Stacked: Self-Custody for New Zealanders
Who's Stacked?
Stacked started as Lightning Pay in 2023 in Queenstown, New Zealand. Brandon Bucher, Simon Collins, and Rob Clarkson set out with one goal: to get more New Zealanders using bitcoin. They began by helping merchants accept bitcoin, and the team quickly learned the customers' goal: getting a simple way to buy, sell, and spend bitcoin straight from their bank. In April 2026 the company rebranded as Stacked.
Today Stacked is a bitcoin-only platform and registered financial service provider run by a team of four and moving NZ$2-3M in exchange volume a month for thousands of Kiwi users. Customers buy with as little as NZ$6 straight from their bank account, schedule recurring top-ups with Autostack, pay New Zealand bills in bitcoin, and take payments at the counter with merchant tools. But getting to this fully realized NZ bitcoin platform wasn't easy. Until it was.
The Challenge
New Zealand's bitcoin market was moving the other way. Easy Crypto, once the country's largest locally owned platform, was sold to Swyftx and shut down in March 2026 after eight years. Sharesies offers bitcoin through a third-party custodian, with no way to withdraw to a personal wallet. Banks remain wary of crypto businesses, and Stacked's co-founders credit its non-custodial model with securing the company's banking relationships.
Self-custody for newcomers was the hard part. Buying small amounts on-chain is uneconomical. And on an earlier version of the Breez SDK, a customer's Lightning address could fail if they hadn't opened the app recently, because receiving depended on background notifications that didn't always arrive. For a platform whose promise is "your keys, your bitcoin," a missed payment was never an option.
The Solution
Stacked integrated the Breez SDK directly into the Stacked Wallet, consolidating several functions into a single app. The SDK is the payments engine that facilitates all the transactions between a New Zealand bank account and a wallet the customer controls, invisible to everyone except the engineering team.
For users:
- Speed: Users can buy bitcoin with fiat bank accounts and watch it land in their personal, self-custodied wallets instantly.
- Economy: The Breez-Stacked combo rewards stacking small and often. Lightning keeps network fees from eating a slice of every NZ$6 buy, and Lightning addresses receive around the clock, even with the app closed.
- Self-custody: Users never relinquish their keys, and unilateral exit is built in. Stacked doesn't see users' balances or transactions.
"I've worked with a lot of SDKs, and the Breez one is really well documented. It does what it says on the tin. It's a developer's dream to work with."
Rob Clarkson, Co-founder and CTO, Stacked
For developers:
Stacked is a team of four, and Rob calls integrating with the Breez SDK a developer's dream. Moving the wallet to the current Breez SDK, built on Spark, made Lightning addresses reliable 24/7, independent of app wake-ups and notifications, while keeping self-custody and adding unilateral exit. These four hard-working Kiwi-based builders never need to worry about nodes, channels, or inbound liquidity, so they are free to build what Stacked actually sells: the exchange, Autostack, bill pay, and merchant tools.
For growth:
Thanks to the Breez SDK, existing Lightning Pay customers moved to Stacked with no disruption to their accounts, and the wallet now sits at the center of the platform: buy, save, spend, and pay bills from one balance the customer owns. In Queenstown, Stacked also backs Bitcoin Basin, a local circular economy of merchants who accept bitcoin, and the new .com points beyond New Zealand.
As New Zealand's other platforms hand custody to someone else, Stacked, powered by the Breez SDK, hands it back to the customer.
Ready to Get Started?
Join Stacked and the world's best builders adding instant bitcoin and stablecoins with the Breez SDK.
