conflate "it is on Schwab" with "it is safe" — a conflation the existence of the product does nothing to dispel.
None of that is a reason to avoid Schwab Crypto if you are comfortable with the mechanics. It may genuinely be the simplest, lowest-friction spot-crypto product available to an American retail investor today. It is a reason to understand exactly what you are buying: a custodial, uninsured, non-transferable claim on a volatile asset — offered by a household name. Those are all true at the same time.
If you take one thing from this piece, let it be this: the logo on the app does not change the asset inside it.