If you subscribed to Future of Finance Premium, this is where it continues. From today the publication is called Onchain Finance by Kaupr, and it lives at onchainfinance.kaupr.io.

The new name says what we have been writing about all along. Stablecoins, tokenised assets and AI agents are no longer separate stories. Payments and investing are moving onto the same rails, and the line between traditional finance and crypto is getting harder to draw. Onchain Finance by Kaupr follows that convergence from the side of the people who use it: investors of every kind, and businesses and consumers in their relationship to money and payments.

The publication has two lists. Invest is for anyone putting money to work, from private investors to professionals. Money is about how payments are changing, for businesses and consumers alike. You are on both, and they alternate from here, so you will hear from us every week.

In this issue: three reports from the floor at Visa's first stablecoin summit in Norway, where DNB, Nets, NBX and Norges Bank gave four different answers to the same question — the first time the four sit side by side. And from our own 35-minute conversation with Virtune's Christopher Kock and Andreas Severin, what tokenisation actually runs on, and how an investor can own that.

Both tracks are full this time. From next Thursday they alternate, one each week.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

This week's Kaupr Weekly walks through ten movements bringing old and new finance together, from bitcoin as a mainstream portfolio asset to tokenised stocks, stablecoin payments, banks' choice between stablecoins and tokenised deposits, and computing power as an economic asset. Twelve minutes.

Listen to Episode 13 → · Spotify → · Apple Podcasts → · Read the article →

This month the IMF set out what tokenisation requires before it delivers anything: legal certainty that a token carries enforceable rights, platforms that work together, and settlement in safe money. It also showed how far there is to go. Tokenised repo, the largest segment, trades around $300 billion a day against $13 trillion in the US repo market, and most tokenised trading still happens outside market hours.

Measured against that list, the past three weeks have been busy. The American financial press caught up with it, two exchanges filed to trade it, and an asset manager and a gaming company put mortgages and funds on a marketplace. The third condition, settlement in safe money, is being built too — that is the second main story in Money below.

Here is where each piece stands — and, from our own live session with Virtune on 7 October, what the whole thing runs on and how an investor can own that.

In the space of about a week, Barron's, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC and Bloomberg all turned to the tokenisation of listed shares. Barron's put it on its cover, calling it one of the biggest infrastructure upgrades since paper trading went electronic.

Behind the coverage are the institutions themselves. Nasdaq's chief executive Adena Friedman says Wall Street's problem is misplaced cash rather than a shortage: billions sit in clearinghouses and brokerage systems as collateral and funds held during settlement, and tokenisation could free them. Nasdaq has asked the SEC to allow tokenised settlement of stocks and ETFs on its main market.

Barron's contrasted the crypto bill's defeat in Washington with the pace on Wall Street, where tokenisation is advancing through regulators and exchanges rather than new law.

Read the full story →

OKXICE, the venture between crypto exchange OKX and NYSE owner ICE, has filed with the SEC to trade tokenised shares of 63 NYSE-listed companies around the clock. The companies have 30 days to opt out, and under the SEC's temporary exemption the tokens must carry the same dividends and voting rights as the shares. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo chairs the venture and calls it a radical change.

Securitize has launched tokenised shares of 12 US companies on Solana, including Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and Circle. Each token is backed by a real share, trades settle in USDC, and listing on NYSE's planned round-the-clock platform and on OKXICE is expected.

The OKXICE filing → · Securitize on Solana →

At TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Animoca Brands and Franklin Templeton announced a partnership around NUVA, a marketplace where assets such as loans and funds are represented as tokens that can be traded, lent or used as collateral. Animoca, founded in 2014, built NUVA with Nuva Labs; Franklin Templeton, founded in 1947, has run a digital assets division since 2018. Figure's US mortgages are offered on the platform.

The day before, NUVA launched HOME, giving investors outside the US access to a portfolio of US home-equity mortgages, targeting around 7 per cent a year with no lock-up.

Franklin Templeton's Jenny Johnson says crypto and traditional finance have largely lived as two parallel universes. Animoca's Yat Siu calls their convergence a real infrastructure play.

Read the full story →

The Solana Foundation has released an open-source delivery-versus-payment tool, where a tokenised asset and its payment settle in one transaction — if either side fails, neither settles, cutting settlement from days to seconds. J.P. Morgan advised on traditional settlement practice. Removing the risk that one side pays without receiving is a basic requirement before banks settle securities onchain.

How the banks themselves are getting there is the second main story in Money below.

Solana's delivery-versus-payment tool →

NYSE, Nasdaq, Coinbase and the London Stock Exchange are all pursuing tokenised stocks. But the tokens themselves still move on Ethereum and Solana. At our live session with Virtune on 7 October, the Stockholm asset manager made the case that this leaves an investor two routes: own the issuers, or own the infrastructure underneath them.

Ethereum holds close to half of all tokenised allocations — funds, shares, bonds and stablecoins — helped by a track record traditional institutions trust. Chief executive and co-founder Christopher Kock puts it this way: "The stablecoins are the traffic, and the fuel for this traffic will be, for example, Ethereum's own token, ether." Solana passed Ethereum on investor numbers in the spring, and its low fees and speed have drawn payment companies including Visa and PayPal. Chief Sales Officer Andreas Severin argues Chainlink wins either way, because its price feeds and cross-chain service are used whether tokenisation ends up on public chains or private ones.

Severin also draws a line through the asset class that is easy to miss. Bitcoin is a diversifier, a safe haven, an inflation hedge. Ethereum, Solana and Chainlink are something else — investments in the financial system being built. Kock adds the warning that goes with it: a growing stablecoin market does not automatically lift all of crypto.

And on how far the Nordics have come, Severin is blunt. The region lags on institutional adoption, particularly against Switzerland. Around 13 per cent of Swedes have some crypto exposure, according to K33.

Which leaves the practical question. Owning the issuers means buying shares. Owning the infrastructure means holding the tokens themselves — or holding them through a wrapper. That wrapper is what Virtune makes: exchange-traded products that track the underlying asset and trade on an ordinary exchange like a share, bought through the bank or the broker you already use, in the account you already have, with no wallet and no private keys. Their Zcash ETP listed on Nasdaq Stockholm on 6 October.

This describes how exposure can be obtained, not a recommendation to obtain it. Read the issuer's prospectus and key information before investing.

Read the full article → · How investors gain exposure → · Watch the recording →

CoinShares surveyed 2,230 investors with at least $500,000 to invest, across the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Sweden. Two findings stand out: how ordinary crypto has become in those portfolios, and how far the advice industry is behind its own clients. Sweden is the most cautious of the seven markets.

Two in three hold crypto, at around ten per cent of their portfolio, comparable to private equity, and only six per cent invest for short-term gains. Yet only 13 per cent of financial advisers actively recommend digital assets.

The full survey →

In Sweden, 54 per cent hold crypto, the lowest of the seven markets, and 52 per cent call themselves observers with minimal exposure. Only 34 per cent have a wealth manager who includes crypto, and just 24 per cent are extremely likely to increase their exposure this year, against 46 per cent across Europe. CoinShares reads it as Swedish finance embracing the technology but not the asset class.

The Swedish findings →

Jeonbuk Bank — has made South Korea's first bank loan backed by bitcoin, lending won to corporate clients with a registered custodian holding the collateral, under rules that took effect on 1 October.

Bitcoin is becoming collateral a bank will lend against.

S&P Global — has launched risk assessments for onchain lending vaults, which pool deposits and lend them out like fixed income funds. Deposits in such vaults have grown from $1.5 billion to $10 billion in two years.

Onchain lending is being judged by the same machinery as fixed income.

Nasdaq Ventures — has taken an early-stage stake in One Trading, the Amsterdam exchange that has Dutch regulatory backing for what it calls the EU's first regulated 24/7 market in equity perpetuals. In September it put $100 million into Payward, Kraken's parent, citing tokenised equities and always-on markets.

Nasdaq is putting money into the venues that already trade around the clock.

Standard Chartered — will offer custody of selected cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and tokenised real-world assets in Singapore for institutional and corporate clients, inside the bank's securities services and covering the whole chain from holding traditional assets to issuing and holding tokenised versions of them.

A global bank is adding tokenised assets to the custody business it already runs.

H100 — has adopted a cash-based incentive programme for 2027–2030 under which senior executives are paid on the company's performance relative to bitcoin, with the option to settle in shares. Peter C. Warren was elected to the board at the same meeting, with Sander Andersen re-elected as chairman.

Management pay at H100 now depends on outperforming the asset the company holds.

Our analysis pages gather three recurring formats in one place: Trendline, Venkat Hrushikesa Varri's weekly read of bitcoin and the crypto market, with a new edition waiting at the start of every week; Outlooks, where analysts at Nordic and European research houses and asset managers say where they think the market is and what they are watching; and Kaupr Weekly, the podcast on the longer trends in onchain finance.

Read the analysis →

Visa brought close to 100 people to the National Museum in Oslo on Tuesday 6 October for its first stablecoin summit in Norway: banks, acquirers, merchants and crypto-native companies in the same room. Visa made the case that stablecoins are the only form of money that is at once a store of value, a medium of exchange, digital, borderless and programmable.

The room did not agree. The country's largest bank expects stablecoins to stay a niche and to become more niche as other forms of money catch up. The issuer in the room has been running one for over a year and calls them the building blocks of digital finance. The acquirer sells every scheme going and is content either way. And Norges Bank brought figures that complicate all three: awareness among Norwegians has doubled in two years, while the share of those who have heard of a stablecoin and never bought one has risen from 56 to 72 per cent.

Our own reading, for what it is worth: stablecoins and tokenised deposits will live side by side, and possibly alongside central bank digital money and bitcoin too. DNB's own speaker ended close to the same place — three layers that coexist, with the competition happening inside each layer rather than between them. If that is right, the argument is not which form of money wins. It is how large each layer gets, and how fast.

Three positions and one measurement, in the order they came.

Ole Morten Sunde, head of emerging business products at DNB, set the bar first: mainstream means being paid your salary in stablecoins, paying your taxes with them, and being able to spend them almost anywhere. Measured against that, his answer was no — and not because of the technology. The problem stablecoins solve is shrinking in Europe. Instant payments are becoming the norm and banks must offer them free across Europe; Vipps, Bizum, MB WAY and WERO already do most of what a stablecoin would do at home.

Visa had set out five properties that make money useful: global, programmable, available around the clock, inside banking regulation, and covered by deposit insurance. An ordinary bank deposit meets two of them, Sunde said. A tokenised deposit meets all five. Norges Bank already runs a shared ledger with twelve participants, DNB among them.

He named three things that would have to change before his answer became yes: banks and companies using stablecoins for payments rather than for crypto trading, currencies other than the dollar arriving onchain, and cross-border rules that work together. And he named where stablecoins do fit now: corridors where the banking system is weak, payments between companies across borders, and companies holding dollars in their own cash balances.

Visa's own example cut both ways. A Norwegian shipping company paying the Philippines moves fast through the stablecoin leg, but the conversions at each end still carry the same liquidity and compliance work — and a Banca d'Italia study this summer, across ten corridors, found no systematic cost advantage.

Sunde's conclusion was not that one wins. It was three layers that coexist: tokenised central bank reserves underneath for settlement between banks, tokenised deposits in the middle for lending and credit, stablecoins on top for reach. His own salary, he expects, will arrive as a tokenised deposit.

Read the full story →

On the panel, moderated by Visa's Viktor Möllborg, the three answers sat side by side. DNB's Lars Marius Sæverhagen, who leads the bank's tokenisation work with Norges Bank, called stablecoins a useful niche that will become more niche as other forms of money catch up. He put a number on the scale: Tether and USDC together are worth about $250 billion, while DNB alone moves $100–200 billion a day in outgoing currency trading and settlement. Three or four days of one Norwegian bank's flow exceeds the entire stablecoin market.

Where he does see tokenisation paying off is in capital markets, particularly the ability to move collateral — and central bank money, he argues, has to stay the anchor underneath.

NBX's chief executive Stig Aleksander Kjos-Mathisen took the other side: stablecoins are the building blocks of digital finance, and not overhyped. NBX has issued a dollar stablecoin for over a year and plans euro and złoty versions later this year. His argument is about the moment of payment and what it costs — settlement in stablecoins plus tokenised money market funds could add roughly 150 interest days a year for a merchant with weekend sales. He concedes what cards still do better: buyer protection.

Nets' Snorre Corneliussen was the one with nothing at stake, since Nexi sells every scheme going. He doubts stablecoins will undercut bank acquiring on price, sees digital cash solving a real problem in cash-heavy Germany and for young people and AI agents, and points out that the ECB's digital euro, expected in 2029, would make merchant acceptance a matter of regulation rather than competition.

Read the full story →

Suela Kristiansen, special adviser at Norges Bank, brought the numbers to the same room. Nineteen per cent of Norwegians have now heard of stablecoins, up from ten per cent in 2024 — a representative survey she started in 2022 and now runs every other year. Crypto assets in general are known to 97 per cent, and twelve per cent own some.

"The good news for all stablecoin enthusiasts is that we've almost doubled awareness among the population," she said. The bad news is what happens next: 72 per cent of those who have heard of a stablecoin have never bought one, up from 56 per cent in 2024. Among those who have, trading other crypto is the main reason, ahead of storing value and testing the technology. Tether and USD Coin lead, then DAI and USDS. Men are about four times as likely as women to have heard of them at all.

Kristiansen also pushed back on the idea that an open ledger settles the question of transparency: you can see an address, not who is behind it. "It's easy to say stablecoins are good or bad, and that's not a very interesting discussion for me." What Norges Bank does not have is data on which use cases are gaining ground among Norwegian institutions — and she asked the room to tell her.

Read the full story →

DNB's argument in Oslo rests on tokenised bank deposits doing the same job as stablecoins, inside banking regulation. The week before the summit, at Sibos in Miami, the pieces that make that possible were put on the table.

Swift is the messaging network that almost every cross-border payment runs through today, and it now has a blockchain ledger of its own. Most of the seventeen first-mover banks have used it for round-the-clock payments. What was still missing was how an ordinary bank joins without rebuilding its systems. Four answers arrived in the same week, and together they turn going onchain into a supplier decision rather than a rebuild.

Chainlink is building a connection to Swift's ledger in which banks sign transactions themselves and tokenised deposits stay on their own balance sheets. The Chainlink Runtime Environment coordinates the workflow between the bank's systems and the ledger, so security routines and approval processes stay as they are.

Swift unveiled the ledger at Sibos 2025, built with more than 40 financial institutions; it does not move money itself, and final settlement still runs through existing arrangements such as central banks' real-time systems. Chainlink has not said which banks will use it, or when.

Read the full story →

IBM and Oracle plan to connect banks' current systems to the ledger through ISO 20022, the message standard banks already use. IBM's solution is in beta and can run in the bank's own data centre.

Read the full story →

Chainlink's CCIP 2.0 lets banks and issuers add their own verification and compliance checks, such as sanctions screening, when tokenised assets move between blockchains, and choose how fast transfers settle. ANZ, Fidelity International and Sygnum are launch partners, and the standard secures more than $84 billion.

Read the full story →

Swift is teaming up with national payment systems such as Spain's Bizum, Brazil's Pix and Australia's PayID, so people can send money across borders using a phone number or an email address.

Read the full story →

Visa — business cards account for about 17 per cent of the volume on Visa's more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes so far in fiscal 2026, and businesses are the recipient in 58–64 per cent of all stablecoin payments, according to data firm Allium.

Businesses, not consumers, are already the main users of stablecoin payments.

Stripe — plans to offer its stablecoin card programmes in more than 100 countries by the end of the year. About $1.2 billion of stablecoins were spent through cards last month, triple a year earlier.

The stablecoin card is becoming available almost everywhere.

Qivalis — has been authorised as an electronic money institution by De Nederlandsche Bank, a step towards the euro stablecoin it plans to issue under MiCA. The consortium behind it has grown to 37 European banks across 15 countries, with banks from every Nordic country except Norway.

The banks' own euro stablecoin is moving from consortium to licence.

Samsung — Samsung Wallet opens USDC transfers on Solana for around 82 million Galaxy users in the US from the last week of October, with conversion to and from local currency built in.

Stablecoins are reaching consumers through the wallet already on the phone.

Vipps MobilePay — has joined Bizum, Bancomat, EPI/Wero and SIBS MB WAY in setting up the European Network for Payments, a jointly owned company in Madrid that will connect their systems across 13 countries and about 130 million users. It starts with payments between people across borders, then online and in-store, with each app keeping its own brand.

Europe is assembling a cross-border payment network from the apps people already have open.

Dollars hold about 99 per cent of the stablecoin market, euros under one. In Paris on 5 October, eleven firms including eToro, SwissBorg, Coinmerce and RockawayX formed the Eurøpe Consortium to get the euro stablecoin EURØP into practical use. Schuman Financial issues the token under MiCA. MiCA gave euro stablecoins rules, but not distribution or liquidity.

The euro stablecoin initiative →

What Onchain Finance by Kaupr is, in full →

Onchain Finance by Kaupr comes in two tracks

They alternate on Thursdays, so if you follow both you hear from us every week.

More from Kaupr

Thanks for reading the first issue of Onchain Finance by Kaupr. From next Thursday the two tracks alternate, one each week.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr