Tim Hortons now Offers #Bitcoin

That's a click bait and I hope it did what it intended to do i.e., to trick you.

Today was -21C when I went outside to shop for a random item I needed for breakfast. It was so cold, I had to get the double double for the Mrs. I make my own coffee most of the times coz I am a miser when it comes to spending :P

Well, I went through a drive thru- of course and ordered a double double.They are so efficient that they gave me the drink right after 10 seconds at another window. I paid and came back home. There is nothing special but I received 2 cents worth of Bitcoin in return.

This is a service for Canadians provided by a Canadian company that is growing fast. I have written a couple of articles on #shakepay and how they are working to create an efficient platform for Canadians to buy and sell BTC and ETH.

Shakepay allows users to have a prepaid VISA card and offers cashback on Bitcoin.

I have been using this service for more than a year. In addition to cashbacks, the company allows users to earn sats by shaking your phone. That’s how they got their name- Shake and Pay.

The cashback I received on my Tim Hortons coffee is a very small amount. Nevertheless, it allows me to collect sats on the purchases I would do anyways. The 2% cash back the company offers now on anything and everything is much better than other 1% offers from the legacy bank anyway. I select stores when I use my Shakepay card as there are credit cards that offer 4% cash back on groceries.

I wish Shakepay would do the same for groceries and gas. One day.

The first thing my phone chimes in every morning is to remind me to shake my phone for a couple of hundred sats. It’s a fun gamification that Shakepay did to make sure they have Canadians using their app at least once a day.

This is the app where I buy BTC every two weeks. It is super easy to transfer money and the purchase is fast. They also have given options to move BTC and ETH to wallets. All in all, a good experience. They charge more to buy BTC but manage to offset the price with additional services they have.

The payment system

It looks like crypto payment gateways will have huge impacts on the market going forward. The bitcoin community always advocates the lightning network as a p2p payment system. There are millions of other payment systems trying to compete for attention be it wechat, alipay, twitter, facebook or any other platform out there. Even, hive has its own payment system hivepay.io

In this emerging market, Shakepay is doing well to merge the legacy system and the crypto frontier. There are other firms like Wealthsimple in Canada that are trying to do the same. I am not sure which one of these two will manage to come out as a bigger firm and platform but it is heartening to see the work is happening to meet the end goal.

The more I write about the app, the more I feel like a fanboy. I should tag the Shakepay twitter team while posting it.

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