Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody.
My name is Dustin Walper, and I'm the founder and CEO of Newton.co. I will give you a bit of background about us to start.
We're one of the leading Canadian cryptocurrency trading platforms. We make it easy for Canadians to buy and sell over 60 different cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, as mentioned, Bitcoin, Solana, Cardano and many others. We're a great example of a high-growth, Canadian-run business.
Since we founded Newton in 2018, we've grown to have over 450,000 customers across Canada, with over 100 highly skilled Canadian employees across the country, making, on average, $100,000 in salary. This is everywhere from Halifax to Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Victoria. It's truly from coast to coast.
Recently, we raised a $25 million Canadian series B to further invest in our growth. That was raised from a combination of Canadian and American investors. Furthermore, we have been registered as a money services business with FINTRAC since 2019, and we're in the advanced stages of registering as a restricted dealer with the Ontario Securities Commission.
The extent of our regulatory obligations is quite considerable. They include maintaining a robust anti-money laundering program, an anti-terrorist financing program—for which we often use sophisticated blockchain analysis tools as was mentioned previously—a fraud prevention team, multiple levels of insurance to protect customers from loss of funds, a robust cybersecurity program, including external penetration testing, and a lot more. Far from being the Wild West, as some may perceive it, cryptocurrency trading platforms in Canada are becoming highly regulated businesses. They are more so than in almost every state of the United States.
I'm telling you all of this because I want to clear up misconceptions about the cryptocurrency industry. We represent, I would say, the cutting edge of fintech, or financial technology, and we're contributing meaningfully to the Canadian economy. With some forward-thinking policy, we would be really well positioned to leverage our reputation for the stability of our financial services sector in order to participate in the boom in fintech growth.
I want to talk a bit about the Emergencies Act and touch briefly on that. Ours is a retail platform, so we deal with customers across the country. We were asked by the RCMP to prevent funds from flowing from our platform to a list of Bitcoin addresses, and we complied with that request. Crypto trading platforms like Newton, however, are not able to freeze or hold funds that are being held in private Bitcoin wallets off our platform. In fact, a key characteristic of Bitcoin is that it allows users to transact peer-to-peer without an intermediary, which makes it very much like the equivalent of digital cash.
It's my fundamental belief—and we could maybe go in to this later—that property rights protected by due process of law are essential to the success of a modern democratic country, and table stakes for attracting investment like the investment we were able to raise from outside of the country. That reputation is very important to us and other financial services and fintech companies. That reputation took a long time to build—many decades, through the last financial crisis—and it can be undone if we're not careful.
The ability to hold and spend money to buy groceries, pay rent and fill up your tank with gas is a basic precondition to one's ability to operate freely in society, and our system of law exists to protect individuals from the overwhelming power of the state by imposing the burden of due process. In my personal view, we must do everything we can to prevent its erosion. It is really for this reason that peer-to-peer financial technologies play a really important role in the checks and balances that make our country work. Cash or Bitcoin are examples of that. While they can be and frequently are seized as part of a court order, a criminal investigation, a civil suit or what have you, they cannot be arbitrarily frozen without due process once they are in the control of an individual.
I would urge the committee to think strongly about the kind of country we want Canada to be. In my view, it's a country that strongly values both property rights and due process, regardless of the inconvenience they may cause to legitimate investigation. It's a country that embraces fintech innovation and pro-growth policies, and one that's fair and even-handed, even to those whom we might not ultimately agree with.
Thank you.