Crypto Lending’s Quiet Revolution

Abstract: Crypto has long promised to “disrupt finance,” but in Canada disruption has taken an oddly bureaucratic form: the country’s first crypto-backed lender approved by securities regulators. APX Lending, which secured CSA approval in 2025, has built its business not on DeFi aspirations but on the boring stuff: collateral segregation, and regulatory patience. This is a case study in how crypto lending, forecast to reach $1.5 billion in Canada by 2030, might evolve – slowly, cautiously – into the mainstream.

I am going to share some lessons learned at APX. For an industry built on novelty, crypto lending’s real innovation in Canada has been orthodoxy. We did not storm the gates of finance. Instead, it spent over a year in consultations with the Ontario Securities Commission, persuading regulators that loans backed by Bitcoin and Ether could be offered safely—if overcollateralised, tightly monitored, and subjected to the same disclosure and custody rules that govern traditional securities.

The CSA’s stance was characteristically Canadian: cautious, legalistic, and not entirely flattering to crypto enthusiasts. In their eyes, the right to redeem collateral was functionally a derivative. Firms could either contest that point in court or comply. APX chose compliance. The result is the first coast-to-coast licence to offer crypto-backed loans under Canada’s “passport” regime.

The timing is apt. The 2024 CSA Investor Index found that 18% of Canadian investors already hold crypto, with one in three under-35s doing so. That makes digital assets a fact of life in personal portfolios, even as knowledge gaps persist: nearly half of survey respondents failed basic investment literacy tests, and social media has overtaken financial advisers as the dominant source of investing tips. Trust is scarce, confusion abundant.

Against that backdrop, regulated lending matters. Past failures, from Celsius to Voyager, owed as much to lax governance as to market volatility. By contrast, APX cannot rehypothecate collateral, must maintain strict liquidation margins, and is required to use third-party custodians with SOC-2 compliance. None of this is glamorous. But in finance, dullness can be a virtue.

Some crypto purists argue that DeFi lending protocols already provide collateralised loans without intermediaries. They are right in principle, but regulators remain deeply uneasy. The CSA shows no appetite for blessing code-based protocols with no legal entity, no reporting obligations, and no obvious avenues for recourse. Centralised and regulated platforms, not decentralised utopias, will therefore dominate Canada’s crypto credit market in the near term.

Lessons Learned

APX’s achievement is not that it has reinvented finance, but that it has tamed crypto lending enough to make regulators comfortable. That may sound like a low bar. Yet for an industry often associated with opacity and speculation, the shift is profound.

By 2030, crypto-backed lending in Canada could reach $1.5 billion. Whether that figure materialises will depend less on technological wizardry than on continued adherence to the principles of old-fashioned finance: overcollateralisation, borrower protection, and transparency.

Crypto’s future in Canada may not be a noisy revolution; however, it may finally succeed.

Five key points

1. Regulation, not rebellion, is crypto lending’s route to legitimacy.

2. Canada’s investor base is young, crypto-exposed, and financially under-informed.

3. Failures of the past owed more to governance gaps than to market swings.

4. DeFi remains unpalatable to regulators; centralised models will dominate for now.

5. The industry’s long-term success lies in becoming dull, not dazzling.