Three people, three jobs · Goobit builds while fighting for its licence

Goobit is doing three things at once. It is finishing a savings product that holds bitcoin, gold and interest-bearing assets in fixed proportions and rebalances when they drift. It is raising money to launch it, though less of that money is new than the headline figure suggests. And it is in court over the MiCA licence Finansinspektionen has now refused twice — which is why the bitcoin side of the product runs through Finland.

Latvia wants a legal framework for tokenising real-world assets, commercial property first and government bonds behind it. In London, Anniina Saari has partnered with the trade body for UK investment managers to brief the boards of firms running £11.1 trillion on the same subject.

Mats Ljungberg spent fifteen years in film before enrolling on a blockchain development course. His team came second at Blockathon in Stockholm with a brief from the Red Cross. And Venkat Hrushikesa Varri has now written four editions of Trendline.

Further down: Blockchain Sweden has grown to 23 members, K33 told investors in Oslo what allocators keep underpricing, ESMA has given supervisors until early January to clear non-MiCA stablecoins off the shelves, and a billion-euro bond has settled on the Eurosystem's new DLT platform.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

Goobit's savings product gives the customer three fixed allocations to choose between — cautious at 15 per cent bitcoin, 25 gold and 60 interest-bearing; balanced at 30/30/40; growth at 45/30/25. Goobit recommends none of them.

Each asset class has a permitted band. In the balanced allocation, bitcoin can move between 19 and 41 per cent before the platform flags a rebalance. The proposal comes from the platform, but the customer approves every change. Customers own the underlying assets directly rather than holding an ETP.

Bitcoin trading runs through Kvarn X, Finnish and MiCA-regulated. Goobit is in talks with two Swedish banks about the interest-bearing part. More than 400 people are on the waiting list. Beta customers are expected within weeks, with a wider launch in the fourth quarter. Pricing has not been published.

How the rebalancing works → · Our interview on Futureproof →

Gustav Buder took over as chief executive on 15 August.

The rights issue runs from 22 October to 5 November and can bring in up to SEK 25.1 million — but around SEK 13.8 million of that is debt set-off, where creditors take shares instead of cash. Net cash proceeds are estimated at about SEK 9 million.

The company's stated order of priority is product, technology and key hires to finish and launch Futureproof; then regulatory work, including the MiCA application and compliance; then market development with Sweden as the main market; and working capital last.

Insiders have committed about SEK 15 million, among them Buder, marketing director David Leeb and board member Christian Ander, none of them compensated for it. Vator Securities guarantees SEK 7.6 million. The company notes that none of these commitments are backed by bank guarantees, blocked funds or collateral.

The rights issue, and what is actually new money → (in Norwegian)

Finansinspektionen rejected Goobit's MiCA application on 2 July, and on 28 July declined to reverse that decision, finding no grounds under Section 38 of the Administrative Procedure Act.

Goobit has taken it to Förvaltningsrätten, asking the court to annul the decision and grant authorisation, or failing that to send the case back for a full renewed review. The court has not yet examined the substance. The company says the outcome and the timeline are uncertain.

That is the reason bitcoin trading in Futureproof runs through Kvarn X in Finland.

Goobit takes the rejection to court →

Economics Minister Viktors Valainis wants a legal framework for tokenising real-world assets, where ownership is registered and transferred on a blockchain. Commercial property is the first step. Government bonds are also on the priority list.

The ministry is working with the central bank, the finance ministry and the industry, and the Latvian Blockchain Association takes part in the working groups and testing. The rules could be ready in the first half of 2027. The legal assessment was due on 1 October and is still running.

Valainis puts the brakes on himself: "We don't want to create something with a big boom and then with a big collapse." Anti-money-laundering control is his central concern. The government has not quantified the benefit, and no volumes or terms for the bonds have been disclosed.

What Latvia is planning →

The Finnish tokenisation specialist Anniina Saari and her company Asset Tokenization have partnered with The Investment Association, the UK trade body for investment managers, whose members manage £11.1 trillion between them. As part of the association's new Tokenisation Academy, they provide tailored in-house briefings for boards and executive teams.

"When it comes to tokenisation, we have now seen individual launches and individual transactions," Saari says. "The next step is turning that activity into business benefits at scale, and that means engaging more decision makers."

The briefings are meant to help leaders work out where tokenisation is relevant to their business today, and what could change as the markets develop. Saari will also lead the Academy's public webinar, "Board & Exec Level: What's Next in Tokenisation", on 11 November. She credits John Allan, Gillian Painter and Julie Odunlami at the association.

Venkat Hrushikesa Varri has now written four editions of Trendline, the recurring column on bitcoin and the wider crypto market.

He came to the markets from automation and technical systems, where he leads complex engineering projects and the teams around them — engineering, commercial requirements and delivery in the same room. He has followed crypto since 2019, through the COVID crash, the collapse of Terra and UST, Ethereum's move to proof-of-stake, FTX, and the banking and stablecoin stress of 2023. That sequence is what shaped how he reads a market.

Trendline is not a price prediction column. It works through market structure, momentum, liquidity and the levels that matter technically, and sets out the scenarios that follow from them.

He is also building a crypto analytics platform, and has reported live for Kaupr from more than 20 conferences across the Nordics and beyond.

Trendline, alongside the rest of our analysis → · Bitcoin tried both directions, and neither side won →

Mats Ljungberg spent nearly fifteen years in film, including large productions for Netflix and HBO. He held a technical role there, and it was the growing interest in AI development that pulled him towards programming.

He found a distance-learning course and is now a second-year student on Medieinstitutet's blockchain development programme — an education in blockchain development, which is not something the region has many of.

A classmate told him about the hackathon. His team — Ljungberg, Arwid Anesten, Elin Thim and Yamfu Arhin — took second place at Blockathon in Stockholm.

Their brief came from the Red Cross: how crisis information can be developed to increase transparency, traceability and trust in the organisation's work.

Medieinstitutet on Ljungberg → (in Swedish)

The Swedish industry association has grown to 23 member companies. Witnis and Sapio both joined in September. The association had 14 ordinary members in April last year.

Witnis is Swedish infrastructure for verifiable official communication, and is in operation at a large Swedish public-sector organisation. The service lets an organisation prove what it has published, so that citizens, journalists and AI can check that content being circulated matches the original source.

"When content spreads quickly and across many channels, the recipient needs to be able to check the sender," says Philip Hilm, chief executive and co-founder. "Witnis gives organisations a simple way to prove what they have actually published, and that is a precondition for trust in digital communication."

Sapio is building what it calls a next-generation decentralised capital structure, where people and automated strategies compete to shape a digital portfolio backed by underlying assets. The protocol has entered its alpha phase and rests on four KTH theses and regulatory work in the EU Blockchain Sandbox.

"Tokenisation is moving fast, but the underlying infrastructure is still built for a traditional world," says co-founder Henrik Westerberg. "We want Sweden to lead this technology shift, and Blockchain Sweden is where the Swedish industry meets. After two years in stealth, we want to contribute what we have learned."

Torbjørn Bull Jenssen, founder and chief executive of K33, spoke at VNTR's Investor Roundtable on 22 October, during Oslo Innovation Week.

"Momentum is building behind the scene," he told the room, and "we are still on the adoption curve" — said in a weak trading market, which is the point of saying it there.

His slide asked whether we are still on that curve and listed what would have to hold for the answer to be yes: digitalisation and AI continuing at full speed, institutions investing in better crypto infrastructure, crypto regulation still maturing, debt and deficits continuing to grow, and geopolitical tension still rising.

Sigbjørn Rivelsrud presented Alphalayer in the same room on the same day.

"The next opportunity isn't finding the next great trader. It's the engine that finds, tests and funds many of them," his slide said. Underneath: building the automated hedge fund, in Norway, and opening a few conversations with partners who bring capital, expertise, or both.

The slide carried its own caveat — information only, not an offer of securities.

Johan Toll, chief technology officer and co-founder of Traced Systems, ran a webinar on 22 October with Borgar Hestad of Bluestone PIM, taking the route from product data to a published digital product passport and then showing how the workflow handles an update.

Digital product passports are traceability at product level, driven by EU requirements. The Norwegian end of this is the PIM layer the data comes from.

Dune is advertising for a Head of Product responsible for building products for financial institutions that need reliable onchain data for capital allocation, risk assessment and market entry. The role reports to the president and sits on the leadership team.

The posting is specific about the problem: coverage, accuracy, consistency and timeliness in the data, and translating what institutions need across analytics, trading and operations into product priorities. The company is remote-first with around 50 staff across Europe and the US east coast.

Dune was founded in Oslo by Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen.

The posting →

Nordnet's third-quarter figures give growth by country: Norway up 13 per cent in customers and 40 per cent in savings capital, Denmark 16 and 29, Finland 11 and 34, Sweden 7 and 17. Sweden is the home market and the largest one.

Mari Rindal Øyen, country manager for Norway, writes that more than 574,000 Norwegians use Nordnet, that 12,600 joined in the quarter, and that the Norwegian operation has passed one billion in operating profit for the first time this year.

At group level: close to 2.6 million active savers, 64,000 new in the quarter, savings capital approaching SEK 1,500 billion, and operating profit of SEK 1,096 million, up 24 per cent.

Nordnet's third quarter →

ESMA published an opinion on 8 October telling national supervisors how to handle asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens that do not comply with MiCA. It is not binding. Supervisors are expected to follow it.

A crypto-asset service provider should not provide any crypto-asset service at all in relation to such tokens — trading platform, exchange, execution of orders, reception and transmission, placing, advice, transfer, custody and portfolio management, each separately and all of them together. Firms are expected to stop EU clients buying, trading or increasing positions, using technical, contractual and organisational measures. Warnings and client acknowledgements are not enough.

A limited wind-down is permitted: selling, converting, withdrawing, transferring and holding existing positions. Not new purchases, not marketing, not continued availability. It should be done no later than three months after publication — early January 2027.

ESMA's opinion →

The European Stability Mechanism priced its first digitally native bond on 26 October, a €1 billion benchmark, and settled it through the Eurosystem's Pontes platform. It is the first DLT-based benchmark issuance by a European supranational issuer to do so.

Clearstream creates and manages the bond on its D7 platform and handles delivery-versus-payment. The cash leg settles through Pontes directly in TARGET, in central bank money. The Bundesbank acted as issuing and paying agent and has been onboarded to Pontes as a market participant. DZ BANK and Société Générale advised.

"Wholesale central bank money transactions have become an operational reality," says Stephanie Eckermann, member of the executive board of Deutsche Börse Group and chairwoman of Clearstream.

Bundesbank on the ESM issuance →

Universitetsgata 2 in Oslo, Wednesday 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 →

Live online from the Kaupr studio on Saturday 31 October, 14:00–15:30 CET. A Kaupr session with Bitcoinpolitisk Institutt Norge on bitcoin, politics and where it goes from here, with a live draw for a trip to El Salvador. In Norwegian. Free.

Register →

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 →

The last issue of Kaupr Events is a calendar of what is on across the Nordics and Baltics over the coming months.

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

Thanks for reading the fourteenth edition of Onchain Growth.

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

Onchain Build → · Onchain Community → · Onchain Finance →

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr