Payment for order flow

Some apps don’t fill your order themselves. They pass it to a trading firm, a market maker, which sells to you at its price and pays the app for the order. Robinhood, a US app, explains it on its help pages: as of June 2026, for every 100 dollars of crypto its customers trade through market makers, it receives 0.95 dollars, and “that amount is included in the spread.” In its own example, on a 100 dollar purchase with a buy spread of 0.96%, Robinhood receives 0.95 dollars of the 0.96.

Crypto orders fetch much more than stock orders. A working paper in the SEC’s research series, published in January 2025, put what Robinhood received for crypto at about 0.35% of every dollar traded, some 45 times the rate for stocks.

Why regulators object

The app is paid by the firm that sets your price. In December 2020, the SEC found that Robinhood’s customers, sold on trading that was “commission free,” had received worse prices than at other brokers, in large part because of the unusually high payments it took for their orders. The worse prices cost them 34.1 million dollars more than they saved on commissions. Robinhood agreed to pay a 65 million dollar penalty, without admitting or denying the findings.

MiCA, the European Union’s crypto law, forbids firms that pass on customers’ crypto orders from taking any payment, discount or other benefit for routing them to a particular platform or firm. In June 2026, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority said crypto firms taking such payments are unlikely to meet its rules on “best execution”, conflicts of interest and inducements, which take effect in October 2027.

An app with no fee isn’t free: compare what you receive. See spread, slippage and what buying bitcoin really costs.