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In the beginning of this week I heard that India just banned many exchanges, so bye bye Binance, MEXC, and others for the Indian people. And we from North America can welcome Indian people to suffer with us in finding a way around to trade tokens, especially Hive. When I started at Hive I still got access to Binance exchange since the exchange exited Canada only in September last year, after some federal regulations regarding stablecoins trading to be more controlled. Before that, it was difficult already to buy new tokens in Binance since the credit card providers here weren't allowed to be used to buy cryptocurrency.

The only way to add FIAT to cryptocurrencies is usually by e-transfer ( a method of bank transfer using someone's e-mail or phone number), which Binance hasn't had since I started in Hive. After Binance was gone, we continued having Coinbase and Kraken as the world-renowned crypto exchanges. In addition, we also have some smaller ones, like Bitbuy and Coinsmart (nowadays merged, so it is owned by the same company). Those crypto exchanges trade a relatively small number of crypto coins. A little bit more recently Wealthsimple, a known investments app/website in Canada, started to trade as well some top traded coins, but I don't recommend them, the fees aren't good and I just deposited some money with the promise of receiving 5$ with my first buy and we have a hold of 5 business day until we can withdraw the crypto to another wallet, I was going to use this money at hive but I had to wait this 5 business day. But for me, the best solution for buying crypto in Canada for now is called Shakepay. 

My PrintScreen from Shakepay app

Shakepay and current crypto trading recommendation in Canada for Hive

Shakepay is an app focused more on Bitcoin, after some time they introduced also the option to buy Ethereum, but the environment is around BTC. I installed the app, mostly to farm satoshis a long time ago, the creators had a nice idea, if you enter the app and shake once a day you progressively get satoshis depending on how frequently you don't miss a day. In the past, the first day of shaking was 100 satoshi and some people never forgot shaking one day for more than a year. I always forget I think my maximum was 90 consecutive days, in which I was receiving around 400 satoshis a day If I remember well. Of course, they changed a bit the policies behind the shaking. First, the initial prize was reduced from 100 to 50 satoshis and now if you don't move your BTCs, buy/send/withdraw your daily prize falls to a constant value of 21 satoshis, but once you make a financial movement the daily prizes go up again following the streak table. Currently, I have a 52-day streak and got 320 satoshis today.

But this is just the beginning, the app is good also for transferring out BTC since it covers all the fees of the BTC network. That is good since we have SWAP.BTC at hive-engine and in the past was the way to transfer crypto to Binance and buy Hive. In the past the app allowed me to transfer any quantity of BTC, so last year I made 10$ worth of transferring without paying any BTC fee in the network. They changed a bit now, the minimum is 0.001 BTC to transfer out from Shakepay, which corresponds to the last time I transferred around 50 CAD. The problem of transferring BTC into a hive-engine bridge is that SWAP.BTC market is ruled by bots and it is pretty difficult to get the same market price. In addition that, if you want to power up or trade HIVE for HBD you still need to withdraw it to your main wallet using one of the multiple bridges at Hive, the ones with the lowest fees always lack liquid HIVE.

Another option is transferring BTC and converting it to HIVE using a swap tool, like Simple Swap (https://simpleswap.io/). Simple Swap is very easy to use, you don't need to register unless you want their rewards system which can give you some extra satoshis depending on the amount of points (internal token SWAP) you have. You just add the input of BTC or any other token, the token output which can be HIVE adding the destination wallet. After that, it gives you the address where you transfer BTC or any other token, and done. However, it has some embedded fees that it makes a bit challenging regarding that. However, withdrawing BTC from Hive is challenging since the way back will get the regular BTC network fees, either I transfer from the Hive-engine bridge or using Simple Swap. For the way back I would use some other token such as SWAP.LTC, since LTC has lower transferring fees, but then the recipient would be mainly Coinbase or Kraken. Recently I withdrew money from Coinbase to my bank account and it hurt me because they charge 1 CAD for each e-transfer, maybe I will check if Kraken is different from withdrawing. 

V4V.app and the lightning network 

Recently Hive released an internal transfer of BTC through the lightning network, called V4V app (https://v4v.app/) which is a 2nd layer of payments in the BTC network. The lightning network is very fast and I noticed that the app is already receiving and sending BTC to external lightning network addresses. I have been following @brianoflondon updates related to the app through Twitter and it is amazing. I installed today the MUUN wallet on my cellphone, which is a BTC lightning network wallet that can receive and send also BTC to non-lightning wallets as well. So I can send BTC through the MUUN wallet without any fees and send BTC to V4V using the lightning network. There it could be converted directly to Hive or HBD, from what I understand, I am still going to do the test. The only pity is that Shakepay doesn't have a lightning address yet so I can't do that more directly also the way around is still not good, since I would pay the regular BTC fees when transferring BTC from MUUN wallet through the regular network. I think the way around would be transferring to Kraken which already has a lightning address to receive BTC. 

 My PrintScreen from a receive request from V4V app

So going back to my initial paragraph, I hope that my new friends around the world who just got their options reduced maybe they can see some light in this post. For sure they won't have Shakepay available, since this is only available in Canada, but my tip is to test all the possibilities. Try using the still permitted exchanges, or any trading available. I heard that in Argentina you can buy BTC directly from physical traders that accept cash and they send you to a BTC the money. I am pretty excited about the possibility of a connection between Hive and BTC lightning network, for sure that will similarly solve problems for those in the US. I would love to thank the developers of V4V.app for making this possible. So I am curious to see how you guys are dealing with your workaround in your countries with exchange limitations. And maybe there is some other better way in Canada that I am not aware of. Let me know in the comments. 

You can visit also my blog in Hive at: http://www.peakd.com/@gwajnberg