Buying Bitcoin in Canada: Coinsquare.io Review

So as usual I'm about 2-3 years late to the hottest financial trend out there today...Which is trading cryptocurrency (aka Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin etc.). I won't explain what "cryptocurrency" is all about, as there's enough information and hype on the web as it is. There are a ton of reviews for the American cryptocurrency exchanges, but it's also nice to have something made in Canada, and this is where I stumbled upon Coinsquare...But the big question is: Are they any good? (not to be confused with Coinbase which is the huge American exchange)

While researching for a decent Canadian cryptocurrency exchange, I had the following in mind:

• User reviews
• Reasonable trading fees
• Reasonable funding fees (something I wasn't necessarily expecting...)

And here is what I found...

• Reviews were relatively sparse, which is partly why I am putting my two cents out there and maybe help someone who is a noob at this cryptocurrency trading stuff.
• The trading fees are pretty standard ranging from 0.2% to 0.4%.
• Some of the funding options, however, caught me off guard, in particular the 5% fee to send money by Interac e-transfer! Ultimately, I went with mailing them a bank draft; which for me strangely enough, turns out to be a faster and less expensive (0.25%) option than e-transfer.

Coinsquare Funding options, click to enlarge...

One thing I didn't have in mind (which in hindsight was a minor mistake) is finding out which coins that are actually tradeable on the Coinsquare exchange. I kind of assumed that the top ten cryptocurrency coins (if not more) would be on there ready to be traded...But sadly that's not the case.

At the time of this writing, Coinsquare only supports:

• Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Dash, Dogecoin, Litecoin and CasinoiCoin.
• Fiat currencies too: CAD, USD, EUR, GBP, AUD.
• Interestingly, they also allow trading in gold and silver XAU and XAG, but I don't know much about trading metals so won't comment any more than that.

The plus side is that it's relatively easy to open an account. Having said that you need to get verified, which means sending things like an government issued ID and a selfie. This is pretty standard verification stuff no matter which exchange you sign up for.

Good for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin trading...But not much more...

In the end, it's an easy to use web site, and makes things less intimidating with a clean simple web site. This is all good, but I really wish they had more coins that you can trade for. Once you get into the cryptocurrency world, you want to go beyond just Bitcoin and Ethereum (no Ripple, Monero or NEO). So if you really wanted, say Ripple coins, what you can do is open another account on a different exchange and then send your coins to it. But, if you just want to stick to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin then this seems to be a solid exchange. As usual, I'll keep this post updated with my experience as time goes on, but so far so good.

Update: Withdrawals

Just withdrew some coins from Coinsquare to another exchange and discovered that the costs are not trivial:

• Withdrawing Ethereum (ETH) will cost you 0.00500000 ETH (which at today's price is about $2.40 CAD).
• Withdrawing Bitcoin (BTC) will cost you 0.00250000 BTC (which at today's price is about $26 CAD).
• Withdrawing Litecoin (LTC) will cost you 0.02000000 LTC (which at today's price is about $2 CAD).

Just adding more facts to consider...