Not Your Keys, Not Your Zealand: Stacked Is the Last Non-Custodial Holdout on the Island

Formerly known as Lightning Pay, Stacked might be the only Bitcoin exchange left standing after a series of mergers and bankruptcies in the New Zealand crypto scene. Doubling down on their mission to make Bitcoin "useful as money," they just launched a self-custodial Lightning wallet. Found at StackedBitcoin.com, the company has taken a different path than larger exchanges in the country, which, according to Simon, co-founder and CRO of Stacked, are going all-in on selling custodial and paper bitcoin. Because apparently, when your exchange goes bankrupt, your IOUs look great framed on your wall—real wall art energy.

Exchanges like Sharesies are built following the Robinhood model, with no path to withdraw crypto to self-custodied wallets. Meanwhile, EasyCrypto—a popular swap exchange that received user fiat and sent crypto back to user wallets, similar to the Bull Bitcoin model—was recently bought out by SwyFTX and shut down, funneling its userbase to the parent custodial exchange. It's giving "your keys, my keys, whose keys?" energy—except nobody's laughing.

Stacked, a 4-person company that's seen significant growth in the country in recent years, believes this is the wrong direction for the local Bitcoin industry. They've launched a self-custodial Bitcoin and Lightning wallet that complements their own swap exchange offering. Users send fiat to Stacked and receive Bitcoin into their self-custodial wallet of choice. They can even pay utility bills or rent with Bitcoin, with Stacked settling out the fiat recipients via New Zealand's Open Banking payments framework. Four people versus an entire custodial ecosystem? Sounds like a boss fight nobody asked for, but honestly, we're rooting for the underdog here.

The Stacked wallet features a sleek, modern design and uses Breez and Spark SDKs in the back end to provide a stable, easy-to-use Bitcoin experience with full Lightning Network integration. Users can purchase Bitcoin manually or on a schedule via Autostack—a DCA-style set-it-and-forget-it feature. They can also manage contacts in the app to pay with bitcoin on their end and deliver fiat to recipients. It's basically an app that lets you dollar-cost average into Bitcoin while your mate Dave gets paid in fiat. Dreams really do come true.

The country has no capital gains tax; instead, Bitcoin profits are taxed as income, resulting in what may be a much more favorable regulatory environment for hyper Bitcoinization. Stacked has been focusing its efforts to make Bitcoin useful as money in the Bitcoin Basin, a growing circular economy in Queen