This is the first complete issue of Onchain Invest, a week after Onchain Money set out its own ground. The two alternate on Thursdays from here, which is what Onchain Finance by Kaupr looks like in practice: one issue a week, from one track or the other.

Onchain Invest is about what you can own, how you can own it, and what is happening to the machinery underneath.

Where that issue set out the forms money now comes in, this one does the same work for assets, and it starts where most people start: with the question of how you actually get exposure. There are four answers here. You can buy it directly. You can hold a regulated product through the broker you already use. You can own shares in a company that holds it for you. Or you can hand it to someone who manages it, or to a rule that buys a little every month. Each one carries its own regulation, its own cost and its own kind of risk, and the Nordic market has now run the experiment on all four.

Underneath all four, a second movement runs the other way, as traditional securities move onto blockchains through central bank settlement, exchange infrastructure and the depositories that have cleared Wall Street for decades. That is the subject of the next issue.

You are on both tracks, and they alternate, so you hear from us every week. You can also choose now. The preference centre lets you keep both or take only one of them, and the sign-up page is there for the colleague who needs the other.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

People own crypto in very different ways, and for very different reasons. In June we set out eight ways to own crypto as eight kinds of owner.

There is the sovereign maximalist, coins in cold storage and no intermediary anywhere. The culture trader, buying memecoins through a browser wallet and accepting that the money could go to zero. The protocol investor, staking and providing liquidity on Ethereum and Solana. The everyday saver, putting small regular amounts in beside the funds. The high-net-worth client working through a broker's trading desk for the liquidity and the regulatory comfort. The advisory client who hands the decision to someone qualified. The equity investor who owns bitcoin through the shares of a company that holds it. And the ETP investor who wants passive exposure on the savings platform already in use.

Those are eight kinds of person. This issue groups them into four ways of investing: direct, regulated, crypto stocks, and funds and saving. The yield seeker and the derivatives trader have ways of their own, and those come in later issues. And the maximalist would say the regulated products in the second are themselves part of the problem, which is worth holding on to while reading it.

The scale first. 2.5 million adults in the Nordics own crypto, 11.1 per cent of the adult population, up from 9.6 per cent the year before and growing for the second year running. Firi's chief executive Thuc Hoang draws the plain conclusion about his own market: crypto in Norway is no longer just a niche for enthusiasts.

The growth is uneven, and the way people hold it differs by country. Sweden went from 7.4 to 13.4 per cent in a single year, more than 1.1 million people, and much of that exposure sits in regulated ETPs on Avanza and Nordnet. Denmark grew steadily, and more Danes under forty own crypto than hold shares through a trading platform. Norway still has the highest share in the region, though it edged down. Finland fell from 11 to 8.2 per cent. The Swedish figures come from the Crypto Adoption Survey 2026, run by K33 Research with the Nordic Blockchain Association and Firi.

Hold on to the Swedish line. It is the thread running through the first two: the country with the fastest growth in ownership is also the country that came out of MiCA's June deadline with a single licensed crypto exchange, and the one whose investors hold a fifth to a quarter of every crypto ETP asset in Europe.

The first is the plain one. You open an account with a company whose business is crypto, you move money in, and you own the asset itself.

In Europe the route was redrawn on 30 June, when MiCA's transition period ended. Kaupr counted 38 licensed firms across the Nordics and Baltics, 35 of them pure crypto-asset service providers, and the breakdown by country says more than the total does. Latvia has nine, Norway seven, Denmark and Lithuania six each, Finland five, Estonia three and Iceland one. Sweden has one.

Since the deadline the competition has moved upmarket. The fight is now for professional clients, meaning institutions, family offices and private banking, and the licensed firms have divided the ground between them. Firi comes at it from the broadest base.

More than 400,000 customers since 2017 make it the largest retail player in the Nordics, and under chief executive Thuc Hoang it has been building upward from that for some time: an OTC desk for institutional and wealthy clients has run for over four years, and Sweden became its third Nordic market.

Safello starts somewhere else. It holds Sweden's first MiCA licence, which in a country that granted only one is an edge over every Swedish rival and every entrant from outside, and founder Frank Schuil came back as chief executive in March after three years as chairman to use it.

The retail platform still brings in most of the revenue, while the growth he is after is banks and financial institutions, and his argument to them is blunt: an institution with its operations in order has little legal ground left for refusing crypto outright. Much of his own time now goes on working with selected institutions on how to offer it inside the rules.

K33 works across borders, and its chief executive Torbjørn Bull Jenssen describes the position without decoration: "We're a sniper. We don't serve smaller retail clients. That's the only thing we do." Finland's Kvarn sells stocks, funds, crypto and tokenised assets from one place.

One word explains how they do it. K33 passported its Norwegian licence into Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany, which is the single market MiCA was written to create.

"MiCA is creating a single European market for crypto-asset services," says Bull Jenssen, whose stated ambition from the outset was a European platform and not a Norwegian one. Germany alone held 57 national MiCA licences at the beginning of July, which gives some sense of the room available once a Nordic company stops thinking in Nordic terms.

Coinmotion shows what that looks like in practice. The Finnish company, founded in 2012 and the first Finnish firm licensed as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA, passported into Sweden and opened an office in Stockholm, and it had more than 170,000 clients across the two countries at the start of this year. Its pitch is aimed at the Swedish saver who already holds funds and shares: a small first position in bitcoin, priced in kronor, with local deposit methods. Country manager Christer Ekman's measure of success is domestic familiarity. In Finland, he says, "we are a household name on par with the global platforms Coinbase and Binance."

And this is where that licence count pays off. Sweden is expected to be the main battleground, and nearly everyone entering it is doing so from somewhere else: Coinmotion on its Finnish licence, Kvarn out of Finland, Firi with Sweden as its third Nordic market. Sweden itself licensed one crypto-asset service provider, Safello. Where direct trading is hardest to build at home, it gets built from next door, or it gets replaced by something else entirely.

The second leaves the asset where it is and wraps it in something a broker already handles. An exchange-traded product holding bitcoin trades on a regulated exchange, settles like a share, and sits in the same account as the funds and equities beside it. Bitwise's Nordic head Marco Poblete puts the reason for it plainly: buying bitcoin directly is quite demanding for most people, and investors have strong incentives to trade on regulated markets through conventional brokers.

Sweden got there first, by a decade. Nasdaq Stockholm approved a bitcoin certificate in 2015 and an ethereum product in 2017, the first of their kind on any regulated exchange in the world. The ISK and KF account wrappers made the tax treatment simple, and Nordnet, Avanza and Savr made the products easy to reach. Swedish investors now account for an estimated 20 to 25 per cent of the assets under management in European crypto ETPs, in a sector holding some 16 to 17 billion dollars. When Bitwise came to the Nordics in January, it came through Stockholm, and Poblete runs the region from there.

The distributors are not crypto companies, and they say so. Nordnet lists these products without issuing them, and Joachim Wegebrand, who runs its exchange-traded products across the Nordics, is direct about the limits of the house view: "We have some knowledge, but we are no crypto experts at Nordnet." What Nordnet has instead is reach, and one figure that shows what reach does. After it opened monthly savings plans in crypto ETPs in September 2025, about four in five of the clients who started one had never traded crypto before. About a third of its crypto clients come from private banking.

That is the wrapper's real function. It serves people who already own crypto, and it also brings in people who were never going to open an account on an exchange.

The same preference runs across Europe. In CoinShares' survey of affluent investors, 55 per cent said they would rather invest through a traditional brokerage platform, a crypto ETP or a manager than through a crypto exchange, and in Sweden the figure was 62 per cent. Their advisers have not kept pace: only 13 per cent of financial advisers actively recommend digital assets, while most of these investors say they would take one who understood them.

Sweden stands out in that survey too, in the other direction.

Affluent Swedish investors own digital assets less than their peers in any other market surveyed, and more of them call themselves observers than anywhere else. Set that beside the adoption figures earlier and a particular country comes into view: ordinary Swedish savers are moving in faster than anyone else in the Nordics, while the wealthiest Swedish investors hold back from their European peers. Both groups, when they do buy, go through the regulated channel.

Virtune came to Oslo to stand in the gap between those investors and their advisers. More than 250 Norwegian investors, many of them Nordnet private banking clients, filled a hall in November 2025 to hear chief executive Christopher Kock argue that regulated ETP structures had made crypto ready for a broad base of savers.

His explanation for why Sweden runs ahead of Norway on these products was familiarity and the ISK account. His prescription was education.

The third puts a company between you and the asset. You buy a share, and the company holds the bitcoin. The form was invented in the United States by Michael Saylor.

His business software firm MicroStrategy made a first purchase of 250 million dollars in August 2020, kept buying with money raised through convertible bonds, and renamed itself Strategy in early 2025. Saylor's own line for the position is that you either believe in sound money or you do not. What he supplied to everyone who followed was a template: hold bitcoin as the primary reserve asset, raise the money for it in the capital markets instead of out of earnings, measure the company in bitcoin per share, and make the case in public, because the argument is part of the funding.

The Nordic companies work inside that template, and they industrialised it. H100, a Swedish listed company led by Norwegians, treated 1,000 bitcoin as its first milestone and set a target ten times that, published a twenty-one point plan for getting there, and said plainly that reaching it would require new capital structures. Sweden's Bitcoin Treasury Capital went after the capital itself, proposing the region's first bitcoin preference share, an income instrument paying out every month and ranking ahead of the ordinary shares, with the proceeds going into bitcoin. The model was taken from Strategy.

The warnings came from inside. K33's Torbjørn Bull Jenssen said in July 2025 that companies without a business plan would collapse. Three months later Sander Andersen, by then H100's chairman, said the sector was slowing as it entered an institutional phase, with more than a hundred companies now accumulating and the same investors being asked to fund them.

He expected consolidation, and fewer, stronger firms at the end of it. In January 2026 the market values of these companies fell below the value of the bitcoin they held.

Then the consolidation he predicted arrived. H100 tripled its holdings from about 1,051 to roughly 3,500 bitcoin by buying two Norwegian companies in a bitcoin-for-bitcoin deal, with no cash and no dilution, which left the sellers holding about seventy per cent of the company. K33 signed a letter of intent for 46.3 per cent of Sixty Six Capital in Canada, a company holding some 149 bitcoin, to support lending against its own balance sheet.

What a survivor looks like is visible in Ace Digital's third quarter: a profit of 6.3 million kroner and no debt. The profit is the unusual part. These are companies built to hold an asset and wait, and this one earned money in a quarter when bitcoin fell, its own fund gaining 23.1 per cent in dollars while the asset itself lost 23.7. The balance sheet has become the business.

And this is where two of these meet. As these companies slowed their buying through the second half of 2026, the exchange-traded funds took over as bitcoin's main buyers.

The fourth hands the decision over. On the first three you choose what to hold and when to hold it. Here a manager trades it for you, or a rule allocates it for you every month, and what you are buying is the arrangement itself.

Hilbert Group is the Nordic case. A Swedish manager listed on Nasdaq First North, it has made three acquisitions in twelve months, taking in a hedge fund, a crypto banking platform and a high-frequency trading firm whose volume passed 50 billion kronor last year, and it has set itself a target of ten billion dollars under management. Its chief investment officer Russell Thompson came out of the hedge fund world and describes the job as managing risk and generating alpha, with a short answer for everything else: "The stock will take care of itself."

The product that shows the difference most plainly is Synthetikea. A bitcoin holder hands over the bitcoin, which stays in custody, and receives a token that tracks Hilbert's own daily trading results. Price exposure is traded for the manager's performance.

Hilbert's share register says something about the region that the adoption figures do not. Its retail base is Swedish while its institutional base is largely Norwegian, because Swedish banks have stayed restrictive toward crypto where Norway has been more receptive. Sweden leads on the products individuals buy for themselves. Norway is where the institutions moved first.

StackXMe arrives at the same position from the other side. The Norwegian investment platform put TÝR Markets behind its app, which supplies the connection to international markets so that users can buy bitcoin without StackXMe building any of it.

Chief executive Madeleine Bjørnestad Røed calls her own company an order intermediary, and names the destination in a line: "Eventually, users will get both funds, stocks and crypto in one solution."

Goobit reached the same position from a refusal. Turned down for a MiCA licence in July, the Swedish company came back in September with Futureproof, a savings platform that splits a monthly amount between bitcoin, gold and interest-bearing assets, with every trade executed through a MiCA-authorised partner. The customer sets the amount and the allocation, and the platform runs it from there. Chief executive Gustav Buder is unembarrassed about the arrangement: "We are just a platform for them to do that."

Monthly saving appears under Regulated too, where Nordnet runs it into exchange-traded products. It is the same habit pointed at different machinery, and it is the one behaviour that turns up in more than one of these.

Kaupr Weekly is a short, news-oriented podcast hosted by Morten Myrstad, covering the week's biggest stories in crypto, fintech, stablecoins and the future of payments — out every weekend on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and elsewhere. From here we will point to the episodes that bear on what this track covers.

This issue ends where that convergence shows up in the places people actually buy. The seventh episode, The Everything Exchanges, follows crypto platforms as they start trading stocks, oil and silver alongside digital assets, and brokers, neobanks and fintechs moving the other way to add crypto to what they already sell. In one week this summer Hyperliquid turned over around 25 billion dollars, more of it outside crypto than in it. Eleven minutes.

The episode also runs ahead of this issue, into the settlement infrastructure underneath it: the New York Stock Exchange putting shares and funds onto blockchain settlement, the clearing houses testing it live, and Europe licensing venues of its own. That is where the next Onchain Invest goes.

Onchain Finance by Kaupr comes in two tracks. Onchain Invest is for anyone putting money to work, from private investors to professionals. Onchain Money is about how payments are changing, for businesses and consumers alike. They alternate on Thursdays, so if you follow both you hear from us every week.

More from Kaupr. Kaupr Daily carries daily signals on onchain finance every weekday, and Kaupr Digest gathers the week's most important news in one read every Sunday. Kaupr Weekly does the same week as a ten-minute podcast. Kaupr Events has upcoming events, curated picks and full recordings. Onchain Growth is a weekly briefing on the Nordic and Baltic onchain industry every Tuesday, Onchain Build is notes for builders, organisers and operators, and Onchain Community is where the industry meets between issues.

Thanks for reading. Money follows next Thursday.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr