Agentic commerce arrives · Treasury companies a year on · New podcast

Whether you read every Daily this week, only a few, or none at all — here's the shape of the week, seen from a distance.

In this week's Digest:

💎 AI agents start paying
💎 Agentic commerce arrives
💎 Tokenisation moved on four levels at once
🎧 Kaupr Weekly — the Nordic bitcoin treasury companies, a year on
💎 The recording from Thursday's pre-event in Stockholm

— Morten

Around fifteen Nordic companies announced a bitcoin treasury strategy last year. Mining companies, rig companies, gaming companies. Everyone wanted to be first.

The model depended on one thing: a share price above the value of the bitcoin held. Issue shares, buy more bitcoin, and every existing owner ends up with more. Bitcoin peaked in October, fell through the winter, and the premium went with it.

Most of the fifteen left quietly. Four are still standing, and each of them has attached something else to the balance sheet — options trading, lending, a preference share paying a monthly dividend. This episode is about what those four did, and whether the category has grown up or just found somewhere to wait.

Also on Spotify · Apple Podcasts

For most of this year, agentic payments have been a plan. The pieces are now going into use.

The alliance. Rain launched the Agentic Payments Alliance with Anthropic, Circle, Crossmint and Skyfire, aimed at getting agents to pay for things by themselves rather than through a person. Rain's own scoped cards give an agent limited authority with minimum and maximum balances and spending caps.

The card networks. PayPal, Mastercard and Visa are all building rails for agent-initiated payments. Between them they reach nearly every merchant that already takes a card, which is the part a new payment network cannot replicate.

The settlement layer. Stablecoins are being positioned as the money agents use, because they settle without a bank in the loop and without asking anyone to approve each transaction.

And the protocol. OpenLedger argued that verifiable attribution is what agentic commerce needs to work — knowing which model, which data and which party produced a result, and paying each of them.

Agents have been able to decide things for two years. Paying for them is the part that was missing.

And the businesses are arriving alongside it.

Google Cloud took a stake in the infrastructure with Rezolve AI, and Rezolve set out its provenance work — establishing where a product came from and who touched it, which is what a machine needs before it can transact on your behalf.

Revolut launched EURR, a euro stablecoin, giving one of Europe's largest consumer fintechs its own settlement asset rather than someone else's.

The card schemes were described as operating systems rather than networks: the layer where an agent gets identity, permission and a spending limit, not just a payment rail.

And Anthropic signed a $45 billion compute agreement with Nscale, in the same week it hired for its own silicon work.

The gap between agents being able to pay and companies building businesses on it was one day.

Tuesday's edition carried four stories about tokenisation, and they were not the same story told four times.

The product. Coinbase entered the tokenised stock market using Chainlink infrastructure, issuing tokens backed one-to-one with a custodian holding the shares, tradable around the clock and usable as collateral.

The market structure. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams argued that tokenised equities do not simply copy the stock market onchain — they move market structure itself, because the rules about who may hold what move into the asset.

The sovereign layer. CZ set out models for states tokenising their own assets, which is a different proposition from a company tokenising its shares.

The settlement layer. The European Central Bank selected DLT operators for Project Pontes, its work on settling tokenised assets in central bank money.

A product, a market structure, a state and a central bank. Tokenisation stopped being one conversation some time ago.

On Thursday we broadcast the second pre-event ahead of FirstBlock-athon in Stockholm, with new problem statements from the partners and practical guidance for anyone planning to take part.

Fati Hakim · FirstBlock
Johnny Kroneld · Hundstallet
Hani Raisi Halilovic · AI Institutet
David Dolhomut · Sullis
Tommy Andorff · Neuro
Angelica Lips da Cruz · Innorbis

Moderated by Melissa Persson and Morten Myrstad.

👉 Watch the recording

Chainalysis counted $457 billion in taxable onchain activity in 2025, and found the OECD reporting framework covers 14% of it. In Portugal the activity equalled 201% of the government's deficit.

Coinbase and Better Mortgage launched a token-backed mortgage in the United States, structured to meet Fannie Mae guidelines, letting borrowers pledge crypto rather than sell it for a deposit.

BitGo agreed to buy NYDIG's institutional trading business, adding derivatives and financing to its custody and settlement infrastructure. Its first major acquisition since listing in January.

Standard Chartered is moving around $11 billion a month in tokenised deposits, mainly digital yuan cross-border settlement on mBridge.

NBX registered a subsidiary in Riga as part of an application to become a specialised credit institution. No licence yet; the European Central Bank decides.

K33's second-quarter revenue more than halved to SEK 193 million, though first-half revenue is up around ten per cent. Its MiCA licence is now passported into four countries.

Kaupr Daily — Short, high-signal updates on markets, regulation, tokenization and stablecoins, every weekday.

Kaupr Digest — This: a weekly step back at the pattern behind the week's news.

Not a subscriber yet, or want to fine-tune what you receive? Discover both at today.kaupr.io — and if you already subscribe, log in there to manage what you get.

Thank you for reading our newsletters!

Wishing you a good Sunday. Daily subscribers, welcome back tomorrow morning — and everyone, welcome back for a new Kaupr Digest next weekend.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor