Oooooh Canada, land of free healthcare and liberal pot laws. If you weren’t so damn cold and your people so annoyingly polite, I’d consider moving there.
Those issues don’t seem to bother Coinbase however, as the company has announced that they have opened operations for Canadian citizens all across the great white north, giving them access to CAD/BTC market pairs.
Making the announcement on their blog today, Coinbase is waiving its retail conversion fees for a short time. According to Financemagnates.com Coinbase is partnering with Canadian based payment processor Vogogo, which will handle all the compliance issues while allowing Canadian customers to buy and sell bitcoin directly from their bank account. Vogogo recently received over 12.5 Million in funding and has reportedly worked with other cryptocurrency exchanges in Canada in the past.
Coinbase’s blog reads in part:
“We’re pleased to announce the expansion of Coinbase services to Canada. As of today, our customers in Canada can buy and sell bitcoin with CAD using our Buy/Sell service, as well as trade the BTC/CAD currency pair on Coinbase Exchange.”
While the Vogogo partnership isn’t mentioned specifically in their blog, we were able to independently confirm it with a representative of Coinbase, as well as Vogogo’s press release.
Coinbase is available now in 27 different countries, mostly in Europe and North America. To help celebrate their expansion into Canada, the company is offering a $1,000 bitcoin award for the team that best uses their API at the upcoming Hack the North Hack-a-thon at Waterloo University.
We will keep tabs on Coinbase’s expansions going forward.