This week
Three months after handing over Lunar, Ken Villum Klausen has spent a week introducing a team for a company still in stealth. Eighteen people, an unreasonable amount of compute, and a promise that the secret runs out this week.
In Norway, KPMG traced NOK 700 million through the addresses behind an international fraud network for NRK, while NFCERT explains what the industry is doing to stop the money before it leaves.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute Norway has adopted a work programme running to June 2027, and K33 takes an option on 200 bitcoin through its Canadian holding.
And further down, a first proper introduction to Kaupr Weekly, the podcast that has been running on the Kaupr Today side since the spring.
Morten Founder & Editor, Kaupr
Blockathon preparations continue
Blockathon Stockholm pre-event 2 — Thursday 27 August
Following last week's session on blockchain beyond finance, Kaupr and FirstBlock return on Thursday for the second of three virtual pre-events ahead of FirstBlock-athon in Stockholm. 11:00–12:30 CET.
We go deeper into the challenge categories, how teams are forming, and what to expect when Stockholm opens its doors in September. Free, live on Kaupr's own channels and on YouTube, hosted and moderated by Kaupr.
Missed the first one?
More than 100 signed up for pre-event 1 on 20 August, with Fati Hakim (FirstBlock), Ludvig Bergström (Nordic Tech Week), Hani Raisi Halilovic (AI Institutet), Madina Saleh (AIMS Management), Melanie Rideout (Swedish Red Cross) and Arun Maharajan (UNICEF). Moderated by Zarina Björklund Rehn and Morten Myrstad.
After Lunar, into stealth
Ken Villum Klausen counts to eighteen
The Lunar founder has spent the past week posting from inside a company still in stealth. Four people around a café table, fourteen more at the office, and a photograph he introduced by noting how hard it is to look natural after months of sitting on the same secret.
Four of the eighteen. Source: Ken Villum Klausen's LinkedIn
Three months since he handed over the bank
Klausen stepped down as chief executive of Lunar on 11 May, after eleven years. He founded the challenger bank in 2015 and left it as the largest in the Nordics with more than a million private customers, a MiCA CASP licence — the first for any bank or crypto platform in Scandinavia — and DKK 350 million raised in January. Søren Kyhl took over in June.
His reasoning at the time was that the best moment for a founder to pass the baton is when things are working, not when they are not.
Why do it again
On starting over, Klausen lists what he had sworn never to do again: raise money, hire fast, bet everything on one idea. You do not start another company because the first one was fun, he writes. You do it because you run into a problem so structurally absurd that you cannot unsee it — and then you are hiring people and signing a lease.
What kind of company
The clearest signal on direction comes from a post by Klausen titled A field guide.
"Some industries will adopt AI. A few will be rebuilt by it, from scratch."
A separate post describes a room that was empty a few weeks ago and now holds a small group of people with an unreasonable amount of compute. Taking on an incumbent used to take hundreds of people, he writes. Now it takes a handful of very good ones and the machines to match. Small teams, in his words, have never been this dangerous.
The team he is naming
Three of the eighteen have been introduced, all as Member of Technical Staff. Thomas Bøgh Fangel, who worked with Klausen for close to ten years at Lunar. Nicolai Kobber, roughly eight years alongside him. Alexander Kledal, close to seven years, who left for Uber and has now come back — which, as Klausen puts it, should tell you something when someone leaves a place like that for a company that does not publicly exist yet.
The ambition
The Nordics have built category-defining companies before, Klausen writes. This time, he says, the ambition was never regional. If anything, the opposite.
Thursday
Klausen said on Friday that the reveal comes this week. His LinkedIn headline currently reads "Loading at TBD". On Thursday he is on stage at Future of Fintech at TechBBQ in Copenhagen, in a fireside chat titled Starting Again: Building from Zero After Lunar, from 10:40 to 11:00.
Norway's fraud networks, traced and prevented
KPMG traced NOK 700 million for NRK
Arild Fernandez Møller-Holst and the Forensic & Security team at KPMG Norway assisted NRK's investigation into an international fraud network, tracing crypto assets onward from the fraudsters' deposit addresses.
Arild Fernandez Møller-Holst
The analysis found that the addresses where the money flows ended up had received crypto worth NOK 700 million in total. Møller-Holst calls it an example of what combining expertise from different professional communities makes possible when untangling complex networks, and credits Martin Gundersen, Dan Kåre Engebretsen and the NRK team behind the documentary Svindeljakten.
NFCERT on preventing the fraud
Johanne Andresen, financial crime prevention specialist at NFCERT and a former colleague of Møller-Holst at KPMG, went on NRK's Helgemorgen to discuss the same investigation from the prevention side.
Fraud does not happen in isolation
Behind many of these schemes are large, professional criminal networks involved not only in fraud but in drug trafficking and identity theft — and in the most serious cases, potentially terrorist financing.
"Hi Mum, Hi Dad"
Andresen points to a rise in targeted impersonation fraud, where criminals pose as someone's child or another close family member to manipulate victims into transferring money. Member institutions are reporting an increase. With AI, she says, the impersonation attempts are becoming harder to tell apart from a genuine message, voice or video.
What the regulation does
She points to the coming Payment Services Regulation, and specifically Article 83a and its framework for cross-border sharing of fraud-related data across the EU. NFCERT operates the Nordic data-sharing hub built for that purpose.
Bitcoin Policy Institute Norway gets a work plan
BPI Norway adopts its programme through June 2027
The Bitcoin Policy Institute Norway has published the work programme approved by its annual meeting, covering the period to June 2027.
Morten Søberg, Secretary General in BPI Norway
The political work
Three priorities: tax and duty policy for bitcoin used as a means of payment, state investment in and testing of bitcoin as a store of value, and framework conditions for mining in Norway. The institute will work towards the Ministry of Finance, the Financial Supervisory Authority and the Storting, and take part in public consultations.
Nordic reach
The programme includes establishing contact with Danish and Swedish politicians working on bitcoin policy. A research project funded by the Human Rights Foundation is to be completed in the period.
A second Satoshi address
A new Satoshi Nakamoto Annual Speech is scheduled for February 2027. The first was held in February this year at the National Library in Oslo, to a full house, with Thomas Eichenberger of Sygnum Bank as the main speaker. Satoshi conversations are planned in Bergen, Oslo, Stavanger and Trondheim. The membership target before the next annual meeting is 500.
The first Satoshi Nakamoto Annual Speech at the National Library in Oslo. Thomas Eichenberger of Sygnum Bank (centre), flanked by Morten Søberg (left) and Svein Ølnes (right). Photo: Kaupr
Read the programme → In Norwegian
Bitcoin on the balance sheet
K33 takes an option on 200 bitcoin in Canada
Sixty Six Capital, in which K33 owns around 46 percent, has been granted a call option on up to 200 bitcoin at a strike of USD 100,000 each. On that ownership share, the option corresponds to up to 92 bitcoin in additional effective exposure for K33.
The terms
The option runs for twelve months and can be exercised once, for between 100 and 200 bitcoin, until 21 August 2027. Settlement is by physical delivery onchain. The counterparty is K33 Holding AS.
K33 Holding has hedged the price risk
K33 Holding states that it is fully hedged against the bitcoin price in the agreement, and receives a non-refundable premium of USD 1,932,000 covering the cost of the hedge and a fee for arranging it. K33's financial result will be the premium less the cost and return on the hedge.
"This is a clear example of the synergies we expected from the investment in Sixty Six," says Torbjørn Bull Jenssen, chief executive of both companies.
From fund units to bitcoin onchain
Sixty Six has sold out of the Purpose Bitcoin ETF and repaid CAD 2,963,974.4 in financing. The remaining net proceeds go towards paying for the option and buying bitcoin directly, moving the existing exposure from fund units to bitcoin the company holds itself.
What look-through means
K33 notes that effective look-through exposure is an analytical measure, calculated by multiplying its ownership share by Sixty Six's bitcoin exposure. The 92 bitcoin figure is not bitcoin K33 owns directly.
From Kaupr Weekly - the podcast
Kaupr Weekly — three episodes since the summer, five before them
Kaupr Weekly has been running since the spring. If you have not come across it, that is fair enough — it lives on the Kaupr Today side of the house, and this is Onchain Growth. But eight episodes in, it is worth knowing it exists.
Episode 8: Compute as an Asset Class Two of the world's largest exchanges and six of the largest financial institutions are doing it this autumn. The episode ends on a question about who builds the products, and who just houses the machines.
Episode 8: Compute as an Asset Class — Nvidia, BlackRock, and the Price of Computing Power
In this episode of Kaupr Weekly, host Morten Myrstad looks at what happens when buyers start purchasing computing power they have no intention of using. Oil, electricity and freight all made the same journey. None of them stopped being a cost — every c...
Kaupr Today • Kaupr Today
Episode 7: The Everything Exchanges Coinbase has a name for where this is heading — one venue, every asset class, one settlement. The episode asks how many different players are now building toward it, and what it means that crypto exchanges, stock exchanges, brokers, neobanks and token issuers have all arrived at the same idea from different directions. Listen →
Episode 6: The Internet of Money Is Here The money layer for machines is not a plan any more. An asset manager has called agentic AI the killer use case for blockchain, the payment standard for it has a foundation behind it, and Cloudflare has given AI agents an identity and a wallet. The episode is about what that adds up to, and what it took to see it. Listen →
Ten minutes, no guests
Hosted by Morten Myrstad, out at the weekend. One voice connecting the week's biggest stories in crypto, fintech, stablecoins and payments — not just what happened, but what it means and where it is heading.
Five earlier episodes are on today.kaupr.io/listen. Also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Industry notes
Januar gains direct access to central bank payment infrastructure — The Danish company can now participate directly in the SEPA schemes, cutting commercial intermediaries out of parts of the euro payment chain. It builds on the PSD2 payment institution licence and MiCA authorisation the company already holds. Read more →
Axiology named on both ECB tokenisation tracks — The Latvian company is among the first DLT operators on Pontes, the platform linking distributed ledger infrastructure to settlement in central bank money ahead of the September launch, alongside Clearstream, SWIAT and Cashlink. Axiology is the only one selected for both Pontes and the longer-term Appia track. Read more →
Kryptos among twelve finalists in the EBC12 Startup Battle — The Swedish company will present on stage in Barcelona in September, in front of an investor panel including Speedinvest, Animoca Brands, SBI Ventures Europe and Polymorphic Capital. Read more →
Pluto Markets nominated for EY Entrepreneur Of The Year — Co-founder and chief executive Joakim Bruchmann confirms the nomination in the growth category in Denmark for 2026. Read more →
REWRK introduces Fluid Content — The company, part of Norwegian Klein Group, breaks stories into individual pieces of information and reassembles them depending on context, audience, timing and available data. The coming REWRK Researcher 2.0 is to turn existing content databases into a foundation for the same approach. Read more →
Events - recently and going forward
Coming up
Blockathon Stockholm pre-event 2 — Online and free, 27 August, 11:00–12:30 CET. https://onchain.kaupr.io/products/blockathon-stockholm-pre-event-2-august-27
Future of Fintech at TechBBQ — Copenhagen, 27 August, 09:30–13:00, Bella Center. Ken Villum Klausen in a fireside chat, Starting Again: Building from Zero After Lunar, at 10:40. Requires a TechBBQ ticket. https://techbbq.dk/future-of-fintech/
Blockchain Sweden and SIS, lunch webinar — Online and free, 1 September, 12:00–12:30. https://luma.com/g1eo3onc
Blockchain, stablecoins and tokenisation — Copenhagen, 7 September, from 13:30. Finansforeningen / CFA Society Denmark, with Jan Damsgaard (CBS), Mohamad Zaraket (BNY), Michael Boel (Banking Circle) and Samuel Eddie Mogensen (Danmarks Nationalbank). In Danish. https://cfa.dk/event/blockchain-stablecoins-og-tokenisering/
FirstBlock-athon Hack Day — Stockholm, 7 September. https://luma.com/FirstBlock-athon
AI x Blockchain Summit — KTH Arenan, Stockholm, 11 September. https://luma.com/ai-blockchain-summit
European Blockchain Convention — Barcelona, 16–17 September. https://eblockchainconvention.com/
BTCHEL — Helsinki, 25–26 September. https://btchel.com/
Crypto killer apps — Oslo, 14 October, 17:30–18:30. Polyteknisk Forening with Bitcoin Policy Institute Norway. https://www.polyteknisk.no/program/crypto-killer-apps
UN:BLOCK Fintech Forum — Riga, 15 October. https://ti.to/unblock/fintech
Explore Onchain by Kaupr
Thanks for reading the fourth edition of Onchain Growth.
We're here to follow the industry and community driving onchain finance forward across the Nordics and Baltics — and we're just getting started.
Morten Founder & Editor, Kaupr