Special edition: blockchain beyond finance · Free event on Thursday

Did you know there are a lot of use cases for blockchain outside finance?

In September, developers, founders and anyone with a problem worth solving are invited to build solutions to eight challenges — and only two of them are finance. Blockathon Stockholm is a first for the Nordics, running inside Nordic Tech Week, which itself has around 300 events and some 25,000 attendees.

Kaupr is media partner for FirstBlock-athon. So tomorrow we are hosting the first of three virtual events, where you can learn more about the initiative and get a look at the challenges and problem statements the developers will be working on.

Thursday 20 August, 11:00–12:30 CET. Free, live on YouTube and Kaupr.

— Morten

FirstBlock-athon is a physical event, running 7–11 September. Ahead of it come three virtual pre-events under the name Blockathon Stockholm, and the first of them runs tomorrow, Thursday 20 August, from 11:00 to 12:30 CET. It is free.

The conversation is about the eight challenge categories: what they are, which organisations wrote the problem statements behind them, and what builders can expect when they arrive in September.

Who is speaking, and what they bring

Fati Hakim, founder of FirstBlock, has spent twelve years in blockchain strategy. She started FirstBlock-athon to widen the Nordic conversation beyond finance, and explains the thinking behind it.

Ludvig Bergström, founder of Nordic Tech Week, built it on the idea that the tech industry should be open to anyone rather than to those who can afford the ticket. He makes the case for why blockchain belongs at the centre of it.

Hani Raisi Halilovic, founder of AI Institutet, is organising a full-day summit at KTH Arenan on 11 September under the title AI & Blockchain: Bridging Research & Real-World Impact. It is the organisation's first physical summit, after four digital ones, and brings the research side together with the people building on it.

Arun Maharajan, blockchain lead at UNICEF, brings a humanitarian problem: how do you prove a programme is having an effect — through photographs, video, timestamps and attestations from the community itself — while protecting privacy and working where the internet barely reaches?

Melanie Rideout, AI strategist at the Swedish Red Cross, coordinates thousands of volunteers who depend on messaging platforms that carry security and privacy risks. Her challenge asks whether decentralised technology can improve that without adding complexity.

Madina Saleh, co-founder and chief executive of AIMS Management, works with creators in an industry being reshaped by AI-generated content and deepfakes. Her challenge is about proving identity, verifying work and protecting digital ownership.

Hosted and moderated by Morten Myrstad of Kaupr and Zarina Björklund Rehn, formerly head of operations and programs at Blockchain Sweden, who moderated Kaupr's Diversity in Crypto event earlier this year.

👉 Register for Pre-event 1

FirstBlock-athon runs 7–11 September as part of Nordic Tech Week, organised by FirstBlock. It is the first blockathon of its kind in the Nordics, and the first time a blockathon has been part of a major Nordic tech conference.

The eight challenge categories are financial services, humanitarian and social impact, banking and fintech, creative and music industries, digital products and platforms, AI applications, trust and identity, and emerging technologies.

Two of those eight are finance. For a technology that has been discussed as financial infrastructure for a decade, that split is why we are covering the event rather than mentioning it.

The initiative is backed by a range of organisations from different fields.

Core partners: FirstBlock (business), Sullis, Neuro and BloXcel (technology).

Ecosystem partners: AI Institutet and HyperMind Network (AI and education), Blockchain Sweden (blockchain and industry), KTH (academic and research), Netlight (technology), Kaupr (media), Medieinstitutet (education), UNICEF and the Red Cross (humanitarian and social impact), and AIMS (media and influencer marketing).

We video interviewed Fati in July. Here are the main points.

Her argument is not that blockchain lacks solutions outside finance. Companies already use it for traceability and verification, she says — those uses simply get no attention, and the problems they could solve stay unsolved because the knowledge is not there.

The Nordics, in her reading, already have the financial infrastructure. Exchanges are established, the first krona-denominated stablecoin has launched. What is missing is the understanding that the technology does anything else. As soon as people here say blockchain, she says, they think cryptocurrency.

She makes the case urgent through AI. Data has become a currency, models consume enormous amounts of it, and that makes ownership and verification decisive. Her phrase for what blockchain provides is the trust layer. She extends it to identity: as forged video and voice keep improving, something has to establish that a person is who they claim to be.

She has heard the objection that blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. She met it in Germany, Austria and Switzerland before moving to Sweden — and those, she notes, are now the countries delivering the most solutions in Europe.

Watch: Fati Hakim on what gets built beyond finance — Kaupr TV

Read more: Blockchain can solve problems far beyond finance — Kaupr the news site

Kaupr entered a partnership with FirstBlock around the event on 7 August. We are media partner, and tomorrow we are also hosting. You should know that before reading the rest.

What the partnership involves in practice has not been settled in detail — coverage before, during and after the event, and possibly dedicated channels. Both sides describe the way of working as agile, and expect much to be decided along the way.

The reason both parties give for it is the same, and it is the same reason the event exists. Hakim tried two years ago to get Nordic media and platforms to cover blockchain more broadly, and got nowhere. As soon as you mention blockchain in the Nordics, she says, it is immediately connected to scams. She credits Kaupr with having shifted part of that picture on the crypto side, and argues the same work remains for everything else built on the technology.

The theme is impact, and not in the usual sense. Hakim says the word has become tied to sustainability, and that they want to move it toward effect on future generations. Her argument is that what is built now — AI, and the verification and trust layer underneath it — will shape the people who come after, and that this is a responsibility carried by the developers who build as much as by the organisers.

She draws the comparison to social media, which shaped her own generation and the one after it.

Watch: Fati Hakim and Morten Myrstad on the partnership — Kaupr TV

Read more: Kaupr and FirstBlock enter partnership on blockathon in Stockholm — Kaupr the news site

The event takes place in a country that has spent the past year changing its mind about the technology, without quite changing what it does about it.

Blockchain Sweden's industry report for 2025, presented in Stockholm in March, found the share of companies considering moving their business out of the country had fallen from 84% to 50% in a year. Secretary General Pehr Granfalk described the shift in tone from established financial players and decision-makers: dialogue has improved, without yet translating into better conditions for individual companies.

The report tracks the change as one of posture. Meetings with banks, investors and government have gone from not on my watch to teach me, I will understand. The report points to SEB joining the European stablecoin consortium Qivalis as the year's clearest change of signal — an institution treating the technology as infrastructure rather than speculation.

What still blocks it. Access to banking services remains the industry's largest obstacle. And Sweden's application of MiCA is experienced as more costly and more complex than in several other EU countries, which is a domestic problem rather than a European one.

What the industry expects next. Asset tokenization, digital capital markets, and stablecoins as payment and liquidity infrastructure. Among large Swedish companies, Klarna and SEB are named as clearly interested in the last of these.

And what has not shifted. The report identifies three myths that persist in Swedish public debate: that blockchains are not transparent, that crypto means crime, and that blockchain is only about money. On open chains, transaction history is permanent and public — in some respects more traceable than internal bank systems. The report lists document flow, insurance, supply chains, real estate, intellectual property and digital evidence as uses that rarely reach the conversation.

That third myth is the one tomorrow's pre-event is aimed at. Granfalk's own conclusion from the report was that the discussion has moved to how the technology should be used rather than whether it should exist at all.

Read more:
Fewer blockchain companies consider leaving Sweden — Kaupr
Growing curiosity, but old myths persist — Kaupr

The live stream runs on kaupr.io/blockathon-stockholm and on YouTube.

Onchain Community has a dedicated Blockathon Stockholm channel, where challenges, partners and questions are posted as they land. It opened on 14 August.

Two newsletters carry this between events. Onchain Build follows what gets built on the blockchain beyond finance; Blockathon Stockholm is one of the things it covers, including the challenges and partners as they are announced. Onchain Growth follows the industry itself — who moves, who pushes back, and what it takes to operate here, out every Tuesday. Both stay in the Nordics and the Baltics.

And tomorrow we are back to the usual:

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

Kaupr Digest — A weekly step back at the pattern behind the week's news, plus the latest Kaupr Weekly episode.

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 Wednesday — and welcome back tomorrow morning for the next edition of Kaupr Daily.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor