03/19/2026
It's with a heavy heart to announce, that I have made the difficult decision to wind down Canadian Bitcoins.
Back in 2010 when I was CPU mining on our webserver CPU cores, generating 50 BTC mining rewards several times a day, nobody could have known or predicted we would end up here 16 years later. Spending weeks on IRC chats trying to find a buyer to sell the mined BTC, and then another week trying to figure out how to transfer the CAD, is what sparked this business. Make it easy for Canadians to Buy and Sell Bitcoin.
Back in 2010-2011 it was next to impossible to buy or sell Bitcoins in Canada. Canadian Bitcoins launched on Canada Day, July 1, 2011, with the goal of making it easy for fellow Canadians to buy or sell Bitcoins. Over the years, we expanded into several other cryptocurrencies as the crypto movement took off, while always being cautious about the perception of new coins, with securities regulators, government agencies and banks.
Since then, regulators have recognized Bitcoins and other virtual currencies as legitimate assets, and opened a whole new world for the traditional finance world to move into the space via ETFs. It is now easy for anyone with a brokerage account to purchase Bitcoin ETFs within their normal accounts and even hold them in tax sheltered accounts (TFSA, RRSP, etc). Any Canadian can now own their slice of the 21 million Bitcoins with very little effort.
However, the acceptance of virtual currencies by governments and government regulators has been a double edged sword for small businesses such as ours. We have always operated as lean small business, employing at our peak only a handful of employees. Our trading volumes have dropped significantly in recent years as more customers move towards more traditional options of investing in virtual currencies, and with our revenues coming purely from trading volume, our revenues have seen a continued decline.
As one of (if not THE) oldest Bitcoin business still in operation from the early days of Bitcoin, its sad to move on and let this piece of history disappear into the archives of the internet. But its time. It's been a wild ride.
Thanks to all our customers who stuck with us over the years, and to all the colleagues, employees and friends we've met along the way.
Our last day of operation will be March 31, 2026. We will stop accepting online payments for purchases at the end of day on Friday March 27th. Purchases in office can continue until end of day March 31.
Sincerely,
James
