[__ralston3]

There seem to be ample comments discussing the "viability" of crypto trading/tokens, but if I'm Etrade, all I care about are the commissions - to hell with the underlying tech or what it can/can't do. Not even just for BTC, ETH, EOS, etc now, but for the coins to come in the future. Sure, they can have prolonged periods of low volume (even manipulated volume), but when there's a frenzy (e.g., 2016-2018), I imagine that the profit potential on commissions would do wonders for "shareholder value". Combine that with Etrade's namebrand (as mentioned in other comments) experience, and infrastructure, and you've got a gang of traders that would gladly do away with the sketchy/lesser-known exchanges for Etrade (my opinion).

[whttheuuu]

If you're e*trade you'd probably only do it if you saw a long term future for crypto.

[joncrane]

Not necessarily long term. The only criteria is positive ROI. If you can recoup your costs and turn a profit in six months, I'm not sure you give a hoot if the crypto fad dies off in 18 months.

[Traster]

This really isn't correct at all. Firstly, ETrade is probably not planning on significantly growing its engineering force for one project, so it's likely that spending time on a Crypto exchange is going to involve significant opportunity cost taking other projects off their roadmap. Secondly, they don't need positive ROI, they need to keep their margin, so they probably need a 2x ROI minimum, I don't know what the normal margin in their business is. Thirdly, crypto has significant risks that aren't just ROI. You need to think about the increase in KYC checks and the likelihood of market manipulation reflecting poorly on ETrade as a platform.