How Wealthsimple Actually Holds the Crypto I Bought There

I opened Wealthsimple Crypto mostly because it meant one less app on my phone — I already banked and invested there, so buying some ETH in the same place was convenient. It's a non-registered account, which is the first thing worth knowing if you're coming from Trade or the managed portfolios: crypto can't go inside a TFSA or RRSP here, so any gains are fully taxable, not sheltered like the rest of my accounts.

Where the coins actually sit

I'd been treating "cold storage" as a vague reassurance rather than something I understood, so I went and read the actual page. The bulk of client crypto is held offline with regulated custodial partners, with only what's needed for day-to-day withdrawals kept in hot wallets. Each custodial partner carries over $75 million in insurance coverage, and Wealthsimple also has a partnership with Coincover specifically for hack recovery. The legal structure is that the crypto is held in trust — "held by us, owned by you" is how they put it — which matters if you're wondering what happens to your coins if Wealthsimple itself ran into trouble.

None of that makes it CIPF or CDIC protected the way my chequing balance or my TFSA holdings are — crypto assets are explicitly excluded from both. That's not a Wealthsimple-specific gap, it's true of every regulated crypto platform in Canada, but it's the kind of distinction that's easy to gloss over when everything's sitting in the same app. The coin selection itself has grown a lot since I first signed up — it's over 170 now, up from what I remember being a much shorter list.

What staking actually pays

I've got a bit of ETH staked through the platform, and I'd rather be upfront about the numbers than let anyone assume it's a windfall: staking rewards on Wealthsimple range up to about 5% annually depending on the coin, currently available on ETH, SOL, ADA, and DOT, and Wealthsimple takes a cut of whatever the network pays out before it lands in my account. It's genuinely hands-off — no validator to run, no lockup steps I had to figure out myself — but the payout has been modest for the amount I've got staked, and rewards aren't guaranteed the way a GIC rate is.

On fees, trading works out to a tiered percentage — around 2% on Core, 1% on Premium, 0.5% on Generation, with the rate dropping further if you trade enough volume in a rolling 30-day window. It's not the place I'd go for frequent trading given those numbers, but for buying and holding a small crypto allocation without leaving an app I already trust, it's done what I needed. If you're signing up through the link above, that's a $25 welcome bonus on top, on any account you fund — crypto included.