Firi’s furloughs run to March · a Finnish licence banks can use

Firi has confirmed that the furloughs announced in August run until the end of March. The largest crypto exchange in the Nordics has met resistance this year for the first time in several — and is appointing a product director while thirteen of its people wait.

A Finnish company is selling its MiCA licence as infrastructure, so banks can offer crypto without applying for one. It already sits under both the bitcoin and the gold in Goobit's coming savings product.

A reconstruction from Cointegrity finds that no private key left Binance when $6.3 billion did. What the attacker took was the system that decides what gets signed.

And Visa's chief executive named a Norwegian company from the stage at the quarterly earnings call. The world's first stablecoin-linked Visa Flex Credential is coming in Europe, he said, and it is coming with NBX.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

Firi has confirmed that the furloughs announced in August run until the end of March 2027. Thirteen of 58 full-time equivalents were furloughed, and chief executive Thuc Hoang points to the statutory ceiling: a furlough can last up to 26 weeks, and for those furloughed at Firi that means the end of March.

In the same period the company has appointed Dino Cehajic as chief product officer. He came from Eika, where he spent three years. His background is in product and business development, and in product and project leadership across banking, insurance, communications and retail, with work experience from Norway, Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He holds a master's degree in political science from the University of Vienna.

Kaupr understands that at least three people in senior roles have left Firi since September and started new jobs. Christian Etholm, head of marketing from December 2024, started at Ohma this week. Lennart Wilke, head of markets from January 2025, has joined Accenture, and has also taken a role lecturing at the University of Gdansk. Per Morten Sandstad, head of information security from July 2025, is now a senior security consultant at mnemonic.

Banks, brokers, fintechs and wallet apps can offer trading, custody and transfer of more than 300 crypto-assets against the euro — including bitcoin, ether and MiCA-compliant stablecoins — through a single API from Kvarn Capital.

The partner keeps its own brand and its own customer experience. Kvarn handles order execution across multiple venues, custody, transfers and compliance, and keeps the regulatory responsibility, the customer relationship and the best-execution obligation.

Kvarn Capital is authorised under MiCA as both a crypto-asset service provider and a payment institution, supervised by Finland's FIN-FSA, and passports that authorisation across the EEA. A partner can enter several markets without separate local licences.

Kvarn was co-founded by Joonas Järvinen.

How the arrangement works →

Goobit has signed a gold supply agreement for Futureproof, which means both of the asset classes it needs to launch are in place. The interest-bearing part comes later.

The supplier is Kvarn Metals in Helsinki, in the same group as Kvarn Capital, which supplies the bitcoin. Gold holdings are backed one to one by physical gold, with Kvarn Metals holding title to gold equal to the total of customer holdings in custody. Kvarn Metals provides no advice or portfolio management.

That leaves customers exposed to Kvarn Metals' ability to meet its obligations, on top of the price risk in gold and bitcoin.

"Gold has been part of Futureproof from the start, together with bitcoin," says Goobit's chief executive Gustav Buder.

Goobit secures the gold →

Kvarn X Academy is a free, interactive investing school for beginners: a test they call Investor DNA that maps your investor profile, a course path in three levels, quizzes, calculators and a daily market overview.

Kvarn X Academy →

Torstein Thinn at Cointegrity, which analyses major incidents in the sector for banks, regulators and police, has reconstructed the hack independently. His conclusion runs against most of what has been repeated since: "no private key appears to have left Binance."

What the attacker took control of was Binance's internal system for requesting signatures — the thing that decides what gets signed. Seventeen Binance wallets across ten chains, using at least two signature types and separate key stores, issued valid signatures to attacker addresses inside about thirty minutes. "A hijacked system for requesting signatures explains seventeen," Thinn writes.

On Ethereum the route was EIP-7702, live since May 2025, which lets a wallet delegate its behaviour to a smart contract through a signed authorisation. The attacker sent fifty such authorisations in a single transaction on 29 October, then drained the Binance 14 wallet of about $2.53 billion in one more. Binance's deposit systems kept sending customer funds into that wallet, and the attacker kept withdrawing.

Ethereum worked as designed, Thinn writes. A valid signature from the wallet's own key was misused; the network was not at fault.

He is careful about what is not established. Binance's explanation has changed three times without a confirmed root cause. TRM Labs and Chainalysis tie the attack to the North Korea-linked TraderTraitor group with high confidence and Elliptic calls it probable, but Thinn notes the on-chain evidence is weak and no government has attributed it publicly.

Thinn's reconstruction →

Andreas Severin, chief strategy officer at the Swedish ETP issuer Virtune, reads the hack as a verdict on centralised exchanges. "If we look at the whole crypto ecosystem, it's once again the exchanges that have proven to be a weak point here," he says.

He points to the Bybit hack last year, also attributed to TraderTraitor, and argues the case for stricter exchange regulation under MiCA is stronger for it. No MiCA-licensed exchange has been hacked, he says, and Binance was denied a MiCA licence last year over security weaknesses — a link he does not think is a coincidence, while stopping short of claiming a licence would have prevented this.

"MiCA is now, for the first time, fully implemented in almost all EU member states," he says.

Severin on what the hack says about MiCA →

Karina Rothoff Brix of Firi and Jesper Munk of Dansk Krypto Nyt took the hack apart on their podcast Ugens Kryptosnak. Their reading: a Binance developer's computer was compromised, and the attacker used that access to redirect funds.

"The blockchain hasn't been hacked," Rothoff Brix says. "It's about a person having given access to something malicious inside the systems."

Around half the stolen funds were frozen quickly, partly because Tether and Circle halted the relevant stablecoin addresses. The pair put the mild market reaction down to fast, transparent handling and an industry that has seen this before.

The panel on what actually broke →

We are still following this, and the Nordic angles as they come. Everything we have on the hack is collected here.

The latest on the Binance hack →

Ryan McInerney, chief executive of Visa, named NBX in his prepared remarks at the company's quarterly earnings call on 27 October.

"We will also soon be launching the world's first stablecoin-linked Visa Flex Credential with Norwegian Block Exchange, or NBX, in Europe," he said.

He said it straight after reporting that Flex Credential volume has tripled in a year, and after naming Cash App and Chime as new partners.

The term Visa uses is Flex Credential, and the one that matters in the sentence is stablecoin-linked. This is not only the first in Europe — it is the first of its kind anywhere.

It is also not live. McInerney said "will also soon be launching".

Visa's quarterly earnings call →

NBX has drawn at least NOK 34 million from the Los Angeles firm LDA Capital across ten rounds since 2022. The latest, NOK 6.8 million, closed on 3 November.

The agreement, signed in September 2022, lets NBX raise up to NOK 100 million in equity over several years. It works as a committed equity facility — a share-based credit line the company draws on when it chooses. NBX issues a notice for a set number of shares, a pricing period follows, and LDA must subscribe at the resulting price. NBX can set a minimum price for each drawdown, which it says gives it control over dilution.

Observatoriet Invest AS, linked to board member Bjørn Kjos, lends shares to LDA as a bridge until new shares are formally issued, without interest or fee.

The money has gone to bitcoin purchases and to statutory capital requirements, among them the capital behind the e-money licence and the MiCA authorisation NBX is seeking. In June 2025 the company extended the agreement by three years and drew one million euros to buy ten bitcoin. Rounds have come roughly every other month since.

Share capital stood at 366,419,032 shares after three rounds disclosed in July 2026. Prices per share have ranged from NOK 0.38 to NOK 0.78; the November round was the lowest at NOK 0.47. The NOK 34 million is a floor: it counts only rounds where both share count and price were disclosed.

How NBX has been funding itself →

Bitcoin Suisse (Europe) AG opened in the Nordics on 3 November, aimed at high-net-worth individuals, companies, family offices, institutional investors, and issuers and financial institutions looking for a custody partner.

Clients trade and hold crypto assets directly in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish kronor, each with a dedicated adviser, with staking offered alongside. The European subsidiary holds a MiCA licence from the Financial Market Authority Liechtenstein and serves clients across the EU and EEA on that passport.

The two Nordic leads come from the industry here. Ammy Edberg sits on the board of the Swedish Bitcoin Association and founded the bitcoin education firm BTChick, and worked with clients at Goobit before this. Kristoffer Nyström spent nearly four years in Zug, rising to Head of Crypto Solutions, and was most recently Head of Sales at the Danish fintech Januar.

The group has offered crypto services since 2013, holds more than CHF 3 billion in client crypto assets and employs over 200 people across Switzerland, the EEA, the UAE and Bermuda.

Bitcoin Suisse opens in the Nordics →

Bitpanda now lets users ask an AI assistant about their holdings in crypto, stocks, funds and precious metals. The app connection is read-only; the company's own MCP server goes further and lets an assistant place orders within limits the user sets.

Coop Bank Investering in Denmark lets investment customers connect their accounts to ChatGPT or Claude and ask about their investments — dividends received, price alerts. The connection is started by the customer and can be removed at any time. Neither arrangement lets the assistant trade or move money on its own.

Both run on the Model Context Protocol, the open standard that lets an assistant read from and act in an outside service without every service building its own integration for every model.

Kristian Mikkelsen, chief operating officer at Coop Bank, announced the bank's offering on LinkedIn.

What the two have opened up →

Kryptos, which tracks crypto holdings and calculates tax across wallets and exchanges, has connected user portfolios to ChatGPT. Users can ask about portfolio value, cost basis and gains. The connection is read-only and cannot move funds, and it needs a paid ChatGPT plan.

Founder Sukesh Kumar Tedla says the company has built more than 5,500 integrations into a single record. His advice to users is to check first for transactions missing prices or purchase history — one gap is enough to distort a gain calculation.

How the connection works →

Sweden's Government Offices, which support the prime minister and the ministries, stopped staff using ChatGPT and Claude through a browser on work computers from 26 October. Employees are directed to Microsoft Copilot, which the agency says it has tightened security on. A limited number keep access through the Stockholm company Intric, whose servers are in Sweden and which won a Government Offices contract in July.

The review followed an internal audit at the Swedish Transport Administration, which found widespread use of around ten AI services and raised concerns both about the sensitivity of what staff entered and how they handled the answers. The Tax Agency and the National Board of Institutional Care have introduced similar blocks, and the Enforcement Authority is reviewing it.

"Using AI services without an agreement can have consequences for our information security," says Mikael Wettercrantz, director of digitalisation at the Government Offices.

What Sweden has blocked →

Agion, a Helsinki AI company founded in 2025, and the Stockholm-based SIROS Foundation are building infrastructure to establish who an AI agent is, what it is permitted to do, and whether it has authority to act for an organisation at all.

The example in the piece is an agent placing a supplier order: it would have to show that it represents the company, and that it may buy within set limits.

The work has three parts. Verifiable identity and delegation, so an agent's authority can be checked independently of the organisation that granted it. Governed execution, tying those permissions to internal policy and controls while the task runs. And open interoperability, connecting SIROS's open identity infrastructure to Agion's platform through open standards rather than a single vendor.

Agion is led by Janne Pulkkinen, who ran AI projects at Kela in Finland. SIROS was founded in February 2025 by Stina Ehrensvärd, co-founder of Yubico, and is run by executive director Leif Johansson.

What the two are building →

Finansinspektionen has chosen tokenised money and DLT-based payments as the next theme in Innovationskompassen, the guidance process it started in December 2025. It is now recruiting a reference group, which will meet in four to five joint workshops. The deadline to register interest is 22 November.

The group is aimed at companies and others with experience of, or concrete plans in, tokenised money and DLT-based payments — among them issuers of MiCA e-money tokens, tokenised bank funds, and payment solutions tied to tokenised shares and bonds. FI selects for relevance and for a broad mix.

Blockchain Sweden has pushed the question towards FI through the autumn, starting from its own tokenisation roundtable in September.

What FI is asking for →

Ted Scheiman, who runs Firi in Sweden, argues in Dagens Industri that what happens in Washington matters to the estimated one million Swedes who hold crypto — and that Sweden should not copy the American model.

The Clarity Act, which would have clarified the division of responsibility between the SEC and the CFTC, did not get enough support in the Senate. That left the industry without the legislation that would have given it long-term rules, Scheiman writes.

The agencies have carried on without it. The SEC and CFTC have new leadership and are working through guidelines, exemptions and relief — among them a time-limited exemption for certain trading venues that want to offer trading in tokenised shares. He objects that this room can close again when the political direction changes, and a company investing in a new service needs to know what the rules will be later, not only now.

For Sweden, he writes, the lesson is not to choose between the two. The EU has set common rules through MiCA, which requires authorisation and sets conditions for customer information and the handling of customer assets, but which protects nobody against a fall in value. Rules that are too restrictive or too vague slow new services down; rules that change easily create uncertainty.

Scheiman in Dagens Industri → (in Swedish)

The Lithuanian e-money institution VIALET can now safeguard client funds in tokenised money market funds from Axiology, alongside the bank accounts and high-grade government bonds it already used. The point is to spread risk beyond individual banks and earn a return on money that still has to stay available.

Axiology runs a regulated system for trading and settling digital securities under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime, which is what gives VIALET the route in. It also arranged a separate agreement with an outside liquidity provider so VIALET gets intraday cash without changing the funds' redemption terms — payments settle around the clock, money market funds do not.

VIALET manages about €150 million and processed €5.5 billion in gross payment volume over the past twelve months. Its chief executive is Mantas Staliūnas; Axiology's is Marius Jurgilas.

What VIALET and Axiology have done →

Bitcoinpolitisk Institutt Norge wants the Government Pension Fund Global to be more open about the indirect bitcoin exposure it already has, and wants Folketrygdfondet to consider setting capital aside to invest directly in bitcoin and other digital assets. Both proposals have gone to parties in the Storting, and BPI meets the Finance Ministry in early November.

Secretary-general Morten Søberg argues that the dollar is increasingly used as a political instrument, which makes bitcoin a geopolitically neutral alternative.

Silvija Seres, who has sat on several large company boards, said Norwegian authorities and banks have been too cautious, and tied it to preparedness: "We talk so much about preparedness, but we talk about it very abstractly." She pointed to Norway's reliance on Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay and Alipay, and to bitcoin mining as a way to balance power grids.

BPI is also working with the Human Rights Foundation on remittances. In El Salvador remittances are about a quarter of GDP, and such transfers cost around 6 per cent on average against a UN target of 3.

The institute has grown from 150 members in June to 265, with 52 joining in the past month.

What BPI is asking for →

Sofia Bobadilla, a doctoral student, and Martin Monperrus, professor of software technology, both at KTH in Stockholm, presented at the DeFi Security Summit in Mumbai on 1 November.

Their work, published as a preprint in August with Humaira Afrin and Angela Novelli, tests whether invariants — properties that must always hold during execution — would have stopped attacks that have already happened. They built a benchmark of 28 real Ethereum exploits, each paired with an invariant written to block it, and a framework that replays transactions to check the invariant holds. The invariants block all 28, validated across 108,637 replayed transactions.

The preprint →

Magnus Jones was on a panel in Munich called "All ways lead to Rome: Pontes, Appia & the necessary marriage of Financial & Technical Sovereignty", alongside Dolf Diederichsen of Hyphe, Jens Hermann Paulsen of Deloitte and Jork Leonhardt of corpus.core. The questions he set out beforehand: how Pontes develops as Appia is built, where the bridges go, who controls them, and whether the traffic can be handled. ComplyOnce and Raido Saar were there too.

Joakim Bruchmann, co-founder and chief executive of the Copenhagen neobroker Pluto.markets, spoke to Polit Invest at the University of Copenhagen on 27 October — the student investment society at the faculty he graduated from ten years ago.

Jesper Johansen, founder and chief executive of Northstake, says things are going well and that the company is short of four to six desks, preferably in central Copenhagen.

Live online on Wednesday 11 November, 11:00–12:30 CET. A Kaupr session with FirstBlock-athon Stockholm on what happens to hackathon work after the weekend is over, and what it takes to turn it into something that runs. Free.

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Thanks for reading the fifteenth edition of Onchain Growth.

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Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr