TÝR's best month · ETPs grow up at Nasdaq · Axiology's new licence

TÝR Markets traded 367 million kroner in October, the best month in the Oslo broker's history. Market activity was subdued, the chief executive says. Revenue still came in above expectations.

The ETP market spent a day at Nasdaq in Stockholm working out what it has become. Four people who were in the room at the exchange's Nordic Crypto ETP Forum have written it up since, and they agree on the shift: the question has moved from whether to invest to how, and to where the risk actually sits.

In Vilnius, Axiology now holds order handling, trading, settlement and custody of tokenised securities inside one regulated firm. The Bank of Lithuania granted the extension this month.

Finance Norway's payments conference spent two days on agents and tokenisation. A year ago those were subjects the industry discussed from the outside.

And this morning we ask the Blockathon teams from Stockholm what happened to their projects after the weekend ended.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

Live online today, 11:00–12:30 CET. Free, no registration — it streams on our own page and on YouTube, and a recording follows.

Watch and chat here →

FirstBlock-athon ran in Stockholm from 7 to 11 September, part of Nordic Tech Week. Eight problem areas, two of them in finance, with problem statements from organisations including UNICEF. A jury named UProof the winner.

Today we ask what happened next.

The UProof team — Ashita Kolla, Catalina Pizarro, Eylül Balcilar and Hadisa Anwari — will say where the project stands and what it still needs. Natalie Lipschutz and Divyesh Munnuru Singamshetty, the OWND team and a finalist, will do the same.

Around them: Fati Hakim, chief executive and co-founder of FirstBlock, who started the event. Hani Baloch, who was among those who came up with the idea. Mina Lindberg, chief operating officer of Nordic Tech Week. Bertram Steininger, associate professor at KTH, which hosted the AI track. Farhad Rasouli of Sulis on turning hackathon projects into companies. Tommy Andorff of Neuro on what makes a solution trustworthy once the demo is over. And Jesper Löfgren of Dubai Chambers on whether the format travels to other markets.

I'll be asking the questions, and yours from the chat.

Who is taking part, and what we will ask them →

TÝR Markets traded 367 million kroner in October, the highest monthly volume in the company's history.

"Market activity in October was subdued. Even so, our revenue came in higher than we expected," says chief executive Filip Berg-Nielsen. "We're far from done, and we're going to get even better."

The Oslo company sells on execution and price. Customers trade at the mid-price of the global market with no spread, and fees run from 0.10 to 0.35 per cent depending on volume, with nothing charged on deposits and withdrawals beyond the blockchain cost. Stop loss and take profit orders are coming, and an integration with TradingView is being built.

It gathered its customers in Oslo on 6 November for an evening on money, macro and crypto — a talk on the debasing of the Venetian money system rather than a product demonstration.

The month in numbers →

Safello posted an operating profit of SEK 0.8 million in the third quarter, its first profitable quarter since the last three months of 2024. It got there by shrinking: net turnover fell 41 per cent to SEK 98.4 million, costs fell by the same proportion, and the average headcount went from 33 to 19.

The year behind it is still negative — EBITDA of minus SEK 11.5 million over nine months, and cash down from SEK 17.3 million to 12.3. Founder Frank Schuil, who returned as chief executive, treats the quarter as a data point rather than a turn. His target is three profitable quarters in a row.

The part worth watching launched on 24 September. Safello's crypto checkout lets partner companies offer buying and transferring crypto inside their own flows, running through its API and its customer checks. The pilot is limited to Sweden, runs with one external partner, and goes live shortly.

The quarter in full →

Sweden's Ekobrottsmyndigheten has charged two former senior executives of Valuno Group with aggravated insider trading. One is Daniel Sonesson, the former chief executive; the other is a former chief financial officer, who is not named.

On 3 July 2025 the two learned that Finansinspektionen had rejected an application from QB Europe, Valuno's subsidiary. The decision was made public on the afternoon of 4 July, and the prosecution alleges they sold large parts of their shareholdings in between. The share then fell about 33 per cent, and NGM's disciplinary committee later fined Valuno SEK 200,000 for the delayed disclosure.

Chief prosecutor Thomas Langrot says the delay was deliberate, so that the two could finish selling, and calls the evidence direct and very strong. Valuno, formerly Quickbit and listed on Nordic Growth Market, says the charges concern events in 2025 and are directed at the two individuals, and that it will assist but not comment further. Neither of the accused has responded publicly.

The charges in full →

Nasdaq held the Nasdaq Nordic Crypto ETP Forum at its own premises in Stockholm on 4 November. It is Nasdaq's event, convened by Nasdaq, and the exchange put its own people on the stage. Four who were in the room have written it up since, and the clearest account comes from the person who ran the panel.

Helena Wedin, head of ETF and ETP services for European markets at Nasdaq, moderated. The panel looked at how the crypto ETP market has matured since last year, helped by greater regulatory clarity and by growing use of distributed ledger technology to make capital markets more efficient.

"The discussion is moving from why invest? to how do we invest? and how best to gain exposure," she writes on Linkedin

With a more mature market, she says, comes a stronger focus on due diligence, product structure, custody and liquidity. Understanding where the risks actually sit remains very important.

On the panel: Alex Pollak of 21Shares, Marco Poblete of Bitwise in Europe and Frank Schuil of Safello. Haytham Mousa of iShares spoke separately on bitcoin, digital assets and the road ahead.

Late in the afternoon Nasdaq's programme turned to product. "Beyond Bitcoin — the future of crypto ETP innovation" put Christopher Kock, co-founder and chief executive of Virtune, alongside Dovile Silenskyte, director of digital assets research at WisdomTree, with Nasdaq's Anton Schönqvist asking the questions. The subject was product development, investor demand and growth.

The session before it had taken the same question from the distribution end: how banks, investment platforms and high-net-worth investors actually get at crypto ETPs.

Ammy Edberg of Bitcoin Suisse reached the same conclusion from the custody side: as allocations grow, the conversation shifts from whether to invest in bitcoin to how to hold it. She reports Joachim Wegebrand, head of ETPs at Nordnet, saying a growing number of clients want bitcoin exposure and that the size of those allocations is rising, and Frank Schuil arguing that ETPs are not always the preferred solution, particularly among institutional investors — the right structure depends on whether the client wants price exposure, direct ownership or custody.

Ted Scheiman, who runs Firi in Sweden, lists five takeaways. Digital assets are increasingly treated as a long-term part of portfolios. In the Nordics, trust, simplicity and familiar structures such as ISK make ETPs accessible. Adoption is widening: the discussion highlighted typical holdings of around SEK 5,000 among retail investors and SEK 50,000 among wealthier ones. Growth will come from bringing crypto and traditional finance closer together. And older and wealthier investors are becoming a more important group.

Alex Pollak, who represented 21Shares with Nicolò Finazzi, adds the context the others leave out: the forum fell on what he calls a big day for markets, following the US midterm elections.

Valour began trading eight new exchange-traded products on Spotlight Stock Market on 5 November, all in Swedish kronor, all with a 1.9 per cent management fee, all available through an ordinary brokerage account.

They cover four corners at once: Venice for AI, Canton Network for institutional blockchain infrastructure, Raydium, Morpho and Maple Finance for decentralised trading and lending, and Pump.fun, Dogwifhat and Bonk for community tokens.

"Digital assets have long since moved beyond their original use cases," says Johan Wattenström, chief executive of DeFi Technologies, which owns Valour. Valour now has more than a hundred ETPs linked to digital assets.

The eight products →

Virtune listed the Virtune AI Crypto Index ETP on 3 November, on Nasdaq Stockholm as VIRAI and on Deutsche Börse Xetra as VRTI. It tracks thirteen crypto assets tied to what the issuer calls the agent economy, in four layers: compute, infrastructure and data, trading and liquidity, and payment networks.

The argument is about cost. A card payment in the United States runs at 2.9 per cent plus 30 cents, by Stripe's published figures. A stablecoin payment costs a fraction of a cent. That matters little when a person buys something once, and a great deal when a machine pays hundreds of times a day. By MarketVector's count there had been 233 million payments on the x402 standard as of 4 August, averaging 23 cents each, and the standard now has 51 members, among them Visa, Mastercard, AWS and Google.

The weighting is a choice: the four layers carry equal weight rather than being ranked by market capitalisation, because the bet is on the structure rather than on which part is biggest today. Andreas Severin, chief sales officer at Virtune, explains it on Kaupr TV, takes the bubble question head on, and says he expects 2027 to be the breakout year for agentic commerce. A week after listing the company says more than 500 investors in Sweden had bought in.

What the index holds → · Severin on the agent economy, on Kaupr TV →

SEB is looking for a solution developer for digital assets and blockchain integrations, in Solna, for what the bank calls its core digital assets team. The advertisement has been up two weeks, has 54 applicants, and closes on 18 November.

What it describes is more interesting than the vacancy.

The job is to build an orchestration layer connecting SEB's core banking systems to external custody and wallet providers and to a token issuer — starting with Ethereum. The advertisement confirms that SEB is a founding member of Qivalis, the bank consortium behind a regulated euro stablecoin.

The bank wants someone who knows both ERC-20 and ISO 20022 pacs.008.

The second of those is the message format behind an ordinary euro credit transfer. Asking for both in the same person means the stablecoin is not meant to run alongside the bank's payment infrastructure. It is meant to run inside it.

The rest of the list fills in the picture: Solidity, .NET, Python, Terraform, mutual TLS and OAuth 2.0, hardware security modules, multi-party computation, hierarchical key derivation. Experience with Fireblocks, Ripple, Taurus or Zodia counts in your favour, as does Chainalysis, Elliptic or TRM Labs. MiCAR and DORA are named.

Qivalis has been aiming at the second half of 2026. That is now. SEB is hiring people to connect the pipes in the weeks before.

It is worth saying plainly what this is and is not. A job advertisement is evidence of intent, not of a product. We do not know how large the team is, how far it has got, or whether anything ships. What we know is what the bank wrote down.

The advertisement →

The Bank of Lithuania has granted Axiology an extended MiFID authorisation as an investment firm. The Lithuanian company already runs infrastructure for trading, settling and holding tokenised securities. It can now receive and transmit client orders, execute them on clients' behalf or pass them to other venues, and let institutions subscribe to and redeem units in tokenised money market funds directly.

Taken together with what it already held, that covers the whole investment process inside one regulated firm — order handling, trading, settlement and custody.

Axiology has been authorised since July 2025 to run a combined trading and settlement system for tokenised securities under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime, and was among the first DLT operators connected to Pontes, the Eurosystem's service for settling tokenised securities in central bank money.

"Under one regulated roof" is how chief executive Marius Jurgilas puts it. Combining brokerage with the infrastructure it already runs makes access easier for clients, he says.

The segment is small and moving fast. The European Central Bank puts the growth in global market capitalisation of tokenised money market funds at around 110 per cent through 2025, reaching roughly €7 billion by February 2026 — still a corner of the wider money market fund industry.

What the extended licence covers →

Santa Purgaile, deputy governor of Latvijas Banka, spoke on distributed ledger technology and the future of settlement at the Baltic Capital Markets Conference in Riga on 5 November, in its fifth year.

The conference reports three points from her presentation. The hardest stage of digital securities is reworking market infrastructure — past digitisation, past tokenisation. Tokenised securities remain a very small market, but the growth is genuine. And messages travel instantly around the world while securities transactions still do not settle instantly.

That last one is the case for all of this in a sentence, made by someone who supervises rather than sells.

Finance Norway held its annual payments and digitalisation conference on 5 and 6 November. We were there for both days and wrote it up as it happened.

Two subjects took the room. AI agents in online shopping and in banking — and the tokenisation of securities and bank money. Norges Bank, DNB, Nets, Mastercard, Vipps MobilePay, Revolut, BankID, Stø and Digdir all took the stage.

I was in the same room a year ago. Then these were subjects the industry discussed from the outside, at the edges of the programme. This year they were the programme.

Everything from the two days →

In its autumn newsletter, the Nordic Blockchain Association sets out what it has been working on since the summer. Most of it is regulation, and most of the regulation is written somewhere other than the Nordics.

In September it filed its response to the European Commission's MiCA review consultation, drafted by a working group in its Legal Steering Committee. Three things were asked for: rules that scale with the size of the business, a level playing field with unauthorised offshore platforms, and fair access to banking for licensed crypto firms. The last of those is a standing problem for Nordic companies that hold a licence and still struggle to keep a bank account.

It will also take part in AMLA's sectoral roundtable in Frankfurt on simplified customer due diligence, which feeds into the authority's coming guidelines.

On DAC8, the EU's crypto tax reporting rules, the association has been working with the Nordic tax authorities. It surveyed Nordic crypto-asset service providers and put their experience to the Nordic DAC8 taskforces. On 23 November it hosts a session for Danish providers at Skattestyrelsen, the Danish tax agency.

Through its Nordic Blockchain Banking Network, the association brings banks, payment and financial institutions together with its members. It held roundtable dinners in Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen in September on stablecoins, tokenisation, digital asset investment and the state of the regulation. On 8 December it opens the format up: a live webinar at 13:00 CET where Nordic banking leaders are to talk about what they are actually doing with blockchain, moderated by chief executive Jakob Mikkel Hansen. Registration goes through Luma and is approved case by case.

Denmark is where most of its political effort has gone. The association held its second annual Blockchain Forum at the Danish Parliament, where the Minister for Taxation spoke on crypto tax reform, and a closed-door roundtable at the Danish FSA the same day on licensing, supervision and regulation. Crypto tax reform is now on the Danish legislative programme for 2026–2027, with a bill due before parliament in February 2027. On 30 October, Hansen joined a session at the Danish Ministry of Taxation on legal certainty in tax matters.

The association puts the Danish case plainly: by its own Crypto Law Matrix, Danes are the worst off in the region, with gains taxed at up to 53 per cent and losses deducted at around 26. It counts more than 2.5 million adults across the Nordics who own crypto, 500,000 of them in Denmark.

The ninth Nordic Blockchain Conference returns to Stockholm on 26 and 27 May 2027. The 2026 edition drew 1,250 delegates and 125 speakers.

Oslo Blockchain Meetup has Reese Legal in for an evening on Norwegian crypto tax on Wednesday 25 November, 17:00 to 19:00, at Universitetsgata 2. Free.

The programme is practical rather than political. Tax rules for gains and losses on sales, and for DeFi transactions, loans and gifts. Wealth held in crypto. How to calculate gain, loss and wealth correctly when there are many transactions, and which tools help with the calculation and the documentation. How crypto is entered in the tax return, step by step. What you actually risk if it is wrong or goes unreported, the mistakes people make most often, and examples from the Tax Administration's own practice.

Attend →

Our events letter counted seventeen events running to the end of November, across four countries and four online. Most are onchain and digital assets — bitcoin, stablecoins, tokenisation, ETPs. The rest are the rooms where that meets payments, banking and capital markets.

Two days carry most of it. Today, Wednesday 11 November, has four, from a launch party in a Stockholm tennis hall to a talk in Oslo about bitcoin as a clock. Thursday 19 November has five, two of them in Stockholm ten minutes' walk apart the same evening.

All seventeen →

Three things hit the market in the same few weeks: the Binance hack, the US midterm elections, and a broad sell-off in AI stocks. Alexander Hagen, chief executive of Ace Digital, which is listed on Euronext Markets, went through how they connect on Kaupr TV. It is the first time we have had him on.

His main point is one many would rather not hear. Bitcoin has not come loose from the rest of the market. It remains a risk-on product with a positive correlation to the Nasdaq and to stocks more broadly.

He is more bullish on bitcoin over the longer term than he was a year ago, on adoption, and reads the geopolitical noise as helping rather than hurting it. But the correlation stands.

The volatility is what has changed. Bitcoin's implied volatility rank in the options market sits at about 40 per cent, meaning it has been higher 84 per cent of the time over the past twelve months. Hagen traces a multi-year decline from around 80 per cent, and reads it as bitcoin becoming a less volatile asset. That has brought in traditional finance investors, though only partly — they tend to arrive near all-time highs, and the market is quiet.

Much of the unease he puts on rates and bonds. Several governments are managing their finances badly, he argues, and investors are reluctant to lend to them for thirty years, which pushes long rates up while short rates stay more directly controlled. He likens it to paying off debt with a credit card. He would lend to Alphabet at 8 per cent before lending to France at 5, and says the war rhetoric in Europe makes the picture worse.

On the AI sell-off he is calmer than most: a matter of timing rather than overvaluation. He points at hedge funds possibly cutting heavy AI-related debt exposure, and at investors selling elsewhere to free up money for the expected Anthropic and OpenAI listings — the same thing that happened when SpaceX raised, and money left crypto to go there.

The article on kaupr.io → · Watch the interview →

Karina Rothoff Brix, country manager for Denmark at Firi and a board member there, has written on our blog about what the US midterms mean for crypto. Her answer is: less than people think.

Trump's influence over a global asset class is overstated, she argues. Crypto grew because the technology solves real problems and the demand was there, not because one politician backed it — and supporters sit in both parties. She points to the Fairshake super PAC, which by its own count won 29 of the 34 races decided by 4 November, and to Sherrod Brown taking back his Ohio Senate seat despite a reported $60 million spent by the industry to stop him.

Congress is not where she expects movement. The CLARITY Act, which would have set clear rules and split oversight between the SEC and the CFTC, failed in the Senate in September by 49 votes to 50. In any new round, she expects lawmakers to lean further towards the banks and towards consumer protection, and Trump still holds a veto.

The regulators will carry on regardless, she writes — the SEC and the CFTC are still writing rules, guidance and innovation frameworks, and that is where clarity will come from over the next few years. With the caveat that rules made by regulators can be undone by the next administration.

Her conclusion is that both parties have to deal with crypto rules. A law carried by one party alone risks being reversed at the next election.

Read the post →

NBX and Aprikos Venture have applied to the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority for a No Objection Certificate for Nayapaisa (Private) Limited, a planned crypto exchange for Pakistani customers. The application is under review. The certificate is the first step in the authority's licensing process; the licence comes later, and the company cannot serve customers until it has both.

The two would own half each, through Horizon Markets AS, a Norwegian holding company still being incorporated. NBX brings its exchange technology and governance framework; Aprikos Venture handles the local structure, the regulator and operations. Stig Kjos-Mathisen of NBX is proposed as chairman, Jamil Rehman of Aprikos Venture as chief executive.

NBX announced the letter of intent on 11 March. Pakistan has 241 million people and came third of 151 countries on Chainalysis' 2025 global crypto adoption index.

What has been applied for →

Sumary, a Danish company selling an AI operating system for accounting work, has raised $25m in a seed round led by Singular, which it calls the largest seed round for accounting software in Europe. byFounders, Partech and Tenity came in again after backing the $4.2m pre-seed a year ago.

The product takes the preparation work — month-end close, VAT returns, year-end — against any client ledger, and hands it to the accountant to review and sign. Deloitte, Grant Thornton and Baker Tilly are customers. Customers are across the Nordics and the UK, with Benelux next.

What Sumary has built →

Pluto.markets, the Copenhagen neobroker, has launched a web platform alongside its app. Same account, synchronised, with all functions in both places: shares, ETFs, crypto, FairRente and Collections. Co-founder and chief executive Joakim Bruchmann says the company has the market's most favourable prices for businesses, private customers and minors.

The same day he did three podcasts, two interviews with Danish media about the market turbulence, two job interviews, and a panel on challenging the financial industry alongside Jeppe Brøndum of kompasbank and Ken Villum Klausen of Repodo, convened by Finansforeningen and CFA Society Denmark.

Someone has arrived, too. Mathias Justesen has left Alm. Brand to start as a student analyst at Pluto, a move he describes as one he could not say no to.

Thanks for reading Onchain Growth.

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

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Nothing in this newsletter is investment advice. Crypto-assets carry high risk, their value can fall as well as rise, and you may not get back what you put in.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr