Today Coinbase, one of the leading bitcoin wallets providers in the world, announced the expansion to Canada. Canadian customers can now buy and sell bitcoins with Canadian dollar via Buy/Sell service as well as trade the BTC/CAD pair on Coinbase Exchange, the company’s blog states.

Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, told CoinDesk:

“It's not where we would want to launch first, it's actually where the partners we have to work with are able to work with us first. But certainly Canada has a huge population of people that are interested in bitcoin that didn't have easy ways to buy and sell it.”

To celebrate the expansion of its services to the Canadian market, Coinbase is waving its retail conversion fees till September 6 (23:59 Pacific time).

The company is also sponsoring the Hack the North hackathon at the University of Waterloo. The winners will get $1,000 worth of bitcoins for developing the best way of using Coinbase’s API.

Coinbase exchange offers a secure and easy way to buy and sell bitcoins online. Coinbase services are now available in 27 countries. Since the autumn of 2014, Coinbase expanded to the Netherlands, France, Finland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland and the United Kingdom.

As Coinfox reported earlier, in June 2015, Coinbase launched Instant Exchange, a new service for automatic conversion of bitcoins into a local currency. Among other features, the company supports bitcoin payments for online store purchases using Fold mobile app.

Daria Petushkova