Firi into Sweden. Goobit borrows a Finnish licence. Denmark talks tax.

Firi opens its app to Swedish customers today, with BankID, Swish and deposits in kronor. It is the first market the Norwegian exchange has entered on its own MiCA licence.

Goobit went the other way. Two announcements landed ten minutes apart on Monday evening, both as inside information: a rights issue of SEK 25.1 million, and a savings platform built on somebody else's authorisation. The company was refused a MiCA licence in Sweden in July.

The company supplying that authorisation is Finnish, and it sells it as a product. That is the third story, and the one worth your time.

Stockholm, Copenhagen and the Swedish election further down.

Morten Founder & Editor, KauprSweden gets another exchange

Three things happened in two days, all on the same question: how the Nordics prepare for digital money. Norges Bank named twelve partners for its tokenisation work. DNB is among them, and still outside Qivalis. And the industry meets behind closed doors in Oslo today.

Firi opens its app to Swedish customers this week. Registration with Swedish BankID, deposits in kronor, and buying and selling directly in the app. The company received its MiCA licence in May and secured a Swedish banking partner shortly after.

Country manager Ted Scheiman says launching in Sweden involves far more than translating the app. Firi draws on a large part of the Swedish fintech ecosystem for onboarding, compliance, payments, bank connectivity and support: BankID, Swish, bank transfer and established open banking providers, with prices and fees adapted to the market. Support is in Swedish.

The licence opens around 30 countries in the EEA. Firi chose Sweden because roughly 1.1 million Swedes already own crypto, 13.4 per cent, and because the infrastructure for digital investment services is already in place. Scheiman warns against reading those surveys too literally — they are binary, while Firi wants customers who invest regularly.

Exchange-traded products account for the largest share of exposure among Swedish investors today, helped by access to the tax-efficient ISK structure. Scheiman does not treat them as a competitor that rules Firi out: direct ownership gives exposure to the assets themselves and access around the clock. He confirms Firi is in discussions with Swedish financial providers about further services, and does not rule out lending.

Safello is the only Swedish company granted MiCA authorisation. Norwegian and Finnish players and several global exchanges are targeting the same market. Scheiman expects a tough battle, but also collaboration, on the grounds that the job first of all is moving customers into the habit of investing at all.

Read the story → · Watch the interview →

Goobit sent out two announcements ten minutes apart on Monday evening, both as inside information under the EU Market Abuse Regulation. At 21:10, a rights issue. At 21:20, a savings platform. The company that supplies the regulated part of that platform sells the arrangement as a product.

The rights issue is what pays for Futureproof. It is subject to approval at the annual general meeting on 15 October, with a subscription period from 22 October to 5 November.

Of about SEK 25.1 million, some SEK 13.8 million is a set-off of existing claims — lenders take shares instead of cash. That leaves SEK 11.3 million, and after issue costs of around SEK 2.3 million the cash net proceeds are put at about nine million.

Commitments of around SEK 15 million, or 59.7 per cent, come from the company's own: chief executive Gustav Buder through AB XXI Capital, chief marketing officer David Leeb through a company, and board member Christian Ander privately and through Blockchain AB. The same parties control about 42.8 per cent of the votes and have undertaken to vote for the proposals. Vator Securities underwrites a further 30.3 per cent. None of it is secured by bank guarantee or pledge, and the company flags the risk that commitments are not met.

Full subscription takes the share count from 369.7 million to just over 1.6 billion, a dilution of 77.3 per cent. The compensation issue and a possible over-allotment take it to 81.2 per cent, and exercise of the TO 2 warrants to about 84.8 per cent.

The website has been rebuilt alongside the issue. The payoff is now "Alternative investments, built to last", and Goobit describes itself as a Nordic financial group giving ordinary investors access to assets outside the traditional market. In the investor section it calls itself a company in transition. That transition is what the issue pays for: product and launch first, then its own MiCA process.

Read →

Futureproof combines bitcoin, gold and interest-bearing assets in one portfolio. The customer picks one of three compositions with fixed target weights, and approves every adjustment before it is carried out. Beta is due in October, commercial launch in the fourth quarter, and the waitlist opened Monday.

Goobit Blocktech has an agreement with Kvarn Capital Ltd, a Finnish crypto-asset service provider supervised by FIN-FSA, whose authorisation is passported across the EEA. Kvarn provides order execution, custody and transfer. Goobit handles product, brand, customer experience and distribution. Finansinspektionen refused Goobit's own MiCA application on 2 July and the appeal is still running, so the company states the launch does not depend on the outcome.

Only the crypto component is covered. The gold is intended to come from Kvarn Metals Ltd in the same group, and the interest-bearing component from a separate partner the announcement does not name.

Read →

The arrangement was not built for the occasion. Kvarn X Embedded is a finished product sold to partners across the EEA, marketed as crypto-as-a-service. The partner builds the interface and owns the customer relationship commercially; Kvarn executes, holds the assets and runs due diligence under its own authorisation.

Accounts are opened with Kvarn Capital, and users become Kvarn's clients. For a saver in Sweden or Norway, the brand on the screen may be Nordic while the contracting party is Finnish and supervision sits in Finland. Kvarn states that crypto-assets are not covered by investor compensation or deposit guarantee schemes.

The revenue model is a share of the trading fee. Kvarn's own calculator works from an illustrative 0.8 per cent fee and a 50 per cent partner share. Futureproof is sold as long-term saving, but the portfolio is rebalanced towards fixed target weights, and every rebalancing is a trade.

Crypto-as-a-service has until now been about exchanges selling compliance and custody expertise to banks that lack it — the premise of the KTH thesis we covered in July, and the model K33 has described. Goobit does not lack that expertise. The company states in its rights issue announcement that it has its own technical infrastructure and compliance function, built over fifteen years. What it lacks is the authorisation.

Kvarn does not say how many partners use the product, or who they are. Goobit is the first to be made public. Nor is it clear what vetting Kvarn applies to a partner a supervisor in the EEA has refused.

Read → · The July study → · K33's version →

Three answers to the same question in the space of a week.

Danmarks Nationalbank published an analysis on Wednesday. Stablecoin use in Denmark remains limited, it finds, but close monitoring is warranted. Wider use could affect payments, the financial system and the transmission of monetary policy. Foreign stablecoins gaining traction is the case it singles out.

The analysis →

All eight parliamentary parties answered Blockchain Sweden's survey before Sunday's vote. They broadly agree that blockchain belongs among Sweden's priority technologies. The question they agreed with least was whether Swedish firms should be able to offer stablecoins. Support for simpler crypto tax rules surprised the organisation, which will use the answers as a basis for conversations with the parties now that the election is over.

Read the story and watch the interview →

Visa holds a one-day stablecoin summit at the National Museum in Oslo on 6 October, and will present a report there. The programme runs from stablecoin foundations through use cases in the Norwegian market to regulation and a session on the path forward in the Nordics. By invitation, in English.

The summit →

Around 30 people met at Eversheds Sutherland in Stockholm on Wednesday morning: banks, infrastructure players, technology providers, consultants and lawyers, with Finansinspektionen in the discussion. The question was what it would take for one major Swedish financial institution to run tokenised securities in production — not a pilot — by the end of 2027.

The proposal is to bring the question into Finansinspektionen's Innovationskompass and work with a small group of market participants to identify what is already possible within FI's mandate, what needs clarification and where the obstacles lie. Questions sitting with Riksbanken, Skatteverket and others go into separate workstreams. The starting point is tokenisation and settlement of Swedish securities and cash in Sweden.

Tommy Andorff of Neuro spoke on end-to-end tokenisation, Tobias Lipfert of d-fine on why Germany is ahead. Moderator Hanna Raftell writes that there is growing recognition the Nordics are not at the forefront of this development — and that the question now is where, how and by whom the next generation of financial infrastructure gets built.

Read →

Nordic Blockchain Association holds Dansk Blockchain Forum at Christiansborg on Thursday 17 September, in cooperation with the Liberal Alliance party. It is the second year running the event is held inside parliament, and the morning gathers politics, business, finance and research around what is politically at stake for the industry in Denmark.

The organisers describe this year's edition as a shift. Where the forum previously dealt with the technology itself, the theme this time is growth, job creation and earnings if the industry gains real political backing.

Jakob Engel-Schmidt, minister for taxation and growth for Moderaterne, is speaking on crypto and taxation. Denmark has stood out in the Nordics with a tax policy unfavourable to crypto investments, which is why the talk is being watched. Tax enters from two other directions as well: Mads Strange, member of parliament and tax spokesperson for the Liberal Alliance, and Nele Rickelt, lawyer at ADVORA and chair of the Danish tax lawyers' association.

Joakim Bruchmann of Pluto Markets and Svante Hudák-Hildebrandt of Ultrasound Capital come from the investor and platform side, Mads Clemmensen from Danske Bank's digital assets desk, and Jacob Stenum Czepluch of Argot Collective from the developer side. Freja Brandhøj of Dansk Erhverv and Lars Lin Villebæk of Copenhagen Capacity cover growth and establishment policy.

The event is in Danish, seats are limited, and places are applied for through the organiser. The official agenda has not been published.

Who is speaking, and on what →

Three teams reached the final and presented at Demo Day in Kungsträdgården on Thursday. On Friday the team behind U-proof was named the winner and received SEK 10,000 in Amazon Web Services credit. Hadisa Anwari, Ashita Kolla, Eylül Balcilar and Catalina Pizarro answered the problem statement from UNICEF.

The answer turned on who gathers the documentation. Citizens capture it on site, and it can be verified and traced afterwards. The photo is taken inside the app rather than picked from the camera roll, with location and time attached automatically, and UNICEF reviews each submission before approving it.

The photo stays in UNICEF's own database. What is registered on Base is a digital fingerprint of it, together with area and time, so the documentation can be checked later without the photos sitting in the open. The team demonstrated it on a nutrition programme, where recipients photograph their meals. What was shown is a prototype built over the week, not something UNICEF has put into use.

When the team gave its thanks from the stage, Arun Maharajan of UNICEF was the first person they named. He was available to them all week, and they described that access as what got them over the line.

How U-proof works →

The other two finalists answered problem statements from AIMS-Management and the Swedish Red Cross. All three teams, from three different problem statements, arrived at the same question: how to establish that something is what it claims to be — documents, identity, content.

What the three built →

Twenty-seven firms tell the EU its tokenisation ceiling is far too low — Axiology and Swedish Fintech are among the signatories, alongside Nasdaq, Boerse Stuttgart and Securitize. They want the volume cap in the DLT Pilot Regime scrapped. The Commission proposes lifting it to €100 billion, which the letter calls far too low — some European projects already hold more than that. Read →

Three of twelve EBC12 finalists come from the region — Kryptos in Sweden, Lympid in Vilnius and &Volume in Finland are through to the Startup Battle final in Barcelona on 16 and 17 September. Read →

Valuno swaps debt for shares — Monday's general meeting approved two directed issues settled by set-off, so debt falls and equity rises without cash coming in. Netgraph subscribes for up to 100 million shares at SEK 0.1274. Interlace Sweden gets the same terms and is 80 per cent owned by chair Jörgen Eriksson, who stayed out of the board's handling. Both locked up for 24 months. Read →

A Vilnius housing development pays for its first stage with a bond — Novus Asset Management combined €7.7 million of equity, bank financing and a €2.855 million bond for the Bukčiai development. The bond was issued with Bondea, and Axiology registered it the same day it received the information and keeps the ownership records until maturity. Axiology's case study →

Traced Systems partners with The Hashgraph Group — the Copenhagen company puts Hedera-based cryptographic verification underneath the digital product passport layer it has built for battery and textile manufacturers. Most traceability tools record what a supply chain claims; the point of the partnership is proving the physical item matches the claim. The EU battery DPP deadline is 18 February 2027.

European Blockchain Convention — Barcelona, 16–17 September. https://eblockchainconvention.com/

Danish Blockchain Forum — Christiansborg, Fællessalen, Copenhagen, 17 September, 10:00–13:00. Nordic Blockchain Association with Liberal Alliance, bringing together business, finance, research and politics. Danske Bank's head of digital assets and the Danish tax and business ministers are on the programme.

BTCHEL — Kaapelitehdas, Helsinki, 25–26 September. The only bitcoin conference dedicated to the Nordics. The speaker list is being published as it fills, with Francis Pouliot of Bull Bitcoin among the names. Kaupr has been there before, and recommends it. https://btchel.com/

Nordic Fintech Week — 25–26 September. Running since 2017, with the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Invest in Denmark and e-Estonia among the partners. [By mangler] https://nfweek.com/

Crypto killer apps — Oslo, 14 October, 17:30–18:30. Polyteknisk Forening with Bitcoin Policy Institute Norway. Svein Grimholt (Babel), Ken Siva Lie (Norges Bank), Jakob Notland (Riften Labs), Torkel Rogstad (Bare Bitcoin), Silvija Seres and Morten Søberg. NOK 239 for non-members. https://www.polyteknisk.no/program/crypto-killer-apps

UN:BLOCK Fintech Forum — Fantadroms, Riga, 15 October. Agentic payments, MiCA licensing, PSD3, DORA and tokenisation. Over 600 attendees expected. €99. https://ti.to/unblock/fintech

In Stockholm in early September, the problems were written first. UNICEF, the Red Cross, the World Food Programme and a company that manages influencers set them out, and the technology was brought in afterwards to answer them. That is the reverse of how blockchain has usually worked, and of the charge that has followed it for a decade. Nine and a half minutes on what the order changes — and on why tokenisation is three different things pretending to be one.

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Morten Founder & Editor, Kaupr