New Zealand's crypto sector has a shorter memory than it should. Between 2019 and 2026, five platforms serving Kiwi customers ceased to exist. Each failed for a different reason, and each one taught a lesson that the next generation of customers promptly forgot. Here is the record, in order.
Cryptopia — hacked, 2019
Founded in Christchurch in 2014, Cryptopia became a genuinely significant global exchange for small-capitalisation tokens. In January 2019 it was hacked, losing a substantial quantity of customer cryptoassets, and was placed in liquidation shortly afterward.
What followed was years of legal complexity, much of it novel. The courts had to determine whether cryptoassets held for customers were property held on trust — a question with no clear precedent anywhere. Account holders who had left assets on the exchange spent years waiting on a distribution process. The lesson was blunt and it was learned by very few people: an exchange balance is a claim, not a holding.
BitPrime — out of money, 2022
BitPrime was a Christchurch-based retailer offering a very long list of assets, operating on the same broad model Easy Crypto later scaled. During the 2022 downturn it froze trading, citing liquidity pressure and extreme market volatility, and wound down its retail business.
The mechanism matters here. A retailer that fronts its own inventory carries market risk on that inventory. When prices fall sharply and volumes shift, that risk becomes a solvency problem, and customers end up sharing a risk they never knowingly took on. The failure was orderly by the standards of what came next, but it removed one of the country's two large retail platforms.
Dasset — liquidation and a fraud investigation, 2023
Digital Asset Exchange Ltd, trading as Dasset, is the worst outcome in the New Zealand record. It lost its banking services provider in January 2023. Over the following months customers complained to regulators that they could not access funds, could not transfer to another exchange, and could not reach anyone at the company. It was placed in liquidation in August 2023.
The first liquidator report identified roughly NZ$6.3 million of cryptoassets unaccounted for — the gap between what customers believed they held and the approximately NZ$600,000 actually on hand. Efforts to establish what happened were hampered by the chief executive being uncontactable. The Serious Fraud Office opened an investigation in February 2024.
The warning sign that mattered
Every Dasset customer who got out did so because they treated withdrawal delays as an emergency rather than an inconvenience. If a platform starts slowing withdrawals, citing maintenance, or going quiet on support, withdraw everything immediately. You can always deposit again if you were wrong.
Kiwi-Coin — de-banked, 2026
Kiwi-Coin ran from 2014 and was New Zealand's longest-running Bitcoin exchange. It did not fail because of a hack, a fraud or a market crash. It failed because it could not keep a bank account.
From around 2020 it was caught in de-risking by New Zealand registered banks, which increasingly declined to service businesses whose primary activity was dealing in cryptocurrency. An exchange whose entire function is converting New Zealand dollars to Bitcoin cannot operate without New Zealand dollar banking. It ceased trading on 1 January 2026, taking with it the country's only genuinely domestic order book.
This is the failure mode most people never anticipate, and it is the one that most shapes the current market. Read our bank policies page for why the distinction between personal customers and crypto businesses matters so much.
Easy Crypto — acquired and closed, 2026
Easy Crypto did not fail in the sense the others did. It was the largest crypto business in the country, with more than 350,000 users and over NZ$3.5 billion in cumulative sales, and it was acquired by Australia's Swyftx in March 2025. Trading under the Easy Crypto name ceased on 30 March 2026 and customers were migrated across.
Commercially that is a success story. From a customer's perspective it still meant the platform they had chosen stopped existing, on a timetable they did not set, requiring them to verify with a new company and manually migrate self-custodial wallet holdings. Nobody lost money — but nobody had a choice either. Full detail on our Easy Crypto page.
| Platform | Period | What happened | The lesson |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy Crypto | 2018 – 30 March 2026 | Acquired by Swyftx in March 2025; NZ trading ceased 30 March 2026 and customers were migrated across. | Even the market leader can disappear as a brand. Self-custody kept wallet users in control of their keys. |
| Kiwi-Coin | 2014 – 1 January 2026 | New Zealand's longest-running order-book exchange closed after years of bank de-risking left it without reliable NZD rails. | Banking access, not technology, is the binding constraint on a domestic exchange. |
| Dasset | 2017 – August 2023 | Placed in liquidation. The first liquidator report identified roughly NZ$6.3 million of customer crypto unaccounted for; the Serious Fraud Office opened an investigation in February 2024. | Withdrawal delays and silent support channels are the earliest warning signal there is. |
| BitPrime | 2016 – 2022 | Froze trading during the 2022 downturn citing liquidity pressure and wound down its retail business. | A retailer that fronts its own inventory carries market risk you can end up sharing. |
| Cryptopia | 2014 – 2019 | Christchurch-based exchange hacked in January 2019 and placed in liquidation; the recovery process ran for years. | Coins left on an exchange are a claim on a company, not property in your hands. |
What the pattern actually shows
Five failures, four distinct causes: a security breach, a solvency problem, an apparent misappropriation, and a banking withdrawal. Only one of them — Cryptopia — was the kind of event people picture when they worry about exchange risk. The others came from directions most customers never watch.
That is the argument for a broad rather than a narrow defence. You cannot audit an exchange's internal controls, you cannot know whether its bank is about to exit the relationship, and you certainly cannot detect a fraud from the outside. What you can do is limit how much of your position any single company's failure can touch.
The defences that have actually worked
- Self-custody. Easy Crypto Wallet users kept their assets through a corporate shutdown precisely because the company never held the keys.
- A second verified account. Being able to move assets somewhere in an hour rather than a week is worth more than any fee difference.
- Treating withdrawal delays as an emergency. This alone would have saved a meaningful number of Dasset customers.
- Quarterly history exports. Platforms that close give limited windows to retrieve records, and Inland Revenue does not accept "the exchange shut down" as an explanation.
- Position sizing. Never keep more on any platform than you could absorb losing entirely.
What has not worked
Regulation, so far. None of the obligations in force in New Zealand — FSPR registration, AML/CFT supervision, dispute resolution membership — prevented any of these outcomes or made customers whole afterwards. That is not an argument against those obligations, which do useful work elsewhere. It is an argument against treating them as protection for your balance, because they are not designed to be and they have not functioned that way.
Our regulation page sets out precisely what the framework covers, and the significant list of things it does not.