Traditional brokerages enter Crypto: Interactive Brokers makes a three-month blitz into the crypto market

Original title: Interactive Brokers’ First Battle of 2026—Choosing to Open Up the Crypto Market

Original author: Maher, Foresight News

In 2026, Interactive Brokers (Interactive Brokers) used only three months to bring the low-cost, professional execution of its traditional brokerage business into the crypto market.

Interactive Brokers, which listed on the Nasdaq in 2007, currently has a market cap of $113.7 billion. The broker’s platform is known for low commissions, best-execution prices, and advanced trading technology. Through an integrated platform, it provides diversified product trading services for retail investors, active traders, and institutional clients across more than 170 markets and more than 200 countries and regions, including stocks, options, futures, forex, bonds, funds, and more.

With a traditional U.S. equities giant like this, in 2026 it chose to carve out a brand-new battleground in the field of cryptocurrencies.

Interactive Brokers’ current CEO, Milan Galik

What Interactive Brokers strikes first is the funding channel—in stablecoins.

In January, Interactive Brokers launched its 24/7 account funding service for stablecoins. Eligible customers can send USDC from their personal crypto wallets to secure addresses provided by Zero Hash (supporting the Ethereum, Solana, and Base networks). Funds automatically convert into U.S. dollars within minutes and are credited to the brokerage account, available around the clock, including weekends and holidays. In the following weeks, it will also add support for Ripple’s RLUSD and PayPal’s PYUSD.

Interactive Brokers does not charge deposit fees. Instead, Zero Hash charges only a low conversion fee on a tiered basis, and customers only need to cover blockchain network fees.

This directly addresses the limitations of bank business hours in traditional wire transfers and cross-border delays, allowing global investors to instantly inject dollar-value capital into their accounts and immediately deploy it for multi-asset trading.

Second, Interactive Brokers is also turning its sights to BTC/ETH trading and funding.

This year in February, Interactive Brokers launched Coinbase Nano Bitcoin and Ethereum futures, enabling 24/7 trading. On March 25, users can transfer BTC/ETH and other assets directly from an external wallet into the crypto account linked to Interactive Brokers, without needing to sell out first.

This feature removes technical barriers, enabling investors to trade crypto assets on the same platform with lower commissions, and to achieve unified risk management across stocks, options, futures, and crypto.

In addition, the company has expanded its crypto footprint into the European market.

Through its Irish subsidiary, Interactive Brokers offers crypto asset trading to eligible individual investors across the European Economic Area. Users can trade, alongside stocks, options, futures, forex, bonds, and funds, 11 mainstream crypto assets including BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, and DOGE on the existing platform. The service supports trading 7×24 hours.

Now, as it launches a stablecoin blitz on the crypto market, Interactive Brokers’ story serves as the latest footnote to its stance of “embracing crypto while not losing its core identity” as a traditional broker.

As early as September 2021, when Bitcoin had just broken through the $60,000 mark and crypto was still viewed as a high-risk fringe asset, Interactive Brokers partnered with Paxos Trust Company, which is regulated by the State of New York, and was first to launch spot trading for four cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and BCH. Customers do not need to open an additional crypto account; they only need to request permissions in their existing brokerage account to trade and withdraw to external wallets 24/7. This “low-cost + unified platform” model was positioned from the start to serve professional investors—not to chase the retail speculation frenzy.

In the following years, Interactive Brokers steadily expanded its product lineup. In 2025, it added Avalanche, Cardano, Chainlink, Dogecoin, Ripple, Solana, Sui, and others via Paxos or Zero Hash, supporting more than 11 mainstream assets.

This path of “starting with steady execution, then accelerating integration” reflects the unique logic behind traditional brokers exploring Crypto. Unlike pure crypto platforms that pursue traffic and leverage, Interactive Brokers views crypto as an institutional component of a multi-asset platform: stablecoins are no longer just “digital dollars,” but an efficient settlement channel that can be directly converted into trading funds, margin, or idle capital. The CEO team has emphasized multiple times that the goal is “to make crypto trading as professional and low-cost as stocks.”

Perhaps it’s not hard to understand Interactive Brokers’ intent behind the scenes. Crypto assets are shifting from early speculation narratives to becoming an important component of institutional allocation portfolios. Customers increasingly need to manage traditional securities, futures and options, and digital assets all on one unified, professional, low-cost platform—so they can achieve more efficient risk hedging, liquidity management, and capital allocation. If those services cannot be provided, some high-net-worth and institutional clients are likely to move crypto-related business to pure crypto trading platforms, leading to decreased overall platform stickiness and diverted funds.

With innovative initiatives such as 24/7 stablecoin deposits, direct transfers from external wallets, and derivatives, Interactive Brokers not only dramatically reduces the friction costs of cross-border capital flows and asset transfers, but also turns stablecoins into efficient settlement and margin instruments, significantly improving customers’ capital mobility and utilization efficiency. This setup precisely aligns with the company’s core competitive strengths—an advanced automated trading system, seamless access across more than 100 global markets, and exceptionally low-cost execution.

In 2026, when the crypto market shifts from being narrative-driven to institutional allocation, this strategy is beginning to show its competitive edge—customers can monitor how stock price fluctuations affect their crypto positions on the same screen, or use stablecoins to quickly capture global opportunities, without switching between multiple apps.

Interactive Brokers’ story, at its core, is a microcosm of how a long-established Wall Street broker reshapes its own positioning through technology and execution.

Since Thomas Peterffy founded Interactive Brokers in 1978, the company has focused on developing automated trading systems. According to the latest publicly released 2025Q4 financial report data, the number of client accounts at Interactive Brokers reached 4.4 million, up 32% year over year. In full-year 2025, net additions of client accounts exceeded 1 million, setting an annual record. Full-year commission revenue was approximately $2.1 billion (+27%), and full-year net revenue was approximately $6.205 billion (+20%). Customer average return performance was strong (individual clients about 19.2%, hedge fund clients about 28.91%)

These hard-nosed data points confirm the contribution of “low commissions + global access + a one-stop platform” to long-term returns, and also allow Interactive Brokers to firmly stand its ground at the intersection of TradFi and Crypto.

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