Our verdict
Easy Crypto
Closed — ceased New Zealand trading 30 March 2026
Easy Crypto did something genuinely useful: it made buying cryptocurrency in New Zealand feel like buying anything else online. You paid in New Zealand dollars, the coins arrived in a wallet you controlled, and nobody asked you to understand an order book. That model earned it more than 350,000 customers and over NZ$3.5 billion in cumulative sales. It was never the cheapest option, and the acquisition and eventual shutdown left customers doing migration work they did not ask for.
What works
- A genuinely simple retail model — quote, pay, receive
- Real New Zealand dollar rails with the major banks
- Coins delivered to self-custody rather than held on account
- Local support and a local team who understood the market
- Launched NZDD, the first NZD-backed stablecoin
What does not
- Spread-based pricing was never the cheapest way to buy
- No order book, so no limit orders or maker fees
- Acquisition removed customer choice about where to migrate
- The wind-down forced self-custody users to act manually
What Easy Crypto actually was
Easy Crypto launched in 2018 from Christchurch, founded on a simple observation: most New Zealanders who wanted to own Bitcoin had no interest in learning what a maker fee was. The product was a retailer, not an exchange. You chose an asset, the site quoted a price in New Zealand dollars, you paid by bank transfer, POLi or account-to-account, and the coins were sent to a wallet address you supplied.
That distinction mattered more than most customers realised. Because Easy Crypto did not hold your coins, a failure of the company was never a failure of your holdings. In a country that had already watched Cryptopia lose customer funds to a hack in 2019, that was a meaningful design decision rather than a marketing line.
The business grew into the largest crypto operation in the country. It banked with the major New Zealand institutions when almost nobody else in the sector could, which quietly became its most valuable asset. It later added a self-custodial wallet app and, in late 2023, launched NZDD — a New Zealand dollar stablecoin backed one-to-one by Kiwi dollars held in a bare trust.
The acquisition and the shutdown
In March 2025 Australian exchange Swyftx announced it was acquiring Easy Crypto, creating a combined business with more than a million sign-ups across Australia and New Zealand. The stated rationale was scale: more assets, lower fees, more services. For a period both brands ran in parallel while integration work proceeded.
Migration began in earnest in early 2026. Customers were contacted directly — reportedly including phone calls from Brisbane staff walking people through account setup and identity verification on the new platform — and offered incentives to move, including a NZ$20 Bitcoin bonus for verifying before a mid-April deadline. Trading on the Easy Crypto platform ceased on 30 March 2026, and the wallet app began winding down its trading services at the same time.
If you still hold an Easy Crypto Wallet
The wallet was self-custodial. Your recovery phrase still controls those assets regardless of what happened to the company. If you have the phrase, you can import it into any compatible wallet — Exodus or a hardware wallet are both straightforward. If you do not have the phrase, nobody can recover it for you, and anyone who says otherwise is running a recovery scam.
What it cost to use
Easy Crypto priced through the spread rather than a visible percentage fee. You saw one number — the New Zealand dollar cost of the asset — and the margin sat inside it. For small purchases that was fine and arguably honest; you knew exactly what you were paying. For larger amounts it was expensive relative to an order book, where a limit order might have cost a fraction of a percent.
Deposits were the genuine strength. Bank transfer, POLi and account-to-account all worked, and the company held accounts with the major New Zealand banks — ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Kiwibank and Westpac were all referenced in its payment documentation over the years. In a market where Kiwi-Coin eventually died from losing exactly this capability, it is hard to overstate how much that mattered.
Where former customers have gone
The default path was Swyftx, which inherited the customer relationships and secured a Kiwibank account so it could offer direct NZD deposits and withdrawals. It offers a far longer asset list and a volume-tiered fee schedule rather than a flat spread, which suits active traders better and casual buyers about the same.
Independent Reserve is the other platform with genuine New Zealand dollar rails. It runs an order book with 0.5% maker and taker fees, an over-the-counter desk for larger sums, and holds registrations in New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. It charges NZ$15 on New Zealand dollar deposits below NZ$5,000, which makes it better suited to larger, less frequent purchases.
For people who specifically liked the Easy Crypto model — pay in New Zealand dollars, receive coins into your own wallet, deal with a local company — Pay It Now is the closest remaining match. It is New Zealand-owned, accepts bank transfer, card and POLi, and delivers to a wallet in the app.
What the Easy Crypto story tells you about New Zealand
Three things, none of them comfortable. First, scale is not safety. Easy Crypto was by a wide margin the largest crypto business in the country and it still ceased to exist as a brand within a year of being acquired. The size of a platform tells you about liquidity and marketing budget, not about whether it will be there in three years.
Second, banking access is the real moat in this market. Easy Crypto's most valuable asset was not its interface — it was the fact that New Zealand banks would deal with it. Swyftx did not simply buy a customer list; it bought a working relationship with the New Zealand payments system, and it then went and secured its own Kiwibank arrangement. Kiwi-Coin, which never solved that problem, closed the same year.
Third, self-custody worked exactly as advertised. The one part of the Easy Crypto ecosystem that nobody had to worry about during the shutdown was the wallet, because the company never had the keys. Customers had to do the migration themselves, which was inconvenient, but inconvenience is a very different problem from being an unsecured creditor in a liquidation. Ask anyone who had a balance on Dasset.
Common searches, answered plainly
The Easy Crypto login page no longer serves an active trading platform. The app no longer supports trading. The support phone number and contact channels have been folded into Swyftx's customer service. The supported coin list, the fee schedule and the review pages that still circulate online describe a product that has stopped operating. If you arrived here looking for any of those, the honest answer is that the thing you are looking for is gone, and the useful next step is choosing a replacement with your eyes open.
If you need historical records for a tax return, that is the one genuinely urgent task. Inland Revenue expects a complete record of every acquisition and disposal, including coin-to-coin swaps, and since 1 April 2026 service providers have been collecting and reporting user data under the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework. Our filing guide covers what a compliant record looks like.