Brandon Butcher moved to New Zealand to live, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the place he’d chosen to call home was being quietly shortchanged. While the rest of the Bitcoin world was building infrastructure, New Zealand’s financial landscape had been colonised by something else entirely: a casino dressed up as a revolution.
What Butcher saw wasn’t just a market gap — it was a betrayal of the people asking the most serious questions about money, sovereignty, and the slow erosion of what they’d worked for. So he helped build what should have already existed. This is the story of Stacked Bitcoin, and why better money shouldn’t require a plane ticket.
- New Zealand is a long way from the epicentres of the Bitcoin world — geographically. What was it like discovering Bitcoin? And did the distance make the conviction harder or actually cleaner to arrive at?
I came to Bitcoin as an American expat and as a libertarian with a pre-existing distrust of central banking and the slow theft of monetary debasement. So my discovery wasn’t really a “moment,” it was the answer to a question I’d already been asking. 
When I went looking for others, what I found in New Zealand was a small but sharp community of bitcoiners, drowning in a sea of crypto enthusiasm. Our founding team (myself, Rob Clarkson and Simon Collins) came to Bitcoin from very different starting points but converged on the same conclusion: the place we live and love deserves world-class tools for better money, same as anywhere else.
New Zealand’s broader awakening looks a lot like the rest of the western world. A few frogs have noticed the water is warm and jumped out, and the rest haven’t yet. What’s particular to NZ is that we’ve traditionally been a high-trust society; institutional trust here has historically been higher than in most western countries. That’s been a tailwind for stability and a headwind for Bitcoin. But it’s changing, and when it changes here, it tends to change quickly.
- Every founder has a moment where curiosity stops being intellectual and becomes personal — almost urgent. What was yours? Was there a specific realisation about money, about New Zealand’s economy, or about your own future that made you think ‘I have to do something about this’?
The urgency came from looking around and realising what New Zealand actually had on offer.
While other parts of the world had serious companies building real products on Bitcoin as better money, New Zealand, through a mix of monetary isolation and small population, had ended up with a handful of crypto bucket shops marketing a casino to a population that was asking serious questions they didn’t yet know how to articulate.
No payments, no Lightning, no merchants, no privacy tools, no real infrastructure. Not money, gambling. Kiwis who went looking for answers in Bitcoin were told that 10x-leveraging fartcoin would get them where they wanted to go. Most of them dabbled between 2016 and 2020, bounced, and walked away convinced it wasn’t for them.
That was the moment, and it was personal. If we waited for the Bitcoin companies we admired overseas to eventually arrive here, it would be too late. We’d either accept that the place we live wasn’t going to get the tools it deserved, or we’d have to leave it. Stacked exists because neither of those was acceptable.
What Kiwis actually needed wasn’t complicated: real merchant adoption, Bitcoin in their own hands rather than on a company’s balance sheet, technology-forward tools that let them use better money rather than just speculate on it, and someone willing to hold the line on what Bitcoin actually is, not what they’d been sold.
- What problem were you staring at that nobody else in New Zealand seemed to be solving, and what did it take to convince yourself and a co-founder to actually go build it?
The problem we’ve identified is a global problem, but one that New Zealand feels acutely. Everywhere in the world, Bitcoin has been shoved into the same bucket as crypto, marketed as equivalent or even inferior, and the result is that the average person’s only encounter with it is through a trading interface designed to extract from them.
That framing is the whole problem. If your first experience of Bitcoin is on a casino, you’re going to evaluate it as a casino chip, it might be fun, but ultimately you lose. The serious people, the ones asking real questions about financial resilience, privacy, and autonomy, get pushed through that same door and walk away thinking Bitcoin isn’t for them. It’s not that they didn’t understand the promise. It’s that nothing in their actual financial life gave the promise a chance to stick.
That’s the question we kept coming back to: how would anyone understand Bitcoin as better money if they only ever experienced it as a thing to trade? Even if you went all the way through the rabbit hole, the destination was a hardware wallet sitting in a drawer, disconnected from everything else you do with money. A sideshow.
The thing nobody seemed to be solving was the integration problem.
- Your mission is making better money ‘the obvious choice’ in New Zealand — that phrase does a lot of heavy lifting. What stands between a Kiwi and that obvious moment right now, and what does Stacked Bitcoin do that finally removes that friction?
The friction is exactly that gap: Bitcoin has been a separate, deliberate thing you have to go and do, rather than something present in your everyday financial life. As long as that’s true, “better money” is an argument, not an experience. Arguments don’t win markets, better experiences and habits do.
What we found along the way is that New Zealand has a quiet advantage most of the Bitcoin world hasn’t noticed: a genuinely functional open banking environment. By marrying Lightning with open banking, we can move value from a Kiwi’s bank account into their own self-custody wallet in seconds, and the experience feels closer to a bank transfer than a “bitcoin purchase.”
That single capability changes what’s possible. Bitcoin can sit alongside dollars in someone’s daily financial life, with the same choices available without the deliberate ceremony that’s kept it siloed everywhere else.
That’s what makes better money the obvious choice over time. Not because we evangelise (though we do that too), and not because we have to convince anyone. We just make Bitcoin present, alongside the dollars they already use, and let it shine by comparison. Bitcoin does that part natively, we don’t need to.
We’re not all the way there yet, in product or in our journey. The vision is a financial services platform where Kiwis can live in both worlds at once, and gradually let the better one take over as it earns the right to. One step at a time, integrated into the life they actually live, rather than a side-quest they have to opt into.
- Being a Bitcoin company CEO in a small market is a particular kind of lonely — you’re educating regulators, convincing sceptics, managing a team, and carrying the mission all at once. What has genuinely surprised you about leadership in this space?
The most surprising thing, and probably the most useful one to share with anyone reading this, is that it’s not lonely at all.
The framing of the question is the same one I had in my head when we started: small market, isolated geography, lonely founder educating regulators and convincing sceptics. That’s not what it’s been. Over the past five years, the first frogs out of the pot have shaken off the shock and started organising.
We’ve got a nationwide meetup network in Bitkiwi, strong local meetups, an emerging circular economy in Bitcoin Basin, dedicated education and coordination efforts, active online communities, and serious policy work through Bitcoin Policy NZ. None of that existed a few years ago.
We still have real challenges around visibility and reach, both locally and globally. Small market problems are real. But the people showing up to support Stacked and the broader ecosystem are aligned, generationally minded, and willing to do the unglamorous work. Leadership here isn’t carrying a mission alone; it’s keeping pace with a community that’s ready to move.
- Paint me a picture — it’s ten years from now and Stacked Bitcoin worked. What does a Bitcoin-native New Zealand actually look like for an ordinary Kiwi family?
Ten years out, if we’ve done our job, a Bitcoin-native New Zealand won’t be identified as a Bitcoin-native New Zealand to the family living in it. That’s the point.
It looks like a Kiwi family whose savings aren’t quietly eroding while they sleep. Whose weekly shop, power bill, and school fees can be paid in dollars or sats depending on what makes sense, without anyone needing to think about which network is doing the work underneath.
A small business owner in Tauranga who takes a Lightning payment from a customer in Berlin and settles it the same way they’d settle an EFTPOS transaction, except faster and cheaper.
People stop asking whether they should “buy bitcoin.” In the same way that people no longer ask if they “should use the internet”, Bitcoin fulfills its role and people quietly choose the better path over time. The argument is over, not because anyone won the argument, but because the better tool got used long enough that the question stopped being interesting.
That’s the world we’re working toward.
Website: https://stackedbitcoin.com/
