Original subtitles

Cryptocurrencies are a real serious proposition.

Crypto and blockchain are changing the world.

Now we know why crypto is such a big deal.

It's really undoing the last 20 years of technology.

But if you want to join the ride, where do you get on?

Cryptocurrency is absolutely for everyone, but I can fully appreciate how

daunting it is to get started.

We meet the family behind Easy Crypto.

one of New Zealand's biggest crypto success stories. We all start knowing

nothing, and I run a cryptocurrency business, and some days I still feel

know nothing in this space because it's moving so fast.

Hey, bro, I heard about this Bitcoin thing. Can you get some for me? I can't

figure it out. It's much easier to understand once you've tried it.

You should not approach this from a get -rich -quick scheme.

Don't just follow the FOMO.

Make that first step and see where the journey takes you.

People want to know what... My children do. I tell them that my two younger

children are running a crypto business.

At that stage, people of my generation say, ah, now I've heard about that.

What's that?

I grew up in Auckland. My mum and dad ran a computer business.

Computers were the new big thing.

So we had them in the house basically since they were babies.

We'd have the latest model that had come through on its way to the showroom

floor. My brothers were very tech savvy.

We got our first computer. It was a handy TRF80 monochrome screen. My father

bought us some books on programming, basic computer language.

Alan was a very enthusiastic, life and soul of the family type person.

Janine was a bit of a philosopher. She was always asking why and how.

I really liked that idea of understanding the physical world,

creating stuff.

But I was a pretty average student. I ended up dropping out after fifth form.

I just wasn't enjoying school.

We said, but you can't leave school without a job.

Then she came home a day or two later and said she had a job.

I worked in a cafe for a little while. I went over to the UK to do the OE.

I came back to New Zealand for a friend's wedding, and at that stage I

this was a good opportunity to go to university.

So I enrolled at Auckland University as an adult student.

I ended up doing an economics degree, and then in my last year I tapped on

finance. I first heard of Bitcoin, I think it was in 2014, and I just

thinking how much sense it made.

We have with the internet this global village, but we didn't have a global

payment system.

So it seemed to me the no -brainer that this Bitcoin thing would be...

a part of the future. Value soared to more than $315 per Bitcoin.

So what does this mean for those of us who may be interested in investing in

digital currencies?

I remember searching online trying to find out how to buy Bitcoin.

There were very few guides or explainers.

I called up Alan, my brother, to ask him, how do you buy this Bitcoin thing?

he's like, I don't know.

Definitely it was for the very tech adventurer. And it was just so

Buying Bitcoin back in the day was very unusafriendly.

It was just so hard to get involved.

I couldn't set up an account.

It was not easy.

There were some offshore exchanges, but you had to wire up some weird bank

accounts in some obscure country.

I was sitting there nervously, wondering where they were going to come through.

It was still very much sort of seat of your pants, making it up as they go

sort of stuff.

We figured it out. I think Bitcoin was $300 at the time.

So I bought some back then just to see how it worked. You know, I didn't put in

much, but it was a really daunting process.

And I was right there on her laptop helping her, and I didn't buy any.

So she was the smart one, the visionary, and I was just the idiot who helped her

and didn't take part.

I put it in a wallet, I left it there, and I just freaked out that if I ever

touched it, I would probably lose it.

The cryptocurrency Bitcoin has rallied after taking a bit of a Christmas

It really started to come into public consciousness in 2017.

Prices started going up. The media started talking about it. This week,

shot up 70%. At its peak, one Bitcoin was worth 25 ,000 New Zealand dollars.

Cryptocurrencies are a real and serious proposition for the future. I was

working for one of the large banks here in New Zealand.

People knew that I had Bitcoin and they'd come to me with all their

cryptocurrency questions. And I became the bank's expert on Bitcoin. So they

called me Jcoin there, which is a nickname that has stuck.

The Ventures team at the bank asked me to do a presentation on what is Bitcoin,

blockchain and cryptocurrency.

And I'd never done any public speaking before.

I was so anxious. I think I almost pulled out at the last minute.

But I got up on that stage and tried to simplify the concept to help everyone

understand what this technology was about.

Another thing about Bitcoin that makes it really unique and special is that it

has no central control.

The blockchain is the technology that underpins Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is like an application, and blockchain is like your phone or the

operating system that that application sits on.

Off the back of that, I would always have people come in to me and say, so

can I buy Bitcoin?

There were no easy websites in New Zealand for doing it. And there was no

way. You know, I knew how to buy my own cryptocurrency, but it was a real

hassle. And I was just like, Alan, can you buy me this? Can you buy me that?

I was traveling at the time. All my friends, they were all getting in touch

me. Hey, bro, I heard about this Bitcoin thing. Can you get some for me? I can't

figure it out. So I was doing that for half of 2017.

I am at heart a very lazy person. And I was like, man, there's got to be a way

to automate this.

And then I was like, shit, if I automate it, that's a business.

I spent 24 hours a day for four days straight coding up this website.

I thought, ah, easy crypto, that sounds about right.

People who had no knowledge whatsoever of crypto, they could just come on the

website, say I want to buy $100 of Bitcoin, they make the payment, and bam,

have the email. And you'd have a secure encrypted wallet emailed to you with

that cryptocurrency in it.

No need to send funds overseas.

One click, pay your money and you're done. Very simple.

I went live with the site on a Monday and we had orders rolling in on the

Tuesday. We had a $10 ,000 order the Wednesday, Thursday, had multiple of

size. And then all of a sudden...

Just people are sending money my way, which was around about the time that I

Janine involved.

He calls me up, his little sister, and says, hey, I've built this thing. Is

there any reason I shouldn't be doing it or anything I need to be aware of? Not

entirely sure this is legal. I need a bit of help here.

Please take this offline immediately.

I don't know how this is illegal, but I'm sure you're breaking, you know, who

knows what regulations.

Janine was absolutely horrified.

So I remember spending the summer of 2017, 2018, just poring over pages and

pages of legislation, regulation, and then we worked on getting the right

licenses, and we went live in January 2018 with a fully fledged, properly

licensed and regulated version 1 .0 of EasyCrypto.

The back -end part of it at that time was all manual, so the orders would come

in, I would place the trades myself, create the wallet and send it off. We

answering all the help desk queries, we were googling the site, adding new

features. I did so much of the coding on various beaches, train stations, the

side of the road and a bus stop. Any way you can get an internet connection, I

was working.

Running a cryptocurrency business was 100 times harder than doing a normal

startup, I think.

I had my day job, so I was just working on the business nights and weekends. It

was so much hard work, a lot of hustle.

Banks didn't want to talk to us. We were in crypto and it just was too scary,

too risky.

You can't get insurance.

You can't get a business loan. So everything we did, we had to do it off

backs. We used all of our own money.

I was working every hour that I was awake on trying to grow the business,

for things like bank accounts.

It was a time that I feel like I didn't have a life, really. There was nothing

outside of Easy Crypto. I sort of lost myself a bit.

We were constantly running into brick walls. I did often ask myself, is this

worth it, and are we going to make it? The challenges were so huge, and at

they seemed just insurmountable.

Running a cryptocurrency business was 100 times harder than doing a normal

startup. I approached every bank in New Zealand two or three times.

It wasn't until May 2018 that we actually managed to get a bank to

onboard us. That was what got us over the line.

Less than a year into running the business, we became the largest provider

New Zealand, which was amazing for us that it was still a very small market.

We definitely weren't making enough money to leave the day jobs or anything

that. Really, we were just doing it because we both really believed in the

potential of what blockchain and crypto could do, and we wanted to make sure

Kiwis weren't left behind.

With my background in strategy, I've always been really big on the company,

having goals, plans.

Janine came up with this grand vision of what she expected EasyCrypto to do.

And the numbers are ridiculous. A billion dollars in revenue by year five.

I'm sitting there thinking, look, there's no way. I don't see it, but I'm

on board and I support you and do everything I can to make it happen.

We built this amazing thing for New Zealand and it became really successful.

had the tools to take this to other countries around the world. So I said to

Alan, let's take this thing global.

To have equal and fair access to finance is, I think, one of the things that

really brought Janine and I together.

That's really what the crypto revolution is to me at heart. It's that next great

global equaliser.

We launched Australia in 2018 and then moved into South Africa in 2019.

Easy Crypto was continuing to gather momentum, but at the start of 2020, we

decided the time was right for me to leave the day job and go full -time into

Easy Crypto, and then COVID hit.

A state of national emergency has been declared.

A country shutting up shop today as New Zealand heads into an historic lockdown.

I was in Malaysia at the time. But he didn't have the right visa to stay in

Kuala Lumpur with his wife.

We made the very difficult decision that I would leave the country, go back to

New Zealand.

And then we both went down and stayed at mum and dad's place in the Bay of

Plenty.

It was the first time in the history of Easy Crypto that Janine and I had been

in the same room.

We have a huge room in our property upstairs. That became the office. I made

myself into chief cook, clothes washer.

Alan and I were just working flat -tack on the business, and the business grew

leaps and bounds during that time.

Being together in the same physical location was epic.

It was like, hey, Alan, can we do this on the site? Can we have this

functionality? I'm like, yeah, shit, yeah, we can.

Bam, it's done.

I think Mum and Dad really loved having us back. It was quite novel, right? It

felt like this project, the building of Easy Crypto, was something that we were

all doing together as a family.

In the early days of the business, Janine said, would you like to do the

Mum? And I said, not really.

But then when they got busier, I said, oh, maybe I'll do that one little bit.

By the time they were home with lockdown, I was fully involved in the

side of things.

Our business just went nuts.

And we were needing to hire more staff to help look after customers.

Things sort of just exploded when COVID happened.

People who'd always meant to look into crypto suddenly had the time to look

it. People were distrusting regular institutions.

Interest rates were almost non -existent, so the money people had in

doing nothing.

I think we just got more comfortable with digital.

We were all having meetings on Zoom, we did our shopping online, and people

became more accepting of value being digital, of Bitcoin as a digital

They had these milestones, and every time another milestone was passed, there

was another special bottle of whiskey.

And then the milestones just kept coming so fast.

By the end of 2020, we'd done over $200 million in total turnover through the

platform.

It felt pretty surreal. We just kept looking at each other and going, have we

really built this thing?

The site's continually developed. It's kept improving. But the ideology behind

Easy Crypto hasn't changed.

What Easy Crypto is all about is making it easy for people to get involved in

this industry.

We really believe that blockchain, cryptocurrency, digitization of assets

be where the future goes. And we want to make it accessible to everyone.

Your country might be subject to various sanctions and you simply are not able

to play on the same global stage.

It's just about giving people the option to participate in global finance.

Part of being an honourable player in the market is making sure that people

what they're getting into.

Crypto itself is still relatively complicated and hasn't really been

by many.

The math and the underlying plumbing is complex, but, you know, so is email.

We all use the internet every day, but none of us need to know how it works,

we need cryptocurrency to get to that same place.

It's still in that kind of early adopter phase, and it can be a bit confronting.

It's much easier to understand once you've tried it. The moment you learn

about it, you understand its potential.

So if I want to jump aboard the crypto train, what are some of the things I

to be aware of?

All you have to do is realize that the single best investment you could ever

make is spending the time to educate yourself about how this works.

Spend an hour a month finding out, well, how does it work?

Just tip away at it.

There are hundreds of crypto exchanges and providers all over the world, and

there's over 20 ,000 different cryptocurrencies.

The first thing you need to consider when you're getting started with

cryptocurrency is how to store it.

There are countless stories of people losing all of their crypto. So how

I look after mine?

You can store it yourself in your own wallet or you can entrust it to a third

party exchange and let them act as a custodian for you.

With an exchange, it's a way for people to buy and sell cryptocurrency online.

And so your Bitcoin or your assets will be stored by the exchange until you

choose to withdraw it.

Is there anything I need to be aware of with exchanges?

So the centralised exchange, it's a normal company.

It's got an office and a CEO and it can act like a crypto bank. The benefits of

that are that it's convenient.

You can log in and if you lose your password, you've got a number to ring.

But you're also risking your funds and trusting them to keep them safe for you.

If they go through a hack, you might lose all of that crypto.

There is one confidence in the history of crypto that exchanges go under, even

well -operated ones at times.

I wouldn't store more money on an exchange than I was willing to lose.

OK, if I'm not storing on an exchange, what are the options for looking after

myself? If you're storing your funds yourself, you do have full control over

them, which is a real benefit.

But Bitcoin isn't physical.

We like to put up these images of these gold Bitcoin coins. That's not what they

look like. It is just purely digital.

A wallet allows you to receive cryptocurrency and to send it. So

different types of wallets and they have different levels of security and

different levels of accessibility.

So one type of wallet is a hot wallet.

So a hot wallet is quite often an app on your phone, really easy to download, to

use, to send funds from. That's good for everyday use. The amount of value that

you'd store in your back pocket and your day -to -day wallet, that's what you

use a hot wallet for.

If you have larger amounts of cryptocurrency, you can look at

cold wallet.

A cold wallet will look like a little USB device.

It's not connected to the internet, so it has a greater degree of security.

The other type of wallet you'll hear a lot about is a web wallet.

Web wallets enable you to connect your wallet to different online services.

For example, say if you want to buy an NFT, you can go to the site and you

connect your wallet, which allows you to trade NFTs directly from your wallet

with that platform.

But I'm always losing stuff. What happens if I lose my phone with my

it?

So your wallet has 12 words and you write them down or you memorise them. If

you've got access to that, then if you lose your phone, if you lose everything,

all you need is those 12 words.

If your computer dies, as long as you keep your seed phrase, you have your

money. But if somebody else finds those 12 words, they can reproduce your

wallet, they can steal your money.

It is really important that you pay attention to how you store that seed

and make sure that you can always recover your wallet.

What is the safest way to store my seed phrase?

Don't put it online.

The safest place to store it is offline, written down. If you've got a safe, put

it in there.

So keep it in more than one place. You can put them in the fireproof box.

and you can bury it like a pirate if you want to.

Now I know how to keep my crypto safe, but what can I actually do with it?

In terms of why people buy cryptocurrency, there's a few different

is as an investment, but there's stuff that I'm most excited about is the real

-world use cases of cryptocurrency.

Gaming, there's NFTs, which can act as collector's items, and I personally use

cryptocurrency to pay my staff overseas, and I'll receive it within seconds.

Okay, so how else can I protect myself out there in crypto land?

Cryptocurrency is still a very confusing space, and that's a big challenge for

the industry to make it easy for everyday people to get involved and do

safely.

Do your own research and know who you're dealing with. Make sure you're using a

safe wallet.

Use strong passwords.

Don't click on links that you don't know what they are.

Protecting yourself from scams and crypto is really important.

Be skeptical.

If an opportunity to invest approaches you, if someone cold calls you, that is

definitely a scam because that is illegal in New Zealand.

If you are dealing with third parties, minimize your exposure to them. If you

get an email, if you see a news article, just be really skeptical about any of

those opportunities to invest.

You should not approach this from a get -rich -quick scheme, right?

Don't invest more than you're willing to lose. Don't put all your eggs in one

basket. Don't just follow the FOMO. I think it's a really important piece of

advice.

Cryptocurrency is absolutely for everyone. It's an incredibly exciting

be involved in. The innovation here is just immense.

I can fully appreciate how daunting it is to get started, but ideally everyone

would be comfortable with this space because it is where the world is

Next time. You've heard of NFTs, but what exactly are they? With NFTs, we've

found a medium that people really connected with.

Everything they did was five, six steps ahead of anything that anyone in the

industry was doing. We meet the local company making millions.

Well, this is bigger than anything that we've been thinking of.

$15 million in power.

Collaborating with international superstars. There's only one Kiame. And

to hang with the DOWG. In bringing the metaverse to the masses.

It's going to blow people's mind who we're heading to now.