While NZ Exchanges Were Selling Paper Bitcoin, This 4-Person Team Built the Last Non-Custodial Stand

Formerly known as Lightning Pay, Stacked just might be the last uncorrupted Bitcoin exchange standing in New Zealand after a wave of mergers and bankruptcies swept through the local crypto scene like a Wellington winter—brutal and seemingly endless. The company is doubling down on making Bitcoin "useful as money" with the launch of a self-custodied Lightning wallet, because apparently printing promises wasn't their vibe.

Unlike their larger local counterparts going all-in on custodial and paper bitcoin—because nothing says "we believe in Bitcoin" like holding it hostage for you—Stacked took a different path. Simon, co-founder and CRO, notes that exchanges like Sharesies follow the Robinhood model with zero path to self-custodied wallets, which is financial advisor-speak for "we're a casino that owns your chips forever." Meanwhile, EasyCrypto—a popular swap exchange similar to the Bull Bitcoin model—was recently acquired by SwyftX, shut down, and its userbase funneled to the parent custodial exchange, because nothing says "customer-first" like getting merged into a corporate meat grinder.

Stacked, a lean 4-person operation that has experienced significant growth despite—or maybe because of—refusing to become a glorified IOU factory, disagrees with this direction. They launched a self-custodied Bitcoin and Lightning wallet that complements their swap exchange. Users send fiat to Stacked and receive Bitcoin directly into their self-custodied wallet, where it actually belongs. The app also lets users pay utility bills or even rent with Bitcoin, settling fiat to recipients via New Zealand's Open Banking payments framework—because using Bitcoin as money without turning it into a taxable event of your own making is apparently still a novel concept.

The wallet uses Breez and Spark SDKs under the hood, offering a clean interface with full Lightning Network integration, because routing payments through a handful of nodes is obviously superior to routing your life through a middleman who might freeze your assets over a weekend. Users can purchase Bitcoin manually or on a schedule through Autostack—a DCA-style set-it-and-forget-it feature that lets you stack sats while pretending you're not thinking about Bitcoin at least seventeen times a day. Contacts can be managed to pay with bitcoin while delivering fiat to recipients, which is basically the financial equivalent of having your cake and eating it too—except the cake is actually yours and nobody can take it from you.

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