How to Track Crypto You Bought in Robinhood, Revolut or Cash App

You bought bitcoin in the app you already had open. It was three taps, there was no key management and no seed phrase, and that was the whole appeal. Now you want it counted alongside everything else you hold, and you have discovered that the tracker offers a connection for a hundred exchanges you have never used and nothing at all for the one you actually bought through.

That is not an oversight. For most of these apps there is nothing to connect to, and the sooner you accept that the sooner you get a portfolio total you can trust.

Which of these apps actually has an API?

Robinhood, and that is close to the end of the list.

Robinhood launched a crypto trading API for US customers, with credentials generated through a desktop web portal and requests signed with a key pair. It exists, it is documented, and it is real. It is also built for people running trading strategies rather than for read-only integrations, and its credentials do not come with the permission checkboxes an exchange gives you. On a proper exchange you tick read, leave trading and withdrawal switched off, and the venue enforces that a read-only key cannot move funds. Robinhood's crypto credentials are not scoped that way, so connecting one to a third-party service is a different decision from connecting a read-only exchange key, and it deserves more thought rather than less. Read-only API keys sets out what that distinction actually buys you, and is it safe to connect an exchange answers the trust question underneath it.

Everywhere else the answer is simply no. Revolut publishes APIs for business fiat accounts and payments; crypto positions are not part of them. PayPal's developer platform is a merchant payments platform, not a way to read your own balance. Cash App's developer surface is about accepting Cash App as a payment method. Venmo has no public API at all. N26 and Trade Republic have none.

There is a structural reason worth understanding, because it explains why this is unlikely to change quickly. Open banking rules in Europe and the UK force banks to expose payment accounts to licensed third parties. They do not cover investment products, and they do not cover crypto. A neobank has a legal obligation to let an approved app read your current account and no obligation whatsoever to let anything read your bitcoin. Add to that the fact that most of these apps do not hold the crypto themselves — they route it through a custodian or a partner exchange — and the incentive to build a public holdings API disappears entirely.

Can I move the crypto out, or is it stuck?

This varies more than anything else on the list, and it is worth checking for your specific app rather than assuming, because providers change it.

Cash App supports bitcoin withdrawals to an external wallet, including over Lightning in most jurisdictions. It also supports exactly one crypto asset, so whatever you hold there is a single position. PayPal allows transfers out to external wallets after an extra verification step, with weekly caps, and Venmo added the same capability using the same underlying plumbing, which is why you can move balances between the two. Revolut supports sending to external addresses for certain assets on certain networks, with the supported list shorter than the list you can buy. Robinhood supports crypto transfers in and out.

Then there are the ones that do not. Trade Republic states it directly: sending and receiving crypto is not possible on the platform. Several bank-style apps that offer crypto through a partner work the same way, letting you buy, sell and sometimes swap while the asset never leaves the provider's books. Some brokerages route through a regulated custodian and do permit withdrawal; others in the same shape do not. The only reliable method is to read the provider's own help pages, and to do it before you have a large position rather than after.

How do I track a holding that will not sync?

By entering it yourself, which is less painful than it sounds and more accurate than the alternative of leaving it out.

A manual position needs four things: the asset, the quantity, what you paid, and when. The price then updates on its own, because the tracker is pricing the asset rather than reading your account. What does not update is the quantity, since nothing is syncing it, so the discipline is to edit the position whenever you buy or sell rather than at the end of the year. Adding a manual position covers the mechanics and the edge cases.

The acquisition price is the part people skip, and skipping it is what produces a portfolio that claims you are up 400% on a position you bought last month. A holding entered with no cost basis is treated as if it cost nothing, so the entire market value shows as profit. Cost basis vs. market value explains why the two numbers answer different questions and how a missing basis corrupts both.

For backfilling history, use the app's own export. Every one of these providers gives you statements or a transaction download, partly because tax authorities require it, and pulling a year of buys from a CSV beats reconstructing them from memory. Exporting your data covers what to keep and why the export matters more than the connection.

One habit makes this sustainable: update the manual position in the same minute you make the purchase, while the app is still open and the price is still on screen. A portfolio maintained that way stays within a rounding error of correct indefinitely. A portfolio you promise to reconcile later drifts until you stop believing it, which is the real failure mode described in why your portfolio balance is wrong.

What does it mean to own crypto you cannot move?

Mechanically, it means you hold an entitlement rather than an asset.

When you can withdraw, the crypto is yours in the sense the technology intends: you can move it to a wallet you control, hold it through the provider's problems, use it on-chain, or take it to a venue with better pricing. When you cannot withdraw, what you own is a claim recorded on the provider's ledger that tracks the price of the asset. The price exposure is genuine. The ownership is conditional on the provider continuing to exist, continuing to offer the product, and continuing to serve your country.

That last clause is not hypothetical. Providers exit the crypto business, and when they do, customers with transferable holdings move them somewhere else while customers without that option are given a window to sell. Selling on someone else's schedule is a materially worse position than moving on your own.

It also concentrates two exposures into one relationship. Your crypto position and your banking or brokerage relationship live in the same place, subject to the same account freeze, the same compliance review and the same outage. Anyone who has spent time thinking about custody arrives at the same observation, which is why tracking a hardware wallet exists as a topic at all, and why tracker vs. exchange portfolio is worth reading if your instinct is to let each venue show you its own slice.

None of this makes the convenient route wrong. Buying in an app you already trust is how a very large number of people got their first exposure, and a small position you actually made is worth more than a perfect custody setup you never got round to. What is worth avoiding is the mistake of not knowing which kind of holding you have.

The test takes two minutes: open the app, find the send or transfer option, and see whether it exists. Then write down what you hold, enter it as a manual position with the price you paid, and let the number sit alongside your wallets and exchanges where you can see all of it at once. If it turns out you cannot move it, you have not lost anything today. You have just learned something you would rather not learn during a week when everyone is trying to move at the same time.