Latvia rewrites its crypto tax · the community showed up in Riga and Oslo

Latvia's parliament has rewritten how crypto investments are taxed, and an adviser to the prime minister says the country intends to start accepting tax payments in crypto next year.

In Oslo, seven people spent an evening on what the applications built after bitcoin actually let you do — a wine shop that takes nothing else, prediction markets that have reached CNN, crowdfunding that no platform can freeze, and a central bank engineer explaining why Norway is not getting a CBDC.

Norges Bank has counted how many Norwegians know what a stablecoin is. The number has nearly doubled in two years, to 19 per cent — and of those, 72 per cent have never bought one.

And Onchain Finance by Kaupr is out with its first issue.

Morten Founder & Editor, Kaupr

Latvia's parliament passed a new model for taxing crypto investments on 15 October. Withdrawals from a crypto investment account are now taxed only when they exceed what was paid in, instead of every trade being taxed. The law also creates a one-time declaration.

Holders with unsettled tax can clear it by paying 10 per cent of the market value of their declared assets as at the end of 2026. Declarations are filed between 1 April and 31 May 2027, and the tax falls due on 23 July.

Didzis Dejus, adviser to the prime minister on strategic planning and the new economy, says the one-time declaration is meant for people who bought crypto years ago and have no record of what they paid.

Dejus told CoinDesk that the Finance Ministry has agreed to let residents pay personal taxes in crypto, and that technical work with a payment provider is under way. He expects it next year, and says Latvia is willing to move faster than others to attract crypto businesses. He did not name the provider, or say which cryptocurrencies would qualify.

Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs' United List won the election on 3 October and is expected to be renominated, but still needs coalition partners. CoinDesk writes that it had not heard back from the Finance Ministry.

Dejus said it at UN:BLOCK Fintech Forum in Riga.

CoinDesk on the new Latvian rules →

Latvia has issued more MiCA licences than Lithuania and Estonia combined. Part of the explanation was on display in Riga last week, in a hall with 700 people in it: the central bank was there itself — on stage, in the room, and on social media afterwards.

Latvijas Banka ran its own workshop, "Practical Guide – Fintech License with bank of Latvia", with five of its own experts: Agnese Alaine, Maija Darzniece, Evija Ence, Beāte Krauze and Daiga Birite. Jānis Katkovskis, who heads the payment systems operations division, set out the payment services the central bank provides to financial institutions. The bank also sat on the panel on cross-border payments, alongside Bolt, Paybis, Nexpay and SEB.

Afterwards it posted about it: effective supervision starts with open dialogue, and it wants to be accessible and predictable towards market participants navigating the licensing process.

The first UN:BLOCK Fintech Forum filled Fantadroms on 15 October with 700 founders, banking leaders, regulators, investors and industry professionals. The programme ran from putting Latvia's dormant capital to work to cross-border payments, MiCA licensing and digital identity.

"A new direction for us. One day, one stage, and a different crowd: fintech professionals and retail investors in the same room as the regulators shaping EU finance," writes Davis Dargelis of the UN:BLOCK team. "The questions from the floor were sharp, the panels were honest, and the networking ran well past the last session." He credits Reinis Znotiņš, Julija Kane and Karlis Drikis with putting it together in record time.

Polyteknisk Forening and Bitcoinpolitisk Institutt Norge put seven people on a stage in Oslo on 14 October to answer one question: what can you do with the applications built after bitcoin that you could not do before?

Silvija Seres opened by admitting she had believed for a while that bitcoin was the noise and blockchain the signal. That turned out to be wrong.

Svein Grimholt of Babel took prediction markets. The difference from a sportsbook is that you bet against other users rather than the house, so there is no built-in edge and the market sets the odds.

Markets are binary. A yes share at 60 cents means the market puts the outcome at 60 per cent, and shares settle at a dollar or nothing.

He pointed to research from the University of Iowa finding these markets closer to the actual outcome than polls taken in the same period 74 per cent of the time. CNN and the Wall Street Journal have partnered with them, and Robinhood and Coinbase now offer them.

Dominik Langer's starting point was that bitcoin buys conference tickets, mining hardware and financial products, and very little else.

His answer is 21 Wines: a fine wine shop that takes bitcoin and nothing else, no stablecoins and no cards, launched in August and stocked through a partner shop in Frankfurt. The exception is sats vouchers, bought with a card and denominated in satoshis, so someone can be given their first bitcoin without setting up a wallet.

He is in real estate by trade, cannot code, and built the site with AI after giving up on getting bitcoin prices to work in Shopify.

His argument for spending rather than holding is circulation: after each halving the security budget rests on fees, and fees come from transactions. Cigars are next.

Ken Siva Lie was hired by Norges Bank three years ago to work on phase five of its CBDC project, after co-founding one of Norway's first over-the-counter crypto exchanges in 2017 — built because buying bitcoin in Norway meant going into a chat channel.

Phase five ran two sandboxes, retail and wholesale, and then a bridge between them, because the question is how value moves between ledgers when Europe is building one and England is building one. Bridges, he said, are dangerous. They are the place where things go wrong.

They tested the hard version first, with several ledgers, found it hard, and lost the benefits of the technology doing it. Retail was set aside: problems without good answers, and no identified need.

The conclusion stands that introducing a CBDC is not currently warranted. Since January the work has shifted to interbank tokenisation, with a reference group of large Norwegian banks working to half-year plans.

Artur Michel told the Swiss story as a sequence: builders first in Crypto Valley, then FINMA setting rules, then the banks.

PostFinance, where he works, began offering crypto to its 2.5 million customers in early 2024. A portfolio opens inside the ordinary bank account in minutes, with 22 cryptocurrencies, savings plans, ether staking and transfers in from hardware wallets.

That last one is what walks through the door. The day before, a customer had called wanting to move between 10 and 50 bitcoin off a hardware wallet he no longer trusted. He was an elderly man.

Asked what Norway could learn, Michel's answer followed from that: get the banks to offer it, because a bank carries a trust a crypto platform does not.

Jakob Notland of Riften Labs opened with five names — Save the Children, the Ukrainian government, WikiLeaks, Freedom Preppers and the Nigerian campaign against police brutality — and asked what they have in common. All of them raise money in crypto.

His case rests on three failures of ordinary crowdfunding platforms. Donors have to identify themselves, and some have reason not to. Fees run 5 to 10 per cent before currency conversion. And campaigns can be frozen, leaving neither side with the money.

He did not hedge on the drawbacks. The donor needs crypto in the first place, and nobody holds a campaign to its promises. His own company does not run campaigns — it published the code, and whoever uses it hosts their own.

Morten Søberg closed on monetary art, by way of Warhol's dollar bills, Joseph Beuys's banknote inscribed "Kunst = Kapital", and the Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa, convicted in the 1960s for using real banknotes in his work and answering with zero-yen notes.

One bitcoin is a hundred million satoshis, and ordinals let each one be numbered like a banknote and inscribed with text, pictures or sound. Sotheby's and Christie's have auctioned them, which is what turns an inscribed satoshi into art.

Money has always carried inscriptions, he said — coins as small metallic manuscripts, banknotes as something richer. Bitcoin began as a unit of account. Now it has that layer too.

Suela Kristiansen, special adviser at Norges Bank, runs the central bank's survey of crypto assets in Norway. She started it in 2022 and it now runs every other year. Presenting the latest round at the Visa stablecoin summit in Oslo, she asked the room for what the survey cannot reach: the bank has no good data on how Norwegian institutions use stablecoins.

19 per cent of Norwegians have heard of stablecoins, up from 10 per cent in 2024. Among them, 72 per cent have never bought one — up from 56 per cent two years ago. Men are around four times as likely as women to have heard of them.

Stablecoins are often called transparent because transactions are on-chain. Kristiansen pointed out that addresses are usually not tied to identities, so users are pseudonymous — which matters both for regulation and for issuers.

Kristiansen on what the survey found → ·
More from the Visa Stablecoin Summit, in Onchain Finance →

Onchain Finance by Kaupr published its first issue on 15 October, a joint edition for both its lists. Invest and Money alternate from here.

The people in this industry rarely do one thing. The same person builds, invests, runs payments and advises others, and the questions change depending on which chair they are in that day. Onchain Finance is written for those questions — what to own, what it runs on, how money moves and who moves it.

On the Invest side: what tokenisation actually runs on — tokenised stocks, the venues filing to trade them, marketplaces for real-world assets, delivery-versus-payment settlement, and how an investor can own the infrastructure underneath. Alongside it, what affluent investors across seven countries hold, and what their advisers tell them.

On the Money side: the Visa stablecoin summit in Oslo, where the room could not agree on where stablecoins fit, and how banks are getting the plumbing to go onchain without rebuilding what they already have.

The first issue → · Subscribe to Onchain Finance →

The Danish tokenization platform won the Tokenization Infrastructure Award at the RWA Week Awards 2026, handed out during RWA Summit Singapore on 9 October. DigiShares was represented by Mark Mariampillai, Head of Business Development.

Christian Omvik, Director of Partnerships at NBX, sets out the company's thinking on Nasib Fathi's podcast for NFK Media: that a stablecoin should be designed around the corridor it serves, and that the money is in transaction velocity rather than interest on the reserves.

The episode →

Ugens Kryptosnak, Firi's weekly podcast with Karina Rothoff Brix and Jesper Munk of Dansk Krypto Nyt, asks how tokenised shares are taxed.

The episode →

"UN:BLOCK is becoming a legend of its own. Besides business, the vibe is what makes it different. Alexandra Overgaag from Thrilld Labs is the hardest working woman in the industry, companied here by Magnus Jones and Silvia-Kairet Põld from ComplyOnce. Good vibes paves the way to good deals. And of course, all rides in Riga were provided by Bolt, sponsor of the event. Thank you Reinis Znotins for making this happen," writes Raido Saar, founder and chief executive of ComplyOnce.

Live online on Wednesday 4 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.

Register →

Oslo Blockchain Meetup takes on Nexa

Universitetsgata 2 in Oslo, 28 October, 17:00–19:00 CET. jQrgen of Bitcoin Unlimited, who works on the Nexa project, on what makes the blockchain different, with a live technical demonstration. Free. Kaupr is a partner.

Register →

Kaupr and Virtune on what is driving tokenization, which platforms the financial industry is building on, and how investors can gain exposure through regulated ETPs, with Christopher Kock and Andreas Severin. The player sits on the page.

Watch the recording →

The last issue of Kaupr Events is a calendar of what is on across the Nordics and Baltics over the coming months — seventeen events beyond our own.

The autumn calendar → · Subscribe to Kaupr Events and get more events →

Thanks for reading the thirteenth edition of Onchain Growth.

We're here to follow the industry and community driving onchain finance forward across the Nordics and Baltics.

Onchain Growth → · Onchain Build → · Onchain Community →

Morten Founder & Editor, Kaupr