Bitbuy’s reputation precedes it — as Canada’s first and largest cryptocurrency trading platform and now as the latest acquisition of Kevin O’Leary–backed platform WonderFi. But just a few years ago, Bitbuy was just a young tech startup that chief operating officer Jordan Anderson left everything and risked it all to build from the ground up.

Bitbuy, formerly known as Monitex Inc., began in 2016 with founders Tommy Dolan, Ademar Gonzalez, Adam Goldman and Jeremy Murray. By 2018, First Ledger Corp., co-founded by Anderson, bought Bitbuy for $330,000 after the former shareholders were parting ways.

“I had the opportunity to basically join from the ground level when there were only four people,” Anderson explains. “It was definitely scary and a huge risk, but I had a pretty strong conviction in cryptocurrency after I had done a lot of research on it while working at Yahoo. That was a big bet that I made on the cryptocurrency space, but also on myself.”

When Anderson was in high school at Northern Secondary School, crypto wasn’t on his mind — it hadn’t even been invented yet. Instead, he says he “struggled” with school until he started playing on Northern’s Red Knights football team.

“I feel like it just gave me more discipline and more regimen,” he says. “I remember my coach at the time said that if I don’t get my marks together, he’d kick me off the team. I think that’s what finally prompted me to work harder in school.”

Anderson studied business at Western University, where he developed his entrepreneurial spirit growing his own painting business.

“I very much had a sales mentality of just going door to door and getting jobs,” he says.

That led to him selling digital advertising products with Yahoo, and he says working at a large tech firm drove him toward wanting to work at a tech startup.

“In the first two years at Bitbuy, a lot of people were interested in crypto and Bitcoin, so I was very much focused on growth,” Anderson says. “Those first two years, 2018 and 2019, there wasn’t much growth. But when the pandemic hit, we started getting a huge influx of new customers.”

A study from Investopedia found interest in Bitcoin surged 90 per cent over the pandemic as investors looked for decentralized market alternatives.

“We were very well positioned for that growth in the sense that we had built a really good product, with our engineering team had set up really good marketing channels,” Anderson says. “And so the past two years we’ve faced a new set of challenges — scaling up the business, building business systems and processes to help automate that so that we rely less on people to process customers and more on technology.”

Anderson says the company has since put some resources into education about cryptocurrency, because he knows the field can be daunting to enter at first. He’s mostly just excited to see how the platform will continue to grow. “I never thought I’d be in the position where I’d be running a 100-person company.”

This post has been updated.