Hi everyone,

I’m Eli, a software developer from Christchurch, and for roughly the last year I’ve been building a New Zealand cryptocurrency exchange from scratch called Flow Crypto.

We recently went live, so I thought I’d introduce it here and get some feedback from the Geekzone community.

The idea started because I wanted to build something much simpler than a traditional crypto exchange for New Zealanders. Instead of order books, trading pairs and a complicated interface, the basic Flow process is:

 

1. Choose the crypto you want to buy.
2. Pay in NZD from your New Zealand bank account.
3. The crypto is delivered directly to your own wallet.

We also support selling crypto back to NZD, crypto-to-crypto swaps and recurring purchases.

One of the main decisions I made early on was that I didn’t want Flow to be a custodial platform. We don’t want customers leaving their cryptocurrency sitting with us indefinitely. For purchases, the crypto is sent to the wallet address the customer provides.

Flow is 100% New Zealand owned and operated. We’re registered on the Financial Service Providers Register and are supervised by the Department of Internal Affairs as an AML/CFT reporting entity.

The interesting part for me has been how much more there was to building this than just writing the software.

I initially thought most of the work would be building the frontend, backend, exchange integrations and order processing. In reality, a huge amount of the last year has gone into banking, AML/CFT, identity verification, transaction monitoring, wallet screening, liquidity management, reconciliation, security, dealing with providers, and working through all of the strange edge cases that appear when real money is involved.

There have been quite a few moments where I’ve felt a bit like the crypto version of the Bank of Dave story. Obviously Flow isn’t a bank, but the part I relate to is trying to build a small local financial business from the ground up and discovering all the infrastructure and regulatory hurdles that sit behind something that looks simple to the customer.

The site is:

https://www.flowcrypto.co.nz/

I’m not really posting this as a “please go and buy crypto” thread. I’d genuinely be interested in feedback from people here, especially because Geekzone tends to have a technically minded audience that will notice things normal users might not.

I’m also happy to answer questions about the technical side, how we built it, the process of getting a crypto business live in NZ, or how the brokerage model works.

Keen to hear what you think, including criticism.

Cheers,

Eli