- 1. What Schwab turned on, and how long it took
- 2. A 75-basis-point trade is a 1.5% round trip
- 3. Custody sits in a bank, and the disclosures stop short of self-custody
- 4. New York and Louisiana remain outside the product
- 5. What a 0.75% fee is worth on a $13.33 trillion book
- 6. Why five assets and not fifty
- 7. The demand Schwab is building against
- 8. What is left to confirm
Charles Schwab added solana, avalanche and chainlink to its brokerage crypto accounts on Nov. 9, taking Schwab Crypto from two tradable assets to five, the company said in its announcement. The assets trade as SOL/USD, AVAX/USD and LINK/USD, priced at 75 basis points on the dollar value of each trade and held at Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB.
The release carries no volume, revenue or client-count figures for the crypto business. What it does carry is a pricing line, a custody disclosure, a list of five assets and a geographic limit: the accounts are available in every U.S. state except New York and Louisiana.
What Schwab turned on, and how long it took
Schwab announced the plan on Aug. 27, saying the three tokens would be available “in the coming months,” as the earlier release put it. The distance from that statement to delivery was 74 days. In between, the account moved from early access, which began in May 2026, to general availability for eligible retail clients in October, a milestone BlockchainReporter covered when bitcoin and ether trading opened to all eligible clients.
When the plan was announced, the three tokens were described as part of a deliberate build-out around “established cryptocurrencies that align with client demand,” and the earlier coverage noted the same three names. Nothing in the Nov. 9 document revises that rationale or adds a fourth candidate to the queue.
The product surface is the standard Schwab stack: crypto and traditional holdings side by side on Schwab.com, Schwab Mobile and thinkorswim, digital-asset education from the Schwab Center for Financial Research, crypto content through Schwab Coaching, and 24/7 phone and chat support. The tokens are quoted in dollars rather than against each other, which is what a brokerage account needs if a client is sizing a position in dollars rather than trading pairs.
Joe Vietri, Schwab’s head of digital assets, framed the addition as breadth rather than a change of direction. “We continue to expand Schwab Crypto to give clients greater choice and flexibility in how they invest in digital assets alongside their broader investments,” he said, adding that “Our focus remains on delivering the experience, value, education and support clients expect from Schwab.”
A 75-basis-point trade is a 1.5% round trip
Seventy-five basis points is 0.75% of the amount traded. On a $10,000 purchase that is $75; closing the same position at the same price costs another $75, so a full round trip takes $150, or 1.5% of the position, before any price move. That arithmetic follows from Schwab’s own pricing line and is not a comparison with any other venue.
Schwab describes 75 basis points as “pricing among the lowest in the industry.” The release names no comparison venue and publishes no competitor schedule, so the claim stands as a company statement rather than a measured ranking. The only number a reader can check against the document is the 75 basis points itself, and the only thing it applies to is the dollar value of a trade.
The fee structure also explains what the product is not. At 0.75% a side, an account built for frequent trading pays a visible toll, and an account built for a long hold pays it once or twice. That is the shape of a distribution product aimed at clients who already keep their brokerage relationship at Schwab, not at traders who compare spreads across venues.
Scale the same fee across position sizes and the curve is flat: $7.50 a side on a $1,000 order, $75 on $10,000, $375 on $50,000. The fee is proportional, so nothing about the schedule rewards a larger ticket, and a client who trades in and out three times a year on a $10,000 position pays roughly $450, or 4.5%, before the asset moves at all.
Custody sits in a bank, and the disclosures stop short of self-custody
The accounts are offered by Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB, a bank subsidiary that is separate from Charles Schwab & Co. but affiliated with it. The disclosures are blunt about what that does not mean: the assets are not deposits, are not FDIC insured, are not SIPC protected and are not securities. “Investing in cryptocurrencies involves risk, including the risk of total loss of principal invested,” the release states.
What the announcement does not describe is movement. It covers buying and selling. It says nothing about whether a client can send assets to an external wallet or receive them from one, and it makes no mention of staking, yield or lending against the five tokens. Those are absences in the document, not confirmed limitations of the product; Schwab’s crypto support pages are where the answer would sit.
The release also keeps an exit clause: “Schwab may delay, modify, or withdraw support for any announced asset based on market, regulatory, operational, or risk-related developments.” A listing at a brokerage is a decision the firm can reverse, and the document says so in advance.
New York and Louisiana remain outside the product
The accounts are available in 48 states, are not offered in U.S. territories or internationally, and may be restricted or closed if a client moves to an unsupported jurisdiction. “Not all clients will qualify,” the disclosure adds, without defining the eligibility test.
The exclusion is material to scale. Schwab reported 48.6 million client accounts and 40.3 million active brokerage accounts at Sept. 30. Leaving out New York leaves out the largest U.S. metropolitan market, and the release gives no reason for the carve-out. State licensing and money-transmission rules are the usual constraint on crypto custody, but the document does not say that, and it does not give a date for closing the gap.
What a 0.75% fee is worth on a $13.33 trillion book
Schwab ended the third quarter with $13.33 trillion in client assets, up 15% from a year earlier, according to its quarterly release. One basis point of that book is $1.33 billion. A crypto allocation equal to 10 basis points of client assets would be about $13.3 billion, and trading that amount once at 75 basis points would generate about $100 million in fees.
Two comparisons size that number. Schwab’s total net revenue in the quarter was $7.171 billion, so $100 million of crypto fee revenue would equal roughly 1.4% of a quarter of revenue. And to add 1% to quarterly revenue, the crypto desk would need about $9.6 billion of quarterly volume at 75 basis points. For a firm that reported 10.7 million daily average trades in the quarter, $9.6 billion over three months is not a stretch; it is also not something the release claims.
A third calculation shows why the fee is not the interesting variable. Schwab’s $1.2 billion of quarterly trading revenue, spread over those 10.7 million daily average trades and a quarter of roughly 64 trading days, works out to about $1.75 of revenue per daily average trade. Crypto at 75 basis points earns more per dollar traded than that, but it earns it on a much smaller base, and the base is what a five-asset menu is designed to grow.
Why five assets and not fifty
The filter Schwab published points at scale rather than breadth. Bitcoin and ether arrived first, in the May-to-October rollout. The three additions are all large-cap tokens with liquid dollar markets and a long operating record. Nothing in either release suggests the firm intends to work down the market-cap table toward smaller assets, and the phrase “over time” is the only schedule offered.
That restraint is the part of the product that carries the signal. A brokerage with 40.3 million active accounts changes an asset’s distribution simply by listing it, and each listing sets an expectation about how far the firm will go. The fee schedule tells a client what a trade costs; the listing decision tells the market what Schwab is willing to hold.
It also leaves the comparison with crypto-native venues unresolved. A five-asset menu is narrower than what an exchange offers, and it is broader than what most banks offer. Where Schwab lands between those poles depends on disclosures the firm has not made: no crypto revenue line, no account count for the crypto product, no volume figure.
The demand Schwab is building against
Schwab has its own read on why a five-asset, education-heavy product looks like the right shape. Its 2026 Modern Wealth Survey, published Oct. 7 and based on 2,000 Americans surveyed between Aug. 24 and Sept. 17, found that six in 10 current crypto investors plan to add to their holdings over the next 12 months, a higher share than among ETF owners (56%), stock owners (52%) or bond owners (42%). It also found that 21% of Americans own crypto and 47% of investors do, according to the survey release.
The same survey explains the guardrails. Among non-owners, the leading barriers were concerns about scams or fraud (48%), not understanding how crypto works (39%) and a lack of regulation (34%), and 52% of people familiar with crypto rated it high risk, the highest share of any investment measured. A brokerage that leads with education, familiar tokens and a bank subsidiary is answering those three objections directly, which is a more useful explanation of the product than the fee line.
What is left to confirm
Three questions are open. Whether the account supports on-chain transfers, which decides whether it is a trading venue or a custody product, and which the release does not address. Whether New York and Louisiana get access, and on what timetable. And whether Schwab breaks out crypto revenue or volume when it reports fourth-quarter results in January.
Against those, the verified facts are narrow and specific: five assets, 75 basis points a side, a bank subsidiary as custodian, 48 states, and 74 days between the announcement and the delivery.
