Two Kiwi bitcoin entrepreneurs are getting ready to take on London with a new savings platform designed to de-mystify the crypto-currency.
The digital coin is still booming, but getting hold of it in New Zealand can be tricky.
That's where start-up My Bitcoin Saver comes in, according to CEO Sam Blackmore.
"Bitcoin is really expensive to buy in small amounts and difficult to buy in small amounts, so what we do is buy in bulk for people and we have a distribution engine that speeds it out."
My Bitcoin Saver takes weekly automatic payments ranging from $10 to $200, converts them into bitcoin, and transfers it into your digital wallet.
The start-up's 1800 users have seen their savings grow by 450 percent.
Banking on that success, Mr Blackmore and COO Matt Gibson have just raised $400,000 to expand their business into Britain.
"After the Global Financial Crisis, the banks there are risk averse and there are few bitcoin businesses," says Mr Gibson.
"But we are partnered with a finance service provider that allows us to expand to the UK and hopefully become market leader."
Bitcoin's boom is bringing out the sceptics, with some comparing it to the burst of the dot com bubble in 2000.
But analyst Fran Strajner takes the long view.
"The real money is only just recently come in, there are going to be corrections but on a long enough timeline it's of little concern."
Bitcoin has been through some tough times, especially when one of the world's largest exchanges, Mt Gox, was hacked in 2014.
It lost 740,000 bitcoins and went bankrupt.
But the currency has rebounded - one bitcoin is now worth $10,000 NZD.
"My bold prediction is that we are going to see at least 5 times from here to about a $50,000 per coin by 2020," says Mr Strajner.
New businesses in downtown Auckland are being built on the future of cypto-currencies, all of them taking the bet that bitcoin is not just a digital mirage.
Newshub.
