The past 6 months as a Canadian using the Crypto-Ecosystem has been hell.
Another shot fired
The latest shot fired by the big Canadian banks came today; as one of the country's only FIAT exchange is being forced to close down it's FIAT operations. The notice came to NTrust clients earlier today,
As of February 6, 2018, nTrust will no longer be able to support deposits or withdrawals in CAD. If you would like to Add Funds to your account, or Withdraw to your bank account, please initiate the transaction on or before February 6.
For more information you can take a look at this reddit thread.
We are under attack, big banks have declared war
The official reddit account for the biggest CryptoExchange (QuadrigaCX) messaged the following
A short while ago, one of our Canadian payment prcoessors (Billerfy), that usually handles outgoing bank wires for us indicated that a banking issue had caused a batch of wires to fail. Basically their bank decided that they would no longer work with a company that dealt with Bitcoin companies (an increasingly common issue in Canada). Due to this, it caused a delay and we had to resend a series of wires through our other payment processor, Finconnnect.
If you are waiting for a wire withdrawal, it will arrive shortly.
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Where else can we go?
The banks have made it nearly impossible to participate in Crypto in Canada. In addition to banks blocking wire transfers there are widespread issues with individuals trying to purchase crypto via Credit Cards and other electronic methods leaving us with extremely few options and days and days of delays and uncertainty.
Currently Coinbase is a safe bastion for us to use, however there are incredibly low buying limits and we can barely use GDAX due to the Crypto-USD restriction. Quadriga has faced increasing amount of issues with both Funding and Withdrawal. Their banking partners change rules every week which has caused an insane amount of support issues on top of increasing financial costs. With the support comes impatient customers which have complained to the RCMP (kinda like the FBI in the US) which causes slow-downs for everyone while an investigation is completed.
Finally there's coinsquare and kraken.... CoinSquare is smaller than Quadriga but faces the same banking relationship problems as them and Kraken is uh, Kraken (I wouldn't recommend anyone use it).
To give someone an idea of what it takes for us to actually complete a transaction;
- Initiate a Wire Transfer to QuadrigaCx
- Wait for 2-3 weeks
- Buy Crypto
- Transfer Crypto to another exchange like Bittrex
- Do your trading
When you want to cash out;
- Convert to BTC/BTG/ETH/LTC
- Transfer it to Quadriga
- Withdrawal and wait again 2-3 weeks.
It's incredibly frustrating waiting so long to deploy capital. In 2 weeks the entire market can and does change significantly.
What do you think we can do up here?
I really have no idea what possibly we can do to force banks to let us do what we want with our own money.
what about Bitstamp or Xapo?