Stenseth on agents. Jepsis wins again. A Danish fund launches. Blockathon.

Four companies carry this edition, and none of them were doing what they are doing now a year ago. SolvaPay is building the payment layer for agents, Azpire launches its first fund today, Deploi has won its second competition in under a year, and Repodo has come out of stealth.

Further down: K33 and Hilbert Group both report, and both report losses — for different reasons. In the notes, Denmark's regulator admits it broke EU rules, NBX sets up in Riga to become a bank, and Allica Bank applies for a Swedish licence.

And the last pre-event before FIRSTBLOCK-ATHON goes out on Thursday. Two earlier sessions are available in full. The events section runs from Stockholm next week to Riga in October.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

📅 Kaupr Event — Blockathon Stockholm: Pre-event 3 | Thursday 3 September, 11:00–12:30 CET

The first two sessions were about why. This one is also about what: the challenges teams will work on, what the days in Stockholm actually look like, and what it takes to arrive ready. Moderated by Melissa Persson and Morten Myrstad, with speakers announced shortly. Free and live on Kaupr.io and YouTube — registering gets you the reminder and the recording afterwards.

👉 Register here

Read more about the Blockathon in the Build section.

SolvaPay launched in April with €2.4 million in pre-seed funding and a payment layer built for AI agents. Four months on, the Stockholm company is in the market — into Copenhagen Fintech, and on stage at TechBBQ last week.

That is how Stenseth frames the problem. Take the person out of the purchase, and the infrastructure has to answer three questions on its own: who is this, what are they allowed to do, and how much should they pay.

Stenseth appeared alongside Nvidia, Norlix, Lunar and Visma, moderated by Rikke Kjær Damgaard, on what AI native actually means in fintech and what it does to growth and revenue. He describes conversations at the event on transactions, fast loans and 3D printed parts moving through agentic clients, and on what it takes to get an API to a payable MCP server in minutes.

How do you charge for an MCP server without risking the platform that distributes it. Teams running live servers are not avoiding monetisation because they do not want the money, Stenseth writes, but because getting it wrong can cost them distribution. So the server stays free, usage climbs, and everyone calls it marketing. You built the server, you maintain the tooling, and your datasets are valuable to people building with agents. Maybe the answer looks like the old Spotify shape, a free tier and paid depth. Maybe it does not.

SolvaPay was founded by Stenseth, Ingemar Svensson and Tommy Berglind, with backgrounds from Spotify, FIS, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers and Handelsbanken. The April round was led by Redstone and MS&AD Ventures, with Antler and Greens Ventures. With a single integration, the company aims to make products and services discoverable and payable across AI platforms.

Read the funding story on kaupr.io →

The Aarhus asset manager launches its first fund on Tuesday, registered with Denmark's Finanstilsynet and restricted to professional investors. The premise is different from most crypto funds available today: the model neither predicts the direction of the market nor depends on it.

The model assesses a selection of major crypto assets over the next 24 hours and builds a portfolio with both long and short positions. What it tries to earn on is the gap between the market's winners and losers, not whether the market as a whole is rising. The strategy was developed from scratch, drawing on principles from equity markets and energy trading. The company says it never makes forecasts several weeks out.

Over the first 14 months of a test period the strategy returned 25 per cent, according to the company, while bitcoin fell 30 per cent. Testing ran for 23 months in total alongside development of the strategy.

Azpire is aiming for DKK 100 million under management over the next twelve months, and to scale from there to DKK 500 million. Chief executive and co-founder Andreas Blom says the ambition is to give Danish investors access to the market through an actively managed vehicle that can return money in both rising and falling markets. Chief financial officer Anthon Aaby Lorentzen emphasises the work on compliance and governance. The launch falls on the second anniversary of the company's founding.

Read the story on kaupr.io →

Last October Oskars Jepsis and Deploi won the Startup Battle at European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona, from close to a thousand applications. Kaupr connected with him shortly after and has followed the company since. Last week Deploi won 10X Founders Demo Day v2.0.

10X Founders Demo Day is run by Inspira Labs with Cicada Market Making and Yellow, with Sonic Labs as anchor partner. Deploi takes a share of a prize pool of more than $150,000, alongside grants, acceleration and go-to-market opportunities across the partner network. A nine-strong VC jury, with Animoca Brands among them.

Private credit — direct lending outside the banking system — has grown into one of the world's largest asset classes over the past decade. The structure has not kept up. Investors are locked in for seven to ten years, redemptions are capped at five per cent per quarter and not guaranteed, and valuations come quarterly and lagged rather than continuously. The standard manager charges two per cent of assets and twenty per cent of returns.

Deploi tokenises the loan assets themselves rather than wrapping existing instruments in a fund. Each token represents a single asset with a legal and technological link to the real-world loan. A secondary market gives investors real-time pricing rather than quarter-end valuations, and the company is working on daily yield, where capital resting in the market accrues interest and can be withdrawn the next business day. The target group is family offices, fund managers and insurance companies.

Funds use Fitch or Moody's to assess portfolio quality — agencies they pay themselves. Deploi's nearest deliverable is an open-source rating system, free for any financial institution to use or contribute to, with the methodology transparent and collectively owned. The company has six employees and placed in the top twelve at Paris Blockchain Week.

Read interview on kaupr.io → · Watch Jepsis on Kaupr TV →

Last week Onchain Growth followed Ken Villum Klausen counting his way to eighteen on LinkedIn, from inside a company he would not name. Four hours after the edition went out, the name came: Repodo.

Statutory audit is a licensed field where an authorised auditor has to sign off that the numbers hold. Repodo is registered as an authorised audit firm rather than as a software supplier to the profession. It launches in Denmark in 2026, with small and medium-sized businesses as the first customer group, in a European audit market the company puts at more than €80 billion a year.

Klausen founded the company in Copenhagen with Peter Andreasen and Joachim Strøjer Hansen, Lunar's chief financial officer and chief product officer. The fourth co-founder is auditor Anders Houmann, who brings the profession itself into the team.

The €8.2 million pre-seed is led by Hedosophia and Seed Capital, with angel investors including Alex Berriche of Fleet, Oscar Höglund of Epidemic Sound and Philip Man of terralayr. Sarra Zayani, partner at Hedosophia, says what mattered was that the team is rebuilding the operating model around the technology while keeping the professional accountability audit requires, rather than layering AI onto an existing workflow. The capital goes to the technology platform, the team and the Danish launch.

The platform automates data collection, reconciliations, documentation and transaction analysis. Authorised auditors keep responsibility for review, risk assessment, professional judgement and final sign-off. On LinkedIn Klausen is sharper than in the announcement: he calls the industry's methods forty years old, and its business model one that bills for hours instead of getting to the truth faster.

Repodo is set up to expand market by market across Europe.

Read the story on kaupr.io →

Revenue fell from SEK 399.2 million to SEK 192.9 million, and the result came to minus SEK 19.6 million against minus 3.5 a year earlier. Around SEK 14 million of that is unrealised changes in value on the company's own bitcoin and on its share of the result at Sixty Six Capital.

Across the first six months revenue came to SEK 932.8 million against SEK 849.4 million, up around ten per cent. Nearly SEK 740 million of that came in the first quarter.

K33 Markets received authorisation from Norway's Finanstilsynet on 16 June and has since passported it to Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany.

The share is admitted to trading on Cboe Europe from Wednesday, alongside the listing on Nasdaq First North. Torbjørn Bull Jenssen says the focus now is commercialisation.

Read the story on kaupr.io →

The Swedish group closed the second quarter with revenue of SEK 3.7 million and an operating loss of SEK 36.3 million. Of the half-year loss, SEK 50.4 million carries no cash effect — share-based programmes, amortisation on what has been acquired, and a remeasurement of the price for Nordark. Operations drained SEK 42.8 million.

The rebuild management calls Hilbert 2.0 is substantially complete: the trading business Enigma consolidated, the fintech and banking infrastructure company Nordark acquired, and the Hilbert Finance division established in July for institutional crypto lending. The group has applied to Malta's regulator for both a MiCA authorisation and a payment institution authorisation through Nordark. In August it opened its first strategy for deposits onchain through Syntetika.

Bitcoin fell around 26 per cent over the half year, and comparable crypto hedge funds were down as a group. Hilbert's market-neutral strategies still returned positively. Assets under management stood at USD 119.5 million at the end of June, alongside 4,679 bitcoin in a fund. Management fee revenue rose 74 per cent from the first to the second quarter in dollar terms.

Barnali Biswal is group chief executive.

Read the story on kaupr.io →

Blockchain Sweden presents its election compass — The industry body laid out where the Swedish political parties stand on blockchain and digital assets ahead of the election. It was Blockchain Sweden's first event after the summer, hosted by Firi in Stockholm, and people took the chance to catch up.

Denmark's regulator admits it broke EU rules — Finanstilsynet acknowledges that Danish CASP applicants were not treated lawfully, neither on the MiCA deadlines nor on communication, but rejects paying compensation. The Nordic Blockchain Association filed a complaint with the Parliamentary Ombudsman earlier in August. Read more → In Danish

NBX sets up a subsidiary in Riga to become a bank — NBX Digital Asset Bank AS was entered in the Latvian company register on 26 August, to apply for authorisation as a specialised credit institution. The ECB decides. Provisional start is the second half of 2027. Read more → In Norwegian

Svein Østvik hosts an XRP conference in Oslo — The TV personality is master of ceremonies when the XRP community meets at Litteraturhuset on 5 September. NBX and Devoteam are on the programme alongside a line-up of XRP influencers. Ripple is not. Read more →

Allica Bank applies for a Swedish banking licence — The UK digital business bank has filed with Finansinspektionen and hired an executive team led by Rickard Westlund. Sweden is its first market outside the UK. Read more →

Moralis introduces Continuum — The Swedish company calls it an accountability layer for agentic AI: a system of record where any decision can be reconstructed and any action replayed. Read more

FIRSTBLOCK-ATHON runs on 7 and 8 September at Netlight in Stockholm, two days of building where teams work on real problem statements from the organisations that need the solutions. Fati Hakim, co-founder of FirstBlock, has taken part in all three virtual pre-events with Kaupr ahead of it.

Pre-event 1 on 20 August drew more than 100 registrations and brought together speakers from UNICEF, the Swedish Red Cross, AI Institutet, AIMS Management, Nordic Tech Week and FirstBlock. Pre-event 2 on 27 August went through the challenge categories, how teams are forming and the practical preparation. Both run 90 minutes and both are available in full.

Watch pre-event 1 → · Watch pre-event 2 →

UNICEF has one. Hundstallet, the Swedish canine welfare association, asks how AI and blockchain can make charitable donations more transparent and more engaging for younger donors — donations tracked on chain, transparent use of funds, gamified giving and impact dashboards. Alexandria Protocols and AI Institutet bring the document verification challenge. That range is the point: the participants are AI engineers, blockchain developers, product builders, founders, researchers, students and designers, and the challenges come from outside their own field.

Two days of hacking, 09:00 to 18:00 both days, with mentors present throughout. No ticket price and no pay-to-enter, but places are limited and registration is subject to approval. The week closes on 11 September with the AI x Blockchain Summit at KTH, where the teams present their work, and the award ceremony at Kungsträdgården.

Kaupr is media partner for FIRSTBLOCK-ATHON.

Apply → · Blockathon Stockholm on kaupr.io → · The Blockathon Stockholm channel →

Standardisation in blockchain — Online and free, 3 September, 12:00–12:30. Blockchain Sweden with the Swedish Institute for Standards. How standardisation work functions, and how a national blockchain committee could be set up in Sweden — ISO, CEN and the former TK 614. https://luma.com/g1eo3onc

FIRSTBLOCK-ATHON Hack Day — Netlight, Regeringsgatan 25, Stockholm, 7–8 September, 09:00–18:00 both days. Blockchain and AI hackathon under Nordic Tech Week. Free, limited places, registration subject to approval. https://luma.com/FirstBlock-athon

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/

Roundtable on Tokenisation — Eversheds Sutherland, Stockholm, 9 September, 10:00–12:00. Blockchain Sweden brings together banks, financial institutions, fintechs, investors, authorities and the technology sector on how tokenisation moves from pilot to real use: infrastructure, regulation, custody, identity, payments and interoperability. Chatham House Rule, limited places, participation subject to approval. https://luma.com/ekfczwdh

AI x Blockchain Summit — KTH Arenan, Stockholm, 11 September. Organised by AI Institutet, part of FIRSTBLOCK-ATHON. https://luma.com/ai-blockchain-summit

Mining & proof of work — Skram, Litteraturhuset, Oslo, 14 September, 12:00–16:00. Bitcoin Policy Institute Norway, with Rachel Geyer (European Bitcoin Energy Association), Alexander Neumüller (Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance), Sander Stolpe, Sturle Sunde and Ola Borten Moe (Norsk Kjernekraft), plus a political conversation with Nils Forren (Senterungdommen) and Omar Svendsen-Yagci (Unge Venstre). Free. First session in English, the rest in Norwegian. https://bpinorge.no/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/mining-proof-of-work_4_22.html

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

The Onchain Community calendar →

Around 250 companies globally and close to fifteen in the Nordics said last year they would hold bitcoin on the balance sheet. A year on, the industry has lost around $80 billion in market value and most have left quietly.

The four still standing in the Nordics all attached something else to the holding: H100 bought while the price was down and brought in Peter Warren to trade options against the balance sheet, K33 lends against crypto collateral and has taken over the running of a Canadian company, Bitcoin Treasury Capital listed a preference share with a fixed monthly dividend, and Ace Digital built on options experience from the start.

Fourth episode in a row since 9 August.

Episode also available: Spotify · Apple

The show: Beehiiv · Spotify · Apple

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.

Onchain Growth → · Onchain Build → · Onchain Community →

Morten Founder & Editor, Kaupr