Readers who read my posts (if any 😛) must know the one Canadian company that I always want to talk about. Yes, it is Shakepay. I engage with the app every day to shake and earn BTC. Because I use their app every day, I get to know what they are up to and how they are progressing.
In the last few months, they have grown tremendously. As per their twitter feed, they have more than 900K users who use their apps regularly. They allow Canadians to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum. Although the spread is not good and they hide their fees and charge within the price of Bitcoins and Ethereum, they have been gaining popularity. One of the reasons of their success is due to the simplicity in onboarding and buying crypto using Canadian banks. The app allows users to connect to their retail banks. The fiat transfer is super-fast and you can buy your coin in a jiffy.
It shows how important it is to have positive user onboarding whenever you are creating a product. The success of a product depends on how users interact with it and how easy and intuitive it is to use the app. I am not promoting the Shakepay app as users must decide themselves which products they want to use based on their need.
The recent growth of Shakepay was also fueled by their new visa card that proides rewards back to users on BTC. I am one of the users of their visa prepaid card. They have not yet shipped the physical card but it can be used for online purchases or using phones at retail counters.
The 44 million New Funding
With all the growth that they saw in 2021, it was inevitable that they would get noticed by a venture capital firm in the US. They announced this new capital funding of 44M yesterday. It is incredible to see the growth of the app. It is adding conviction to the Bitcoin standard. The Bitcoin standard is gaining in popularity and I have been under that bandwagon knowingly or unknowingly. I could have used other credit cards to get rewards in CAD but I decided to go with Shakepay card. That way I immersed myself into an economic standard that is governed by Bitcoin. Although the card uses VISA tech and rely on traditional finance, the BTC standard is being created by the app through rewards. I am glad that I got to experiment with Shakepay.
With the new funding the company received, it was all over the Canadian mainstream news outlets. They dubbed Shakepay a “Bitcoin neo bank”. That’s fancy but also demonstrate the growing popularity of BTC standard. The crypto market is all red today and it may go down or up in the short-term. It is quite obvious that the BTC and blockchain tech will disrupt the traditional finance going forward in one form or the other.