Toronto embraced digital assets sooner than most and is home to more crypto projects than anywhere else in Canada. Contents O
Toronto embraced digital assets sooner than most and is home to more crypto projects than anywhere else in Canada.
Contents
Overview
Crypto culture in Toronto
Where can I spend crypto in Toronto?
Crypto projects and companies in Toronto
Toronto’s crypto controversies
Toronto crypto education and community
Notable crypto figures from Toronto
Overview
The city lies at the center of the so-called Golden Horseshoe, a large urban area around the shore of Lake Erie that 9.76 million people — about a quarter of all Canadians — call home. Consistently rated among the world’s most livable cities, Toronto, much like Vancouver on the west coast, is notable for its ethno-cultural diversity brought on by waves of immigration. It’s within a short flight of the capital Ottawa, as well as Montreal to the north and New York to the south. Toronto is seen as the country’s financial and cultural capital.
Playing home to notable battles between indigenous peoples in the late 1600s, French traders from the mid-1700s and the British later that century, Toronto has seen a lot. In 1834, around the time of a failed rebellion against the British, it was incorporated as Toronto, which was a First Nations name, and the city became a destination for slaves escaping the American South. In the late 1800s, the city became a railway hub. Today, it is served by Pearson International Airport.
As a global hub of business and culture, Toronto resembles a northern version of New York, to the extent that many movies set in New York are filmed in the city due to their similar appearance. Winter weather can be formidable, with freezing rain in 1999 requiring the army to be called in for road clearing. The city is well-known as the birthplace of Ethereum and today hosts a majority of Canada’s blockchain companies.
Crypto culture in Toronto
“Vitalik Buterin, an elongated Toronto young man who looked brainy in a very literal way, had attended Anthony’s first meetup and later brought to him an idea for a blockchain platform he called Ethereum.”
So writes author Ethan Lou in his memoir, Once A Bitcoin Miner, much of which takes place in Toronto. Anthony Di Iorio, an early Bitcoin investor, started a crypto meetup named after his software company Decentral in a “redbrick house in Toronto’s historical fashion district” — this is where the young Buterin walked in with his idea for Ethereum, which is, of course, another story entirely.
With the founding of Ethereum, Toronto cemented its position in the crypto canon. By 2018, Canadian startup blog BetaKit wrote there was a divide in Canada between the areas that embraced the cultural aspects of crypto on one side, and the financial aspects on the other.
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“While Toronto and Waterloo are understood to be lively crypto hubs, Vancouver is known for companies that privilege crypto-collectibles over currency, and blockchain art over tokens.”
This makes sense, considering Toronto is a city oriented primarily toward finance, while Waterloo, the birthplace of BlackBerry, is a tech hub an hour’s drive away. That’s where Buterin attended university briefly and was the home of the author of this article for nearly 20 years.
In 2014, Decentral opened a physical location on the prominent Spadina Avenue, making it and its large Bitcoin sign something of an institution and a way in which Bitcoin touched the lives of average Torontonians. Featuring a Bitcoin ATM, the spot became almost a Bitcoin embassy in the city, hosting meetups and other events.
As a financial hub, Toronto regularly plays host to blockchain conferences including the annual Blockchain Futurist Conference, the largest in the country. In 2022, the event coincided with ETH Toronto. The year also saw the Web3 & Blockchain World summit, AIBC Toronto and the Cardano Summit 2022. A quick browse of Meetup.com will reveal that there are dozens of cryptocurrency-, blockchain- and NFT-themed meetups in the city and surrounding area.
The corporate nature of the city means there is more funding available than in most other comparable destinations, explains Charlie Aikenhead, senior vice president of marketing at WonderFi. And unlike south of the border in the United States, there is a general sense of regulatory certainty, which…
cointelegraph.com