This week, our team pushed an update to improve the buy and sell rates for all currency pairs on Shakepay.

For context, every time you buy bitcoin on Shakepay we perform an equivalent transaction to cover the trade in our system. When we started, it made sense to perform these trades in Canadian markets because we were transacting to and from Canadian dollars. The resulting rates we provided to you were a function of those we could source ourselves.

There is a downside to this approach. We noticed that when the market moves with great volatility, like it has over the last few weeks, these Canadian markets lack trading volume. This leads to a larger difference between the buy and sell rates (that is, higher bid-ask spreads) which directly affected the buy and sell rates we could offer.

A little over a week ago, we announced on reddit that we were working on lowering this spread for our customers by sourcing rates from more liquid markets trading US dollars. This change has been put into production since early this week and has lead to better and more consistent rates for all our users on Shakepay.

We are continually looking for ways to lower our bid-ask spread and deliver the best rates possible to you. Stay tuned, we have more updates in store.