Charles Schwab Will Add Solana, Avalanche and Chainlink, Date Unset

Charles Schwab said on Thursday that it will add solana, avalanche and chainlink to Schwab Crypto, the spot trading service it opened to retail clients this spring. The three join bitcoin and ether, which have been the entire menu since launch. Schwab put the timing at "in the coming months" and gave no date. Nothing was said about what the new assets will cost to trade, or whether the custody arrangement changes to accommodate them. No release for the expansion was located on the company newsroom at the time of writing; the announcement reached the trade press directly.

What Schwab Crypto already is

The service opened with bitcoin and ether, which Schwab's own April release described as roughly 75% of crypto market value. Trades cost 75 basis points of the dollar value, or three quarters of one percent. Charles Schwab Premier Bank holds the assets as custodian, with Paxos Trust Company acting as sub-custodian and handling execution. Clients in every US state except New York and Louisiana can use it. US territories and clients outside the country cannot. The same release said Schwab clients already hold about 20% of spot crypto exchange-traded products, which is the demand the firm says it is answering.

The launch date is reported two ways

The Block and Investing.com both date the platform's launch to May 2026. Schwab's own release setting out the launch details is dated 16 April, and the Dallas Morning News wrote that same day about a phased rollout arriving in the following weeks. CoinDesk had reported on 3 April that the firm was aiming at the first half of the year, starting with the two largest tokens. Read together, those accounts describe an April announcement and a rollout that reached clients over several weeks. A single launch date would flatten it.

How big Schwab is depends on who counts

The Block put client assets at about $12 trillion across 39 million active brokerage accounts in its Thursday story. Back in April, crypto.news described a $13 trillion platform serving 38 million clients, and a separate April headline counted 40 million accounts. The numbers come from different quarters and from different definitions of what an account is. They do not reconcile. Every version says the same thing about scale. The three tickers are the news; the size of the firm quoting them is the reason anyone cares.

Nothing has been promised beyond the list

Joe Vietri, who heads digital assets at Schwab, framed the addition as a question of choice.

"With this expansion, clients will have more choices to build a digital asset allocation alongside the investing and banking experience they know and trust at Schwab," Vietri said.

Crypto Briefing carries that sentence clipped after the word "banking"; The Block runs it whole. Investing.com carries a second line from Vietri that the other two leave out, in which the firm "may delay, modify, or withdraw support for any announced asset based on market, regulatory, operational, or risk-related developments." One outlet has that caveat. It is also the only thing anyone has said about the timing.

Solana has had a busy year, with validators cutting slot times to 350 milliseconds in the chain's first such reduction, and asset managers working on its exchange-traded wrapper. Established finance has been building the plumbing around all of it, and Citi opened digital-asset custody earlier this year. What Schwab has not given is a start date, a fee for the three additions, or any figure for what Schwab Crypto has traded since April. Until one of those lands, this is a list of tickers and an open calendar.