This week brings a lot of fintech news to the Bitcoin space with exchanges expanding, getting venture capital, and linking up with financial services.

Kraken is growing and has officially launched in Canada; Coinbase announced an investment from Reventure, a major Australian VC firm; and itBit Trust Company LLC partnered with Call Levels Pte. Ltd., a market monitoring and alerting app service. On the ecommerce side, Bitnet teamed up with Computop to bring bitcoin processing to an even larger audience of merchants and retailers. And on the crowdfunding angle: Bitcoin crowdfunding equity siteBnkToTheFuture Ltd. announced exceeding $10 million in total invested funds.

The BitTorrent protocol is getting a bit of joy from Bitcoin with the JoyStream client which incentives seeding with micropaments and from Coinado, a cloud-streaming BitTorrent privacy service, which now accepts bitcoins for subscription fees.

This and more in this Bitcoin Weekly.

Kraken bitcoin exchange officially launches in Canada

Kraken has officially launched in Canada and now allows users in Canada to exchange bitcoins for Canadian dollars. This launch follows a partnership with Vogogo Inc., a Calgary-based payment processor.

“We see a lot of opportunity for Kraken in Canada,” says Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, “and we’re counting on Vogogo’s expertise in risk management and payment processing to make it possible for Canadians to move their dollars safely and efficiently.”

Through the partnership with Vogogo, Kraken will be offering both Interac and EFT payments in Canadian dollars. Interac deposits will normally be credited within a few minutes so clients can start quickly.

Bitnet and Computop team up to bring bitcoin to merchants

San Francisco-based Bitnet, a payment processor that has repeatedly made it into the Bitcoin Weekly [1, 2], recently announced a partnership with Computop, an international payment service provider with more than 3,000 retailers internationally—which includes Samsung and Fossil. Through this partnership, Bitnet seeks to bring simple, secure bitcoin processing to Computop’s merchant client base.

Last year, Bitnet raised $14.5 million in Series A, and this year, Bitnet integrated with Japan’s largest e-commerce provider Rakuten, Inc. This alliance with Computop will add even more merchants and retailers to Bitnet’s already broad stable.

“We recognize that the bitcoin ecosystem is growing throughout the world and are excited to be the first European PSP to partner with Bitnet to enable merchants to accept payments in bitcoin,” said Ralf Gladis, CEO of Computop.

Gladis continued to stress that the partnership would give its merchants a safe and simple way to access “this evolving payment method,” and that it means merchants will have a process that is “smooth and risk free.”

Bitcoin equity crowdfunding site BnkToTheFuture exceeds $10 million in funds

London-based Bnk To the Future Ltd., a bitcoin and blockchain equity crowdfunding site, has passed $10 million in funds.

BnkToTheFuture is an equity crowdfunding platform that gives users a chance to invest in private companies and supports investments made in Bitcoin. The company also caters exclusively to companies working in the Bitcoin technology space.

SiliconANGLE’s Duncan Riley reports that BnkToTheFuture famously helped raise $1.8 million for ShapeShift AG, a login-less cryptocurrency exchange launched by Erik Voorhees. And that Bitcoin blockchain-based asset tracking company, Factom Ltd., received $1.1 million in pledges in its first week.

As interest in Bitcoin and blockchain-based technologies continues to soar, BnkToTheFuture appears to be well-positioned for the equity crowdfunding market. While crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indigogo provide a coalescence of community and funds; equity crowdfunding involves an investment from pledges that may produce equity once the project launches, which provides returns on the investment.

Major Australian VC firm Reinventure invests in Coinbase

Coinbase just announced that a major Australian venture capital firm, Reinventure Group Pty Ltd, invested in the Bitcoin financial services company. The amount of the investment was not announced, however, Reinventure boasts over $50 million invested in Australian technology ventures.

This move leads broad speculation that Coinbase is making a move into Australia.

The statement from Coinbase also says the company now has a line to one of the largest banks in the world via Reventure:

“One of Reinventure’s primary objectives is to create opportunities between its portfolio companies and Westpac, Reinventure’s largest investor and one of the top 15 largest banks in the world.”

TorrentFreak: How JoyStream changes BitTorrent with bitcoin incentives

Last week, Bitcoin Weekly wrote a short highlight about the BitTorrent client JoyStream, which seeks to use bitcoin micropayments in order to incentivize torrent seeding. JoyStream just caught the attention of TorrentFreak, the preeminent news source for copyright, privacy, and everything related to file sharing.

BitTorrent is a file sharing protocol that uses the power of peer-to-peer networking to quickly transfer files. JoyStream, as described above, is a newly developed BitTorrent client that allows torrent users to use bitcoin micropayments in exchange for bandwidth, the precious resource involved in file transfers.

Developer Bedeho Mender, the founder of JoyStream, told TorrentFreak that BitTorrent functions primarily on a concept of contributing bandwidth for bandwidth by maintaining upload and download ratios. However, not everyone is capable of keeping that ratio (due to low bandwidth or poor connection) and that means some sort of alternative incentive is needed.

Mender explains: “The key is therefore not money, the key is incentives to supply enough bandwidth. Money is just one of many means to try to achieve this, just like we do with other goods.”

Using JoyStream, if you have extra bandwidth and content that people want, then you can receive bitcoin for providing that seed.

Read more of Mender’s insights at TorrentFreak about how JoyStream may revolutionize BitTorrent clients by using bitcoin as an incentive. The client is currently still in alpha, which means it has a long way to go before becoming a stable product, but

Cloud-streaming bittorrent service Coinado accepting bitcoins

While JoyStream sets up a way for people to make bitcoin off seeding torrents, Coinado.io, a cloud-based remote-torrenting service, is taking on the privacy angle and now accepts payments in bitcoin.

Unlike running a local torrent client, Coinado takes the torrent process to the cloud, does the torrenting on Coinado’s cloud servers, and then sends the complete file along to the end user. This is done over an encrypted connection and nothing about the service’s users is passed along to torrent seeds and the final file is streamed to the user from Coinado’s servers.

Coinado’s pricing is $0.05/GB and it runs as a pay-as-you-go service with no monthly fee, no minimum top-up, and the service takes bitcoin payments.

Of course, the catch is that Coinado is for intermediate and advanced users—that is, those who know how to jockey a command line. Although as command line cleints go, it’s extremely easy to set up in just a few commands. Any power user with some basic UNIX or Linux command line experience will likely find it a breeze to execute.

Currently Coinado only uses public trackers, private torrent trackers are not supported.

For more information, visit Coinado.io’s website.

Call Levels partners with itBit to add Bitcoin to free market data tracking app

Call Levels is a real-time financial monitoring and notifications service with a free app for iOS and Android. Ordinarily this service only provides information on forex and stock markets, but recently startup Call Call Levels Pte Ltd. partnered up with itBit Trust Company LLC to add Bitcoin to the list of tracked markets.

itBit is one of the first U.S. regulated Bitcoin exchanges, including in New York with its infamous BitLicense. The company announced $25 million in series A funding this year in May along with regulatory approval to take customers in the U.S. itBit also boasts a partnership with Bloomberg, which uses the exchange to deliver tracking data to over 320,000 subscribers.

Call Levels is a startup launched a few months ago and its only product is the Call Levels market monitoring app. In partnership with itBit, Call Levels iOS and Android apps now allow professional traders to set monitoring alerts for particular Bitcoin price points. Interested users can download the app from Google Play and the Apple App Store—it will also run on the Apple Watch.

photo credits: via reddit member huevos_de_acero; and Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)