ShakePay

Useful to buy crypto easily!

Shakepay is a Canadian crypto brokerage service that allows you to buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum without paying trading fees. As of May 2021, the service had 600,000 Canadians on the platform. Shakepay is growing rapidly: just two months earlier, it reached 380,000 Canadian users.

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What is Shakepay?

Shakepay was created in Montreal in 2015 by CEO Jean Amiouny and CTO Roy Breidi. Amiouny and Breidi are both graduates of McGill University. Amiouny graduated in 2013, then moved to Dubai as a business analyst for Booz & Company for a year, while Breidi graduated in 2012, then worked in wealth management technology for Morgan Stanley for three years.

The company has received $786,500 in funding since 2015 from Bogaroo, Boost, Box1 and Creative Destruction Lab, according to Crunchbase data.

You can only buy two cryptocurrencies on Shakepay: Bitcoin and Ethereum.

How to buy and sell cryptocurrencies on Shakepay?

To buy cryptocurrencies on Shakepay, you will first need to create an account. Shakepay will first request information about your identity, including your name, address, date of birth and telephone number, and cross-reference some of this data with credit bureau databases.

Shakepay may request additional information, such as a selfie video or photo ID image. Shakepay claims that customer data is kept encrypted and complies with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act of Canada and the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector of Quebec.

Once you have registered, you will need to deposit funds to purchase cryptocurrencies. There are two ways to buy cryptocurrencies on Shakepay. The first is with the other cryptocurrency: you can buy Bitcoin with Ethereum and vice versa. The second is in Canadian dollars, by bank transfer or by Interac transfer.

Shakepay does not charge you for any of these methods, but some deposit methods may still cost you money. Shakepay says Interac e-Transfers should be available within minutes, but some banks are delaying transfers for up to an hour. Wire transfer transactions are limited to $5,000. Wire transfers take 1-2 business days and banks may charge money for sending these transactions.

Shakepay estimates that Bitcoin deposits take 20 minutes to arrive and Ethereum deposits take an hour, but it depends on the network condition - it could take much longer in case of heavy network congestion. Shakepay does not charge for cryptocurrency deposits, but you must pay the necessary "network fees" to send cryptocurrencies between wallets.

Once you've added your funds, it's time to buy your crypto. To do this, click on the “Buy and Sell” button on the main dashboard, then select the currency you want to buy and the currency you want to buy it with. Shakepay will offer you a price. Remember that although Shakepay does not charge for this transaction, this price will likely be more expensive than a price quoted on a regular cryptocurrency exchange, where you are trading with other users rather than the brokerage herself.

To sell, you do the same thing but in reverse. If you sell your cryptocurrencies in Canadian dollars, you can make withdrawals via wire transfers or wire transfers, both of which are free. Of course, you might not want to sell right away. You can do a lot with your cryptocurrencies if you choose to keep them. You can HODL, which stands for “hold” in cryptographic parlance, wait for the price to rise to a point at which you are happy to sell, and bear the risk of it falling.

You can also send your crypto to other friends using their Shakepay username. And finally, you can send your crypto to an external wallet. You might want to do this to put your ETH into a loan protocol or business on another platform, to buy NFT crypto art, or to sell it on another exchange. Shakepay, unlike most other cryptocurrency exchanges, will cover the network fees you typically incur to send cryptocurrencies to other wallets.

What other services does Shakepay offer?

The company also runs a “shake” program, through which you can earn free Bitcoin every day by shaking your phone. These rewards accumulate if you continue to build your streak, from 100 satoshis (Bitcoin's smallest denomination) on day 1 to 1,000 satoshis on day 1,000. Keep in mind that this probably won't make you rich by soon: there are 100 million satoshis for one Bitcoin.

A bigger financial incentive is Shakepay's referral reward, which pays out CA$10 if the person you referred today bought CA$100 worth of Bitcoin or Ethereum within a month of signing up. This reward has sometimes increased to $30 CAD during holidays. The process can be repeated for each person you enroll.

In April 2021, Shakepay announced the Shakepay Card, a Visa card that offers Bitcoin cashback on all purchases. “All bitcoin refunds will be paid to your Shakepay bitcoin balance and will be separate from your Shakepay card balance,” he said in his blog post. shakepay offered a bitcoin debit card years ago, but scrapped it after its issuer “ran into a few issues,” according to Coindesk. In 2018, Shakepay transitioned to the Bitcoin buying and selling services in place today.

In addition to serving individual investors, Shakepay allows select Canadian companies to register. Corporations, partnerships, trusts, and nonprofits are all eligible to apply for business accounts. Companies will need to provide additional information to have their accounts audited, including articles of association, a statement from the board of directors, proof of address, the driving license of the director of the company and a signed document detailing the structure of the company. company shareholding.

Is Shakepay safe and regulated?

Since August 2020, Shakepay has insured the cryptocurrencies it holds in offline storage through a policy issued by Aon and underwritten by Lloyd's of London. This policy covers “most damage, theft and loss of private keys”. Shakepay hasn't disclosed which companies hold its cryptocurrencies, and it's unclear when the cryptocurrencies are sent to "cold" offline storage, but the CEO told Coindesk in August 2020 that most assets are not held very long.

Shakepay has already hired blockchain forensics firm CipherBlade to independently audit its reserves and securities policies. The audit said there was “100% match between transaction data found in backend systems and amounts credited to user accounts” against transactions they tracked on Bitcoin blockchains. and Ethereum and bank account records. The report also found that all cryptocurrencies held in hot and cold wallets (online and offline wallets) "are not at risk of being compromised", in part because Shakepay "performs background checks on all employees working in the company".

Shakepay is registered with FINTRAC as a virtual currency broker and transfer service provider. In Quebec, it is registered with the AMF. It is licensed to do business in all provinces and territories of Canada, even in Ontario, whose securities regulator has cracked down on unregistered exchanges. In a July 2021 update, Shakepay said FINTRAC's new rules that came into effect on June 1, 2021 would mean it could request more information from its customers. However, in the long term, Shakepay expects it to be “able to offer more services to our customers”.

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