A Nordic fund returned 22 per cent over the past twelve months while bitcoin fell 29. It is run by a bitcoin treasury company, it invests in other treasury companies, and it has never used leverage or taken a short position. Alexander Hagen explains how, in an interview published this morning.

Tokenisation runs through the rest of the issue. Norges Bank wants the industry to write a strategy, Sweden's regulator is recruiting a reference group, and a round table in Stockholm put a deadline on the table: live production by the end of 2027, not another pilot. Lithuania's Axiology can now take client orders as well as settle them. In the United States, the New York Stock Exchange has picked its settlement ledger, and a second tokenised venue opens on 23 November — after 67 companies refused to be listed on it.

Among the Nordic crypto stocks, Goobit's rights issue adds 1.66 billion shares, NBX has been drawing equity from a Los Angeles firm every other month, and Safello made money again on 41 per cent less revenue.

And MSCI has decided that companies holding bitcoin on the balance sheet look more like investment funds than operating businesses. Strategy leaves its global indexes on 1 December.

Below, by asset class: tokenised securities, crypto stocks, treasury companies, ETPs.

Morten
Founder & Editor, Kaupr

Over the past twelve months the fund run by Ace Digital — itself a bitcoin treasury company — returned 22 per cent in dollar terms, against a 29 per cent fall in bitcoin. Chief executive Alexander Hagen manages it.

It invests in bitcoin treasury companies — the listed companies that hold bitcoin on their balance sheets — and uses derivatives to manage the exposure. It has never used leverage and has never taken a short position. Hagen says the fund reads each company's capital structure and judges whether management understands what it is trying to do and can deliver it, then applies the approaches that suit that company. It stays in the most liquid shares, because liquidity is a real risk in a European market this small.

“You can't just buy bitcoin, fold your hands and wait for the price to rise,” Hagen says. The fund is closed to new external investors.

The story · Hagen on Kaupr TV

Torbjørn Hægeland, director for financial stability at Norges Bank, opened the digitalisation and payments session at Finance Norway's conference on 5 November by telling the industry to prepare a tokenisation strategy, and saying central banks should have their own. He expects coexistence rather than replacement: “perhaps we'll see a development where tokenisation and traditional technology live side by side.”

The gains and the costs fall largely outside the central bank and depend on many players moving together, which is why he put the weight on coordination. Norges Bank wants closer collaboration with Nordic and European central banks on future settlement systems. The first concrete step is connecting real-time settlement in Norwegian kroner to TIPS, planned for 2029, with work running in parallel on the clarifications needed for Norwegian participation in the Eurosystem's T2, where the bank aims to conclude early next year.

What Hægeland said →

Ole Morten Sunde, the DNB director who leads the bank's tokenisation work, told the same conference that collaboration between banks and regulators is what decides whether the benefits of tokenisation arrive at all. Payments and securities have long sat in separate value chains, and his argument is that they can meet on one shared register, where money and securities settle together and transactions run through smart contracts instead of reconciliation between several parties.

Norway has done it before. In 1985 banks, brokers and Norges Bank built the Norwegian Central Securities Depository together, the collaboration Sunde points to as the precedent, and Norges Bank is involved again in DNB's testing of tokenised bank deposits. Those tests have run across several banks, central banks and currencies.

Sunde on what it takes →

Blockchain Sweden brought around 30 people to one table at Eversheds Sutherland during Nordic Tech Week — banks, infrastructure players, technology providers, advisers, entrepreneurs, lawyers and Finansinspektionen. The question was deliberately ambitious: what would it take for one major Swedish financial institution to run tokenised securities in live production by the end of 2027, not a pilot and not a proof of concept, and who in the room has a role in making that happen.

The concrete next step was to bring that question into Finansinspektionen's Innovationskompass and work with a small group of market participants on what is already possible, what needs clarification and where the real obstacles lie, leaving what sits with Riksbanken, Skatteverket and others to later workstreams. Tommy Andorff of Neuro by Trust Anchor Group brought end-to-end tokenisation experience, Tobias Lipfert of d-fine a wider European perspective including why Germany is ahead of Sweden. Hanna Raftell of Blockchain Sweden writes that there is a growing recognition that Sweden and the Nordics are not at the forefront: “Maybe we don't need to be? But we absolutely need to be prepared.”

Finansinspektionen has opened a call for participants in a guidance project on tokenised money and DLT-based payments, with 22 November the deadline to register interest. The theme came out of Innovationskompassen, the regulator's method for identifying where the market needs guidance.

The work runs as four to five workshops, covering how tokenised money should be classified, which rules apply, and how DLT-based solutions can work alongside existing payment and settlement systems. The use cases named include cross-border payments and the trading and settlement of tokenised shares and bonds. FI is aiming at issuers of e-money tokens under MiCA, providers of tokenised bank funds and anyone building payment solutions tied to tokenised instruments, and may limit numbers if interest is high.

What FI is asking for →

The cap in the EU's DLT Pilot Regime stands at six billion euro. The Commission has proposed a hundred billion. A group of 27 companies and industry bodies — Nasdaq, Boerse Stuttgart, 21X, Axiology and Securitize among them — has told the Council and Parliament that is far too low, and that fifteen hundred billion would be a suitable baseline.

The letter →

NYSE, owned by Intercontinental Exchange, announced on 9 November that it has chosen Avalanche as the settlement ledger for its planned platform for tokenised stocks and ETFs. Ava Labs supplies the core ledger technology to the clearing firm behind it.

It will not run on the public Avalanche network. NYSE is building its own closed chain, which lets it write participation controls into the infrastructure itself. Dennis Lee, its head of digital issuance, says the ledger has to be fast, predictable in cost and able to control who takes part. The platform is designed for round-the-clock trading, near-instant settlement and stablecoin funding, with shareholders keeping voting rights and dividends. Launch is expected in the fourth quarter, subject to approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What NYSE has chosen →

OKXICE, a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, begins round-the-clock trading on 23 November for eligible US customers who have completed onboarding. More than 70 assets are confirmed, including 59 Direxion ETFs and tokenised shares of Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood, BitGo, Securitize, Better.com and Strategy, which is listing both its common and its preferred shares.

Trading runs through Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on X Layer, OKX's Ethereum layer-2. Securitize provides the tokenisation, customers hold their own keys, and the tokens represent security entitlements that preserve dividends, voting and corporate-action rights. It is the second venue to open under the SEC's five-year innovation exemption, which gives a company 30 days to object when an unaffiliated third party tokenises its stock. Sixty-seven objected, among them Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla and JPMorgan Chase.

Payward added tokenised versions of more than 200 UK- and EU-listed stocks to xStocks, including all 40 companies in Germany's DAX — SAP, Siemens, Allianz and Deutsche Telekom among them. Each token is backed one to one by shares held with a regulated custodian, and Deutsche Börse says the DAX tokens trade on its affiliated 360X platform.

What the holder gets is exposure to the share price. Kraken's own risk disclosure states there are no voting rights and no legal claim to the underlying stock. The tokens are also unavailable to investors in the UK, despite the UK listings. xStocks now carries more than 1,500 tokenised assets worth $1.1 billion, and Hong Kong equities are next.

The Digital Asset Custody service is live for paying institutional and corporate clients in Europe. The bank holds the wallets and private keys, with hardware-based key protection, multi-person approvals and separated warm and cold storage. It covers bitcoin, ethereum and three stablecoins: Circle's USDC and EURC, and AllUnity's EURAU. BaFin authorised it under MiCA, and the register listing is dated 12 October.

The bank has been at this since 2021 and applied for a German custody licence in 2023, building with Taurus. A memorandum with Deutsche Asset Management, which oversees around €1.22 trillion, will explore tokenised money market funds, crypto exchange-traded commodities and stablecoins. Deutsche Bank notes that the service does not protect clients against price swings, fraud or failures by other market participants.

The Bank of Lithuania has extended Axiology's MiFID authorisation to cover reception, transmission and execution of client orders. Kaupr reported it on 10 November.

Until now Axiology ran the back end: a combined trading and settlement system for tokenised securities, authorised under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime since July 2025. It could hold and settle. It could not take an instruction from a client and act on it.

With the extension, institutions — including corporate treasury teams — can subscribe to and redeem tokenised money market funds directly, without arranging separate brokerage.

“Tokenisation has the potential to make capital markets much more efficient,” says chief executive Marius Jurgilas, who describes the extension as bringing the full investment process under one regulated roof.

Axiology raised five million euro in a seed round announced in February, taking total funding to around seven million. Exponential Science, e2vc and Coinvest Capital led it. It runs a permissioned network built on the XRP Ledger and settles in regulated European stablecoins rather than waiting two days.

It was the first DLT trading and settlement operator licensed in the Nordics and Baltics, and the second in the EU.

VIALET, a Lithuanian electronic money institution, added tokenised money market funds from Axiology in October as a third place to safeguard client funds, alongside bank accounts and government bonds.

The company handles around 150 million euro and processed 5.5 billion euro in payments over the past year. Putting safeguarded money into funds spreads risk away from individual banks and earns a return on cash that still has to be available.

The hard part is timing. Money market funds have redemption cut-offs; payments settle the same day. Axiology brought in an outside liquidity provider so VIALET can reach cash intraday without changing the funds' terms.

“Safeguarding requires funds to be accessible when payments settle, not just high-quality assets,” says Jurgilas.

When the Eurosystem named the four operators able to settle tokenised securities in central bank money through Pontes, three were Clearstream, SWIAT and Cashlink — all German or German-owned. The fourth was Axiology.

Pontes opened on 21 September and carried its first transaction in October, a one-billion-euro bond for the European Stability Mechanism. Axiology has been testing a full bond life cycle — issuance, trading, interest, redemption — and as of September still needed final certification before joining live operations.

It has also joined the ECB's contact group for Appia, the long-term project for a European tokenised capital market.

The issue closed fully subscribed on 10 November, raising about 25.1 million Swedish kronor before costs. Subscriptions covered 78 per cent; an undertaking and an underwriting commitment covered the rest.

The rights issue and a directed issue together add around 1.66 billion new shares, about 78 per cent of the company's shares and votes. Warrants exercisable between 18 May and 1 June 2027 would add roughly 19 per cent more.

Just over half the issue, 13.8 million kronor, settled claims against the company rather than raising cash. Goobit is now debt-free apart from operating liabilities. The proceeds are earmarked for launching Futureproof.

Chief executive Gustav Buder thanked existing and new shareholders and said the capital strengthens the company's financial position.

The Norwegian exchange has taken at least 34 million kroner from the Los Angeles firm across ten rounds, the most recent 6.8 million on 3 November.

The agreement is a committed equity facility. NBX issues a notice for a set number of shares, a pricing period follows, and LDA must subscribe at the resulting price. NBX can set a minimum price for each drawdown, which it says gives it control over dilution.

Prices per share across the disclosed rounds have ranged from 38 to 78 øre. The November round was 47.

The money has gone to bitcoin purchases and to the statutory capital behind the e-money licence and the MiCA authorisation NBX is seeking.

NBX and Aprikos Venture have signed a joint venture for Nayapaisa, a planned crypto exchange for Pakistani customers, and applied to Pakistan's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority for a No Objection Certificate.

The certificate is the first step in the licensing process. The exchange cannot serve customers until both it and the licence are granted, and several senior roles are still to be filled before the licence application goes in.

The two companies will own half each through Horizon Markets, a Norwegian holding company still being incorporated. Jamil Rehman, Aprikos' chairman, is proposed as chief executive and NBX's Stig Kjos-Mathisen as chairman.

Pakistan has around 241 million people and ranked third of 151 countries in Chainalysis' 2025 adoption index.

Safello posted an operating profit of 0.8 million kronor in the third quarter, its first profitable quarter since the end of 2024, against a loss of 1.1 million a year earlier.

Net turnover fell 41 per cent to 98.4 million kronor. Operating expenses fell 41 per cent to 7.6 million, with average headcount down from 33 to 19. A fee structure change at the end of June lifted the gross margin to 8.8 per cent from 8.1.

Monthly turnover rose through the quarter, from 23.4 million in July to 41.9 million in September. Over nine months net turnover is down 33 per cent and the operating result is about minus 9.8 million.

Founder Frank Schuil returned as chief executive and led the changes. He called one profitable quarter a single data point and set a goal of three consecutive profitable quarters.

Trading volume in the third quarter was 83.3 million Swedish kronor, against 200 million a year earlier. Net revenue fell 60 per cent to 2.72 million, while the operating result improved to minus 3.81 million from minus 6.77 million.

The group runs its crypto trading through Trijo and Northcrypto and had 78,889 customers at the end of the quarter. A cost programme is expected to cut running costs by about 400,000 kronor a month. “The third quarter became a turning point for GreenMerc,” writes chief executive Ari Liukko.

Coinbase reported net income of $718.7 million for the third quarter and adjusted EBITDA of $332.9 million, up 60 per cent on the previous quarter and its fifteenth consecutive positive quarter. Its share of crypto trading volume was 10.7 per cent, a fourth straight quarter of gains.

Subscription and services made up 49 per cent of net revenue. Prediction markets passed $200 million in annualised revenue, average USDC held in Coinbase products reached $22 billion, and tokenised stock volume on Base has passed $1 billion since launch. “Prediction markets are adding another revenue stream and are less correlated to crypto volatility,” says chief financial officer Alesia Haas.

BitGo posted net income of about $44.1 million for the third quarter, which the company attributed in part to treasury-related appreciation. Adjusted EBITDA was negative at about $4.3 million.

Total revenue was around $2.85 billion against $5.81 billion a year earlier, with direct costs of about $2.81 billion; the company says the revenue figure reflects the accounting presentation of transaction-related activity. Normalised assets on the platform rose 31.9 per cent to $59.9 billion, normalised staked assets rose 41.1 per cent, and the firm reported about 6,640 clients.

Circle reported total revenue and reserve income of $865 million for the third quarter, up 17 per cent, with net income from continuing operations of $226 million and adjusted EBITDA of $317 million, up 85 per cent. Distribution and transaction costs fell to $409 million from $447 million.

Average USDC in circulation was $73.3 billion, up 8 per cent, and $73.9 billion at the end of the period, unchanged on a year earlier. Other revenue reached $207 million, up 627 per cent, of which $182 million came from the ARC token presale. “In Q3, we saw continued proof that institutions are building and expanding on USDC,” says chief executive Jeremy Allaire.

MSCI concluded that such companies resemble investment funds rather than operating businesses, and will drop Strategy, Metaplanet and Yellow Cake from the MSCI USA and MSCI World indexes. The ether treasury platform SharpLink is on a watchlist.

Passive funds tracking a benchmark have to sell what leaves it. Strategy warned last year that exclusion would mean about $2.8 billion of its stock being liquidated, and J.P. Morgan has estimated up to $8.8 billion if other index providers follow. The shares are down about 20 per cent this year.

Operating income was $20.91 billion in the third quarter, which the release says reflects entirely a gain on digital assets. Software revenue was $125.4 million, down 3 per cent.

The company held about 848,517 bitcoin as of 25 October at an average cost of $75,446. Andrew Kang stepped down as chief financial officer on 5 November.

BitMine funded its ether buying by selling its own stock — 395.1 million shares for $13.2 billion gross — taking shares outstanding from 232.4 million to 613.3 million over the year.

It reported a net loss of $6.31 billion for the year to 31 August, $6.23 billion of it unrealised, with no ether sold at a loss. Revenue was $124.8 million, almost all from staking, against general and administrative expenses of $376.9 million. Tom Lee has bought weekly since mid-2025 and added another 9,587 ETH this week.

Strive closed an upsized IPO of its SATS preferred stock on 20 October, selling seven million shares at $90 for $630 million gross.

SATS carries a 15 per cent annual dividend on a $100 stated amount, cumulative and scheduled each business day from 9 November — around $105 million a year before Strive's other preferred issues. The company holds about 36,818 bitcoin and has not said how much of the proceeds will go to buying more.

B Treasury Capital's preference share trades on Spotlight without entitlement to the dividend from 12 November. The payment is one krona per preference share.

Finwire puts the annualised rate at twelve kronor per share, a yield of 7.9 per cent against a latest price of 152.50.

The Virtune AI Crypto Index ETP listed on 3 November, as VIRAI on Nasdaq Stockholm and VRTI on Deutsche Börse Xetra. It tracks thirteen crypto assets tied to the agent economy, where software buys data, compute and services, often paying in stablecoins.

The index is equally weighted rather than weighted by market value, at 7.69 per cent per asset at listing, and splits into four layers: compute, infrastructure and data, trading and liquidity, and payments. Ethereum and Solana sit in the payments layer alongside Stellar, XRP and Sui. “We prefer broad exposure that gives you all the layers,” says chief sales officer Andreas Severin, who argues market-cap weighting would concentrate the index in the two largest.

21shares has listed CLAU in Vienna, an ETP that tracks Anthropic's implied market value ahead of an expected listing. It is synthetic: it holds no shares, and will not convert into shares if Anthropic goes public.

Investor money goes into a special purpose vehicle set up with the crypto broker FalconX, which gives it exposure to the Kaiko Anthropic USD Reference Rate. That rate is derived from Anthropic perpetual futures traded on Binance since June, with open interest estimated at about $42.5 million. Adrian Fritz, head of investment strategy at 21shares, warns that depth in those contracts is still limited, which matters for larger trades. Anthropic has filed an S-1 and plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT.

Sixty per cent of affluent Swedish investors said a Riksdag motion for a Riksbank bitcoin reserve — tabled by two Sweden Democrats and voted down — made them more likely to invest. Forty-eight per cent said the same about the Riksbank's warning on cyber risks in digital payments. MiCA scored 49 per cent, against 60 to 65 in other European markets.

The gap to their advisers is the widest in the survey. Thirty-four per cent have a wealth manager who actively includes digital assets, against 51 per cent across Europe, while 44 per cent invest without one and are open to it, and 31 per cent call their manager too conservative. “Swedish traditional finance embraces the infrastructure but won't talk about the asset class,” says CoinShares' head of marketing Benoît Pellevoizin.

The Affluent Investor Crypto Report 2026 surveyed 2,230 investors across seven markets, 304 of them Swedish, each with at least $500,000 in investable assets.

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