This is the first issue of Onchain Money on its own. If you subscribed to Future of Finance Premium, this is where it continues — the publication is now Onchain Finance by Kaupr, at onchainfinance.kaupr.io. The name says what we have been writing about all along: payments and investing are moving onto the same rails, and the line between traditional finance and crypto is getting harder to draw.

There are two lists. Invest is for anyone putting money to work; Money, this one, follows how money and payments are changing — stablecoins and tokenised deposits, the central bank money underneath them, the rails they settle on, and the companies building on top. It follows ordinary money just as closely: cards, bank transfers, and the mobile wallets most people actually pay with. They alternate from here, so if you are on both you hear from us every week. If you came from a payments conference and have never bought a crypto asset, the context here should still be legible.

In this issue: central banks, commercial banks and private companies are all building a version of money, and what separates them is who stands behind it. Sweden's central bank has asked parliament to start legislating for a digital krona, arguing that payments have to work when the power does not. The digital euro has a timetable, a pilot, and a settlement service already running. Europe's banks are building a euro stablecoin that every Nordic country has joined except Norway. And DNB is building something else again.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

Fiat money has an issuer. The krona is worth something because Sweden issues it, takes it in payment of taxes and stands behind it. You already hold it in several forms — notes in a pocket, a balance in a bank account, that same balance reached by debit card or through Vipps, Swish, Apple Pay or Google Pay. A credit card reaches a lender's money, and the bill arrives later. Each of these is the same krona in a different wrapper.

A crypto asset has no issuer. Bitcoin began in 2008 as a proposal for electronic cash two people could send each other with no bank in between; earlier attempts at digital money had failed because a file can be copied and spent twice, and bitcoin let a network keep the record. The trust it attracts rests on what followed — 21 million coins, issued on a schedule nobody can change, and no balance anyone can freeze. Whether that makes it digital gold is argued both ways, and our wiki entry sets out the cases.

A stablecoin sits between the two. It is a token on a blockchain meant to hold a fixed value, usually a dollar, because the issuer holds dollars against it. The blockchain is the shared record every participant reads; the smart contract is the code that issues, moves and redeems the token with nobody processing it by hand. That makes a stablecoin a tokenised dollar — the same operation that puts a bond, a fund or a share on a chain, applied to money.

Five forms run through this newsletter. A stablecoin is issued by a company and holds its value because the company holds dollars or euros against it. A tokenised bank deposit is an ordinary bank balance issued as a token, inside banking regulation and on the bank's own balance sheet.

Wholesale central bank money is tokenised central bank reserves, which banks use to settle with each other, and retail central bank money is a central bank issuing straight to the public — what the digital euro is, and what the digital krona would be. Bitcoin has no issuer at all: where a local currency is failing it gets used to pay for things, and in the West it is mostly held.

You can look up the places that take it — maps list the shops and cafés in Norway and around the Nordics. The most visible door opened in December 2025, when Travel Retail Norway let Klikk & Hent orders collected at Oslo Lufthavn be paid in bitcoin over the Lightning Network. Half a year on, one or two customers a month were using it. “It has not become as popular as we thought, but it is not unused,” deputy managing director Haakon Dagestad told E24 in August.

The work to make it usable as payment carries on. Jack Dorsey's Block has been rolling out bitcoin payments over Lightning to Square's merchants, and has rebuilt Cash App around holding and spending it — salary paid in bitcoin by direct deposit, card purchases rounded up into it.

Meanwhile the wallet people already have keeps growing. Vipps reached 4.6 million users in Norway at its ten-year mark, and counts close to 13 million across the Nordics. With Bizum, Bancomat, Wero and MB WAY it is building a network covering about 130 million people in 13 countries: payments between people across borders this year, shops and online from 2027. Sweden has the same story in Swish, which almost every adult there uses, and which stays outside that network for now.

On the private side the movement has been stablecoins, led by Tether and Circle, and both keep widening what they do. Tether's USDT alone was worth $185 billion in April, when the company launched a consumer wallet of its own: readable addresses in place of long strings, fees paid in whatever is being sent, and an aim stated openly at ordinary users, creators and AI agents. “The people's wallet,” chief executive Paolo Ardoino called it.

Circle has aimed at institutions. It opened a payment network for banks in 2025, raised $222 million for a chain of its own in May, and in September launched that chain with BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard, Visa and Standard Chartered among its founding validators. USDC in circulation has passed $74 billion.

The public side of this is central bank digital money: the state's own money in digital form, issued by the central bank itself. Cash is the only central bank money the public can hold today — a balance in a bank account is a claim on that bank. As cash falls out of use that direct link weakens, which is one standing argument for issuing a digital version. Nearly every central bank is studying the question. Very few have answered it.

Norway has been through the question. Norges Bank ran the fifth phase of its work as two sandboxes, one retail and one wholesale, and then a bridge between them — because the problem is how value moves between ledgers when Europe is building one and England another. Ken Siva Lie, a senior adviser at the bank who joined three years ago to work on it, told an Oslo event on 14 October that bridges are dangerous: they are where things go wrong. They tested the hardest version first, with several ledgers, found it hard, and lost the benefits of the technology in doing it. The retail side was set aside for want of good answers and of any identified need, the conclusion that a digital krone is not warranted for now still stands, and since January the work has moved to interbank tokenisation with a reference group of large Norwegian banks — the twelve named in September — working to half-year plans.

Sweden's central bank has now asked parliament to prepare the ground for one of them.

The Riksbank wrote to the Riksdag's Committee on Finance on 7 October, asking parliament to begin preparing legislation for a digital krona and to appoint a special investigator. It has taken no position on whether one should be issued. Under the Sveriges Riksbank Act it cannot issue one without parliament's consent, and building it would take at least five years on top of passing the law — which is why it wants the work started now, even if Sweden later slows down or drops the idea.

The case it makes is preparedness. The Riksbank cites a worsening security situation and the government's Defence Decision 2025–2030, which notes that other emergency sectors lean heavily on a financial sector that is about 95 per cent private operators. A digital krona could strengthen payment resilience, it argues, including payments that still work offline when power or telecom networks fail.

On stablecoins it sees no near-term threat. Almost all of them are pegged to the dollar, and the Riksbank says they pose no significant near-term risk to the krona's use, while adding that the longer-term risk cannot be ignored. It points to AllUnity's Swedish krona stablecoin SEKAU, issued under MiCA.

It also says Sweden is falling behind Norway, Denmark and the euro area on instant account-to-account payments, and that a digital krona could give the public more instant options and help payments across borders.

And it would have to fit alongside the digital euro. The Riksbank would need to review how security protection law applies to sharing a platform with it, and to negotiate contracts with the ECB. Banks and the market would face substantial software, integration and customer interface work, plus a large public information campaign.

Read the full story →

The digital euro is the piece of all this with dates attached, and the case for it is being made on grounds that have little to do with crypto.

The project moved into technical preparation in February, aiming at a European Parliament vote in May, agreement on the legislation by the end of this year, a pilot in 2027 and a launch in 2029. Burkhard Balz called it a marathon past the thirty-kilometre mark. The argument underneath is dependence: PayPal handles close to a third of German online shopping, and Visa, Mastercard and American Express dominate the card market. Piero Cipollone has said that sanctions and geopolitical conflict strengthen the case for infrastructure Europe owns. Around seventy European economists, Thomas Piketty among them, signed a call to MEPs backing a strong public digital euro.

In July the ECB picked 36 payment service providers from more than fifty applicants, among them UniCredit, Revolut and SumUp — and Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank and Groupe BPCE, which had been among the project's sharper critics. Their worries were about competition for deposits and about cost. Taking part gives them a hand in the design, whatever they still think of it. The pilot runs for twelve months from the second half of 2027.

On 21 September the Eurosystem opened Pontes, a service that settles tokenised securities in central bank money, with the security and the payment changing hands in one operation. It runs weekdays from nine to four, in euro only, with longer hours planned for 2027 and round-the-clock settlement in several currencies targeted for mid-2028.

Ten European banks founded Qivalis in December 2025 to issue a euro stablecoin backed one for one by euro reserves: one shared platform for all of them, and a European answer to the dollar tokens that hold almost the entire market. By May the consortium had grown to 37 banks across 15 countries. It sits in Amsterdam, licensed by De Nederlandsche Bank, run by Jan-Oliver Sell, who used to head Coinbase's German business, and chaired by Howard Davies, once of NatWest. The token is due in the second half of this year.

Every Nordic country is in except Norway. Danske Bank and SEB were founders; Nordea, Handelsbanken, Swedbank, Jyske Bank, OP Pohjola and Landsbankinn came later. DNB was invited at the outset and has stayed out, having said in May that owning a share of stablecoin issuance was not right for it at this point — the same bank that spent Visa's summit in Oslo this month arguing that tokenised deposits do the job better.

UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank and BCV have been testing a franc-denominated stablecoin in a sandbox with a limited set of participants and capped transactions, with Swiss Stablecoin AG supplying the infrastructure. The sandbox runs through 2026, and the stated aim is working uses and customer benefit. Switzerland is outside the EU and outside MiCA, which makes it the other way of getting a European currency onto a chain.

AllUnity announced SEKAU in May, a Swedish krona token reserved one for one and redeemable at par, issued as an e-money token under MiCA and billed as the first regulated stablecoin in a Nordic currency. AllUnity is a Frankfurt e-money institution set up by DWS, Flow Traders and Galaxy; its chief executive Alexander Höptner pointed to Sweden's long run towards a cashless economy. It launched in June.

The Swedish authorities have been circling the question all year. In March the financial supervisor opened a dialogue on stablecoins during Stockholm Fintech Week, with the Riksbank and the finance ministry taking part, after years of being seen as hard to reach on digital assets. It asked for input on three things: what stablecoins could do for payments at home and across borders, what they risk, and where Sweden and Europe go next.

So Sweden already has a private krona token. The public one is what its central bank is now asking parliament to prepare for.

Norway's central bank has reached a similar place from its own evidence. In her annual address in February, governor Ida Wolden Bache said stablecoins mean little to everyday life here: they are used for buying and selling crypto and for some payments across borders, almost never for ordinary goods and services, and being almost all dollar-denominated makes them impractical to pay with in Norway. The krone does the job better. She left the door open — if stablecoins or something like them grow, the regulation has to be looked at again — and told the banks to think about how they avoid being left behind.

That is close to what the Riksbank has now told the Riksdag: no significant near-term risk to the krona, and a longer-term risk that cannot be ignored. Two Nordic central banks, the same reasoning about dollar denomination, the same reservation at the end of it.

What Norwegians know about stablecoins →

DNB has explained its absence from Qivalis twice. In September 2025 it sat out the opening round, citing low customer interest in its main markets; group executive Per Kristian Næss-Fladset said the bank had no concrete plans to take part for now. In May Ole Morten Sunde put it more plainly: it is good that European banks are gathering around shared stablecoin infrastructure, and owning a share of stablecoin issuance is not right for DNB at this point. The bank is building a wallet meant to hold digital money from several issuers and currencies, which keeps it connected to whichever model its customers ask for.

The track it is pursuing is tokenised deposits. In September DNB joined CBMT, the Commercial Bank Money Token network run by the German banking associations' coordinating body, alongside Commerzbank, DZ Bank, Helaba, UniCredit, ABN Amro and BNP Paribas. The Norwegian krone becomes the network's fourth currency, after the euro, the dollar and the yen. DNB will test whether krone deposits can move between parties, be exchanged for other currencies and settle securities trades. “Through CBMT we can explore tokenised deposits together with other banks,” Sunde wrote.

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 one is about what happens when the thing making the payment is a machine. Card payments are too expensive for very small amounts and take one to three working days to settle, where a blockchain settles at once. In July the x402 Foundation launched under the Linux Foundation with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Shopify, Circle, Coinbase, Solana, Stellar and Ripple among its members, reviving an HTTP status code — 402, payment required — that had sat unused for some thirty years. Cloudflare followed in August with wallets built for agents. Eleven minutes.

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. Invest follows next Thursday.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr