Bitstamp was founded in 2011 in Slovenia by Nejc Kodrič and Damijan Merlak, explicitly as a European alternative to Mt. Gox — which, given what happened to Mt. Gox three years later, turned out to be one of the better-timed strategic premises in crypto. It is the longest continuously operating cryptocurrency exchange in the world, and the reason it survived when almost none of its contemporaries did is unglamorous: it took regulation seriously years before the industry generally did, acquiring licences and registrations rather than jurisdiction-shopping around them. Bitstamp obtained a Luxembourg payment institution licence in 2016, one of the first crypto exchanges anywhere to be regulated at that level in the EU, and built out from there to more than 50 active licences and registrations globally, with offices in Luxembourg, the UK, Slovenia, Singapore, and the US.
That patient licensing strategy became the exit. In June 2024 Robinhood agreed to acquire Bitstamp for $200 million in cash, and the deal closed on 2 June 2025. What Robinhood was buying was not primarily technology or users — Bitstamp had roughly 500,000 funded retail customers and about 5,000 institutional clients, generating around $95 million in net revenue in the year to April 2025 — but the regulatory perimeter and the institutional relationships. The acquisition gave Robinhood its first institutional crypto business, complete with crypto-as-a-service, institutional lending, and staking products, and a licensed route into markets outside the United States that would have taken years to build organically. Bitstamp continues to operate under its own brand, styled "Bitstamp by Robinhood," with CEO JB Graftieaux and the existing team joining the acquirer.
The strategic logic became concrete in 2026. On 31 July, Robinhood UK secured FCA registration, and it launched crypto trading for UK retail investors through Bitstamp UK Ltd — sitting alongside stocks, options, futures, and stocks-and-shares ISAs in a single Robinhood app. That is precisely the thesis the $200 million was meant to fund: a US broker using an acquired European entity's licences as the legal machinery for international expansion, compressing what Robinhood's crypto chief estimated at eighteen months to two years of regulatory work.
For anyone assessing Bitstamp today, the honest framing is that it is no longer an independent European exchange. It is the regulated infrastructure layer of a US-listed broker's international crypto strategy, and its future product direction is set in Menlo Park rather than Ljubljana or Luxembourg. That is a good outcome for a company that spent fourteen years surviving cycles that killed most of its peers, and it removes the counterparty question that hangs over independent exchanges. But it also means the European crypto landscape has one fewer independent venue — a pattern visible across this directory, from Tink to Visa to Featurespace to Visa: the European companies that built regulatory credibility have generally ended up owned by American acquirers who wanted exactly that.