Episode October 13, 2026 20 min 46s

Flow Crypto - The New Exchange for Kiwis

From The Crypto Conversation Brave New Coin

Eli Hylands is the founder of Flow Crypto, a New Zealand on and off ramp that launched about a month before this recording. He has been involved in crypto for roughly ten years, and before Flow he worked as a software developer and business analyst at IAG. He built the platform largely by himself over about a year, alongside his day job, after seeing a gap open in the local market.

Why you should listen

When Swyftx acquired Easy Crypto in 2025 and began moving its New Zealand customers across, the country's best-known retail exchange effectively left the market. Hylands saw the gap. Flow Crypto is his answer: a Kiwi-owned, non-custodial service where customers send New Zealand dollars from their bank account and receive crypto directly in their own wallet, with selling running the other way. It charges a flat 0.79 percent fee, supports up to 50 assets, and is registered on the Financial Service Providers Register. Hylands says the software was the easy part. Securing a bank account took about six months, and the hardest work was compliance: meeting reporting obligations to the Department of Internal Affairs while not asking customers for so much information that signing up becomes a chore. His customers, he says, skew toward altcoins rather than Bitcoin, and span all ages, which surprised him.

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