Today I'm going to be going over all of Canada's major cryptocurrency exchanges. All these exchanges allow CAD deposits and a CAD / BTC pairing (with one exception), and most offer multiple other cryptocurrencies other than just Bitcoin, such as Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash.
QuadrigaCX
QuadrigaCX, Known more commonly as Quadriga, they are Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trade volume which accepts CAD deposits & processes CAD withdrawals to and from your bank account. They're sitting at a 24-hour CAD/BTC volume of 1771 BTC. That's not very high compared to some of the bigger USD/BTC markets, but pretty high by Canadian standards. They have the best liquidity you can find if you're not willing to convert your CAD fiat to another larger fiat currency like USD or EUR. You'll have to go through their verification process if you want to deposit or withdrawal fiat, and that takes a while, typically 2-3 weeks as of late. They offer BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH & BTG.
Trading, Deposit & Withdrawal Fees
0.5% Maker & 0.5% Taker on fiat-crypto pairings.
0.2% Maker & 0.2% Taker on crypto-crypto pairings.
No Crypto Deposit or Withdrawal Fees
Fiat Deposits Fees & Limits
Fiat Withdrawal Fees & Limits
Thoughts and Conclusion
Their fees are high, no doubt about it. 0.5% trading fees are about as high as they come on exchanges. However, it's worth noting that many brokers and places which offer to sell bitcoin who may not have any official trading fees in some cases, can make that fee up in other ways. What's worse is their funding/deposit options. Back when I started, Quadriga was willing accept wires for amounts as low as $1000 and charged only a 0.5% funding fee for it. However, now they have a 100k minimum deposit for wire transfers, and have a 1% fee associated with it - a high fee and a minimum far too high for most people. All the other options are in the 2% range. If you're only putting in a couple thousand dollars, that's not such a big issue ($40 funding fee on $2000), but if you're funding say $50k, paying $1k is incredibly costly. To Quadriga's credit, they have some very good withdrawal options; free EFT's and bank wires should you want to get fiat out of the exchange. Also, they have no crypto withdrawal fees which is pretty rare frankly; they incur fees themselves when clients elect to pull their crypto out of the exchange wallet, but don't pass those fees on to their clients.
Quadriga's customer support isn't good. But frankly, pretty much all cryptocurrency exchanges have a level of customer support that ranges between lackluster and horrendous, so get used to it. Their higher funding fees are somewhat warranted giving the unwillingness of Canadian banks to work with cryptocurrency exchanges as banking partners, but it still makes doing business with them difficult when cheaper options exist.
CoinSquare
Coinsquare is the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in Canada by volume, with their BTC/CAD volume coming in at 1179 BTC in the past 24 hours. Coinsquare used to lag pretty far behind Quadriga, but has caught up quite a bit given that Quadriga can only expand so fast.
Trading Fees, Deposit & Withdrawal fees
0.1% Maker & 0.2% Taker fee
No Crypto Deposit Fees
Very high Crypto Withdrawal Fees! Coinsquare does not tell you how much it will do you to withdraw a given cryptocurrency until you have crypto on their platform in your account. This is not transparent at all. They used to provide this information on their old platform, but it's no longer posted nor publicly available. I am unable to tell exactly what their crypto withdrawal fees are as I don't have any on the exchange myself, but based on past experience I would assume their withdrawal fees still incredibly high. At one point I recall their ETH withdrawal fee being in the $40 range when the underlying network cost was only roughly $0.10. I've also seen BTC withdrawal fees over $100. Coinsquare considerably pads their withdrawal fees on top of the underlying network transaction costs.
Fiat Deposit Fees & Limits
Fiat Withdrawal Fees & Limits
Thoughts and Conclusion
Coinsquare's customer service is marginally better in my opinion. You can expect your verification to happen faster as well. While their trading fee is reasonable, even on the low end I'd say their fees more than make up for it, making them just as expensive, probably even more expensive than Quadriga; they have fiat withdrawal fees which Quadriga doesn't have. They are also not transparent with their crypto withdrawal fees, a huge no-no in my opinion. On the plus side, they have a few more cryptocurrencies than Quadriga. Besides BTC, ETH & LTC, they have BCH, DASH, DOGE & they have plans to add XRP.
Ntrust
Ntrust isn't as well known as the former two, but I've had very good experiences with them so wanted to mention them. They started out as a remittance company that helped people send money overseas, mostly to the Philippines. But back in May 2017 they decided to switch gears and became a place where people could easily buy & sell cryptocurrency from their website. They claim to be a cryptocurrency exchange, however, I disagree with this assertion and do not believe they are an exchange at all but rather a broker. This is because they have no order book. You buy or sell at whatever they say the buy/sell price is (just like Coinbase). Since a buy order isn't being matched with a sell order on their platform, I don't see how you could call this a cryptocurrency exchange.
Trading Fees, Deposit & Withdrawal Fees
They claim to have no 'trading fees', but it's not really a fair statement given that they have no buy/sell orderbook. Rather they have embedded a margin into the stated buy/sell prices. Based on my calculations, between the difference in the buy vs sell, their trading fee appears to be roughly 2%. Obviously this might seem a bit high, but if they're a broker rather than an exchange, the fee is actually quite low relatively speaking to other brokers (e.g. an ATM) where fees can run up to 10%.
No Crypto Deposit Fees
No Crypto Withdrawal Fees
Free Funding Options
Free Withdrawal Options
Quick verification (approx 24 hours)
Thoughts and Conclusion
This cryptocurrency exchange, or rather broker, is one I highly recommend to newcomers. It's extremely easy to use, perhaps too easy, and has a very clean and well designed UI. There's really only 2 downsides I can see to Ntrust. First, their 2% fee is higher than what you can find on many other exchanges. If you're funding a couple thousand dollars, that's not a problem. For funding significantly larger amounts, it's not as good of an option. Also, they only offer 2 cryptocurrencies; BTC and BCH. For that reason, when you buy BTC, it's best to withdraw it and transfer to Binance/Bittrex/Cryptopia if you want to buy other cryptocurrencies such as Ripple or Ethereum.
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Kraken
So Kraken isn't a Canadian exchange as they're based in Japan, but they do offer a BTC/CAD pairing, accept CAD deposits, and handle CAD withdrawals. You will however need to wire your funds over to their Japanese bank account. Kraken has the added benefit of offering more cryptocurrencies than anyone else on the list. Offerings include XMR, XLM, XRP, REP, ICN, ZEC, and others in additional to the more regular offerings.
Trading Fees, Deposit & Withdrawal Fees
0.16% Maker & 0.26% Taker (lower rates if trading volume over $50k USD /month)
No Crypto Deposit Fees
Minimal Crypto Withdrawal Fees (roughly in line with underlying network cost, varies by currency)
No Fiat Deposit Fee (however there may be an intermediary bank which takes a fee from the wire)
$10 Flat fiat withdrawal fee
Thoughts and Conclusions
Kraken's low fees make them more ideally suited if you're wanting to fund or withdraw larger sums of money (10k+) and also a great place to buy a wide variety of altcoins. However, there are a bunch of drawbacks to Kraken.
- Trading volume isn't as high for the BTC/CAD pairing. Their volume has increased over the past 6 months, but not nearly as fast as Quadriga & CoinSquare. Once you have your BTC though, you'll have no problem finding liquidity to trade it for other currencies like Stellar (XLM)
- Verification takes VERY long. At least 2-3 weeks if you're able to get verified at all
- There have been reports of Kraken taking a very long time to credit your account after you wire funds in (3 weeks +)
- Customer Service is incredibly poor
- Platform/Servers always having capacity issues. Developers have done a poor job trying to scale it to handle more traffic, which is why so many people have left.
Einstein Exchange
Einstein Exchange is one of the newest exchanges in Canada, having opened late in 2016. Immediately when they opened, they were completely flooded with signups & new customers. They didn't even come close to being able to cope with all the demand and customer problems that they encountered. If you check online, you'll find some people who had good experiences, and some people who had experiences so bad, police were called who ended up showing up at their Vancouver office. In my opinion, there was certainly no malicious intent on Einstein's part, they just bit off way more than they could chew. Their platform was still in beta with some bugs, and they did their best to help out their customers. If you were in Vancouver, you could go to their office in person, and they would easily and quickly fix whatever issue you had. Those that couldn't go to their office, and had no option except to email/call them, tended to have a lot more problems that weren't getting resolved. Einstein offers quite a few cryptocurrencies including XRP, DASH & LTC, and combined with their lower fees can make them a pretty good option.
Trading Fees, Deposit & Withdrawal Fees
Their fees are extremely low, making them a much better option price wise than Quadriga or Coinsquare.
Thoughts and Conclusion
One thing you should know is that even though they are Canadian and accept CAD, there is no trading pairs with CAD. Rather, when they receive your funds, they convert it to USD at the mid-market rate. Frankly this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I realize BTC/USD is a much more popular pairing than BTC/CAD, but converting everything to/from USD first only complicates things more. I was active on Einstein almost as soon as they launched and I must admit I was surprised how good their liquidity and volume was. The buy/sell rates weren't far off from the rates were on much larger exchanges. However, I strongly suspect they filled their order book on the sell side with their own funds to help improve liquidity. It's fairly common for exchanges to do this when starting out actually getting buyers and sellers active on a platform is a bit of a chicken and egg game. Buyers don't want to use it unless there are enough sellers and sellers don't want to use it without enough buyers. So exchanges frequently put their own trades on their sell book to help increase volume initially.
One major issue Einstein has is that their platform UX/UI is pretty bad. Their accounting system is horrendous. Lots of crucial information about orders placed and orders executed isn't available nor listed. Orders frequently get filled for infinitesimally small amounts. Overall, I wish Einstein had taken more time to fix all their bugs on their platform before launching, and then do the roll out slower, limiting the number of registrations. I'm hoping their platform will have improved in a few months, and then I'll be back.
EzBtc
Ezbtc isn't a new exchange; they've been around for a little while. But their volume & liquidity is incredibly poor. Only about 20 BTC/day in volume. Spreads on their site are often massive because of this. Their website was suppose to be upgraded/revamped back in August/September, but as far as I can tell, nothing has changed. It's still pretty ugly, not that well designed, and they only offer 1 cryptocurrency with an order book - Bitcoin. Whoever is responsible for improving their site should be fired frankly. They'd have a lot more volume if they spent some time and money improving their site, but given their very low volume which hardly seems to be increasing at all, it seems to me this exchange is likely to wither and die. It's kind of a shame - their fees are actually pretty decent.
Trading, Deposit & Withdrawal Fees
0.3% Maker & 0.3% Taker
Average crypto withdrawal fees. No crypto deposit fees.
Thoughts and Conclusions
Their fees are pretty low - a free fiat withdrawal option and almost free deposit option. Unfortunately, their low liquidity will likely be a problem for most people. If it's not, give them a try!
Coinfield
Coinfield is the newest cryptocurrency exchange in Canada, having just launched. They currently have registrations closed off until February 15th, after which point they're going to open them again. Coinfield is the only exchange on this list I haven't had the chance to use yet. Their website does appear to be pretty well designed and they are offering a decent number of cryptocurrencies just like Einstein.
Trading Fees, Deposit & Withdrawal Fees
Thoughts and Conclusions
Their fees appear to be on the high end, and there no free deposit or withdrawal options either. Fees are only marginally lower than Quadriga & Coinsquare. They also charge cryptocurrency deposit fees, something none of these other exchanges are doing. But hopefully they've done a better job developing things on the back end and don't fall victim to the same problems Einstein has. And hopefully they will cut of user registration if they are getting more demand than they can handle. I'll be trying it out on Februrary 15th, and will report back with how everything looks.