Best Canadian Crypto Exchanges for 2021

There are a ton of crypto exchanges out there. But very few of them take Canadian dollars, and there's no clear winner because they're less mature than international alternatives.

Unfortunately, Canada's previous largest exchange went down in flames in a lot of drama as the CEO died suddenly and took the cold wallet's passwords to his grave. It was later discovered that they had been emptied out shortly before his death. Canadians lost tens of millions in crypto. So the ecosystem has had to quickly fill the void.

This post will go through some of the main exchanges in Canada, and our suggestions on how to get the best mix of low fees and great features.

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Winner(s)

We'll start with the winner in case you want to bounce here.

Unfortunately, the winner is not clear. Each exchange has major pros and cons. So instead of a simple answer, we'll give you this decision tree.

TL;DR

For people wanting a quick answer:

Use Shakepay to buy BTC and ETH for spot purchases.
Send BTC to Binance to trade, and buy altcoins.
Use Coinberry for automatic recurring purchases and selling your crypto for CAD.

Simple buy and sell

For just buying and selling crypto, these are recommendations:

If you're buying BTC or ETH, use Shakepay. It's simple and has the lowest fees.
If you're selling crypto for CAD, use Coinberry. Their sell price is better than Shakepay, and they don't have withdrawal fees like Bitbuy.
If you want to buy anything but BTC or ETH, buy BTC on Shakepay and send it to Binance to use to purchase the altcoins.

Automatic recurring purchases

Instead of trying to guess the low points, you can set up automatic recurring purchases in order to dollar cost average. It's a great strategy for investors who don't want to look at charts all the time.

These are the best options for recurring purchases:

If you want to do recurring purchases of BTC, Bullbitcoin is the cheapest option. You'll need to send the BTC to an external wallet (which also saves you the transfer fee off the exchange).
If you want to do recurring purchases of other currencies, Coinberry is the best option, although expensive. Coinbase is too expensive and its hard to find a bank card that works.
Alternatively, set yourself reminders to manually purchase BTC/ETH on Shakepay. This will save you ~2% in fees.

Trading

The best trading platform by far is Binance. However, you can't transfer CAD or USD to the platform to purchase (but you could EUR). Instead, Binance is the place to send BTC to after you've purchased it on another platform. You can then keep it as BTC and trade to other alts with it, or what we recommend is selling it for USDT (Tether) which is a stablecoin matched to the USD. You can then use that to trade BTC and other altcoins on a sophisticated exchange.

Analysis

Let's go through the benefits and drawbacks of all the major options for buying, selling, and trading crypto in Canada that lead to the decisions above.

Coinberry

Website: coinberry.com

Benefits

Recurring purchases. Coinberry is one of the few exchanges that support recurring purchases.
Multiple ways to fund your account and purchase: eTransfer, wire transfer, crypto transfer, and credit card and debit card.
No fees for deposits or withdrawals of Canadian dollars.
Supports BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC, BCH, and XLM.
They store their crypto on wallets
Only exchange to be regulated by the government with FINTRAC
On website as well as iOS and Android apps.

Drawbacks

Despite claiming to only charge 0.5% in fees, their prices are about 2-3% higher than other platforms.
The trading platform is extremely limited. They don't track changes in account value over time, the charts they provide are extremely simplistic, there's no margin trading, or stop losses. All you have is buying and selling with market orders and limit orders, and viewing account balances and current value.
They only have 6 cryptoassets. Other platforms have hundreds of cryptoassets.
Fees to transfer crypto is a flat fee. For bitcoin it's 0.0005 which depending on price of BTC is $2-10 to transfer. Other cryptocurrencies are much cheaper however.

Coinbase

Website: coinbase.com

Benefits

Recurring purchases. Coinbase is one of the few exchanges that supports recurring purchases (but their fees are high).
Ability to choose to store assets on a hot wallet or cold wallet
Large selection of cryptocurrencies.

Drawbacks

As a Canadian you can only purchase using debit or credit card. However, most Canadian banks do not allow the purchase of cryptocurrencies with their cards. And even if yours does, you're limited to $250 per day. So making big moves is impossible.
Their fees are higher than all other exchanges on this list..
Their trading platform, although more sophisticated than other Canadian exchanges, it's not nearly as good as competitors like Binance.
Downtime. They have a history of their site crashing whenever there's a spike in trading volume. This is extremely frustrating for traders as these are generally the best times to be monitoring a trade.

Bullbitcoin

Website: Bullbitcoin

Benefits

Lower fees than other platforms. For example, they're about 1% cheaper than Coinberry, although about 1% more than Bitbuy, Shakepay, and Binance.
It's free to send Canadian dollars to Bullbitcoin. Although you're not depositing the money, you're instead buying vouchers for BTC.
Ability to pay anyone, even bills, using BTC. You tell Bullbitcoin who to send Canadian dollars to, and then you send Bullbitcoin the equivalent balance in BTC.
Since you aren't actually storing money or crypto on Bullbitcoin, it's not open to hacks.

Drawbacks

Because you buy a "voucher" instead of "deposit" on their platform, you can't actually withdraw your money. You can either buy BTC and then sell that, or you can wait 6 months until the voucher expires and they'll refund you.
There's only bitcoin. No other cryptoassets.
The UI is pretty confusing and looks like a scam.

Shakepay

Website: shakepay.com

Benefits

No fees for deposits or withdrawals of Canadian dollars.
The fees are very low. Shakepay is cheaper to buy than Coinberry, Bullbitcoin, and Coinbase, and is equivalent to Bitbuy (but has no withdrawal fees).
Well designed, simple app. Takes minutes to onboard.
Multiple ways to fund your account and purchase: eTransfer, wire transfer, crypto transfer, and credit card and debit card.

Drawbacks

The trading platform is extremely limited. They don't track changes in account value over time, there are no charts, there's no margin trading, or stop losses. All you have is buying and selling with market orders and limit orders, and viewing account balances and current value.
You can only purchase BTC and ETH. There are no other cryptoassets on Shakepay.
Often the sell price is not great compared to other platforms. For example, Coinberry can get you a better sell price, but a worse buy price.

Bitbuy

Website: bitbuy.ca

Benefits

Bitbuy has some of the cheapest rates for Canadian exchanges for buying and selling crypto (but you pay for adding and withdrawing Canadian dollars).
They have seven cryptoassets (which is more than Canadian alternatives). They currently have BTC, ETH, LTC, XRP, BCH, EOS, and XLM.
They store their crypto on cold wallets, and their Bitcoin is stored with a third-party with full insurance.
They have a Pro platform which has more sophisticated charts than Canadian alternatives Coinberry, Bullbitcoin, and Shakepay.

Drawbacks

You pay to send and withdraw Canadian dollars to Bitbuy. Below is their fee schedule for adding Canadian dollars to their platform. Wire Transfers are definitely the best deal but the $20,000 minimum is steep. On top of that you'll pay 1.75% to withdraw from the platform.

You can't do recurring purchases to dollar cost average.
It's still fairly simplistic. You can't place stop orders, there's no margin trading, futures, or options.
They still only have seven different cryptocurrencies.
You won't be able to see data like average price, entry price, or unrealized profit or gains in the Express platform.
Their Pro platform's trading volume is low. You can go minutes between trades going through.

Binance

Website: binance.com

This is the only exchange on the list that doesn't support Canadian dollars. But it's one of the best trading platforms in the industry.

Benefits

Really low fees.They only charge about 0.1% for spot trades. They charge 0.5% if you want to buy it from them and not the open market.
A large number of cryptoassets and pairs. There are hundreds of options.
Sophisticated charting tools with an integration with TradingView that gives you a ton of drawing tools and indicators.
Lots of trading types. Lots of trading options that others don't have including: stop orders, as well as margin, futures, and options trading.
Extremely high volume: Binance is one of the most active exchanges.
Privacy: Uyou can trade on Binance without doing identity verification if you only trade crypto.
Security and Insurance: They store their extra crypto on cold wallets, and they put away 10% of all trading fees towards insurance.

Drawbacks

You can't use Canadian dollars. You can't even use US dollars. If you have EUR you can send it there. Instead, you should buy BTC on another exchange and send it to Binance to use to trade with.
No automatic recurring purchases.

Wrapping up

Unfortunately, Canada's exchange market is still maturing, and many of the major players are growing quickly. But for now it's not a simple decision on which to use.

In short, however,

Use Shakepay to buy BTC and ETH for spot purchases.
Send BTC to Binance to trade and buy altcoins.
Use Coinberry for recurring purchases and selling your crypto for CAD.

Best of luck out there.