Why We Launched NZDD: Sharing a solution to New Zealand’s (and our) pain points

At Easy Crypto, you can trade at any time, even on holidays. For us, fulfilling your order is quite straightforward. We exchange your New Zealand dollars to USD to fulfill your crypto orders with our suppliers. 

While cryptocurrency trading continues over weekends, banks don’t operate 24/7. This presents a challenge for Easy Crypto to fulfill orders on the weekends and holidays. With banks closed during those times, we’re forced to stockpile US dollars in advance. This practice involves a considerable amount of guesswork and risk:

• If we underestimate, some customers might not be able to purchase crypto.

• If we overestimate, we risk exposure to the NZD/USD volatility.

Even a small shift in exchange rates over the weekend, when multiplied by tens of millions of dollars, can significantly impact our business.

So, we pondered. What if we could exchange NZD to USD at will, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Traditional foreign exchanges may close along with banks, but decentralized exchanges (DEXs) never sleep. 

This sounds like a good solution, but we faced yet another hurdle. No DEXs accepted NZD-denominated crypto assets or stablecoins. That’s because NZD-backed stablecoin didn’t exist.

We first tried to solve our own problem

So, our product team rose to the challenge, did what they do best — creating something that never existed, which later became NZDD, an NZD-backed stablecoin. This innovation allowed us to utilise a decentralised exchange by supplying an NZDD/USDC pool, enabling traders and ourselves to swap between the stablecoins at any time.

Liquidity pools are interconnected, so when one pool runs low on a particular asset, arbitrage traders seek to fill that gap. This interconnectedness helps maintain consistent exchange rates for asset pairs across various pools. By introducing NZDD to the broader crypto ecosystem, we’re leveraging the interconnectedness of decentralized exchanges to solve our weekend banking dilemma and provide a more efficient, 24/7 solution for cryptocurrency trading in New Zealand.

When we launched NZDD, we saw that it could be more than just a financial instrument that we use internally. It did a great job at helping us serve our customers better, but we also saw that having an NZD-backed stablecoin means that individuals or businesses are faced with more options and more potential opportunities.

For example, the problem of sending money overseas is not trivial. Before NZDD, you have two options. Use a remittance service which could charge you an extortionate amount of fees, or use US-dollar backed stablecoins on the blockchain. While the latter can save you money, you would still face potential losses from forex volatility. Even then, your recipient must sell those USD stablecoins for actual Kiwi dollars, which means they’d still pay fees for forex services by financial institutions. 

NZDD could become that missing piece to build a more robust and inclusive decentralised financial system for New Zealand and beyond. Holding NZDD in your Ethereum wallet can be just as good as keeping cash in your leather wallet, if not better. NZDD gives you the ability to send cash instantly, to anyone anywhere in the world, at any time and independently of financial institutions.

We’re almost two years into the project, and all we can say now is that we’re grateful for the banking problem that we have had to solve in the past. If we had never encountered it, NZDD wouldn’t have existed.