On 11 November, Kaupr brings together the blockathon teams from Stockholm for a new webinar. Winning team UProof and finalist OWND share their experiences and how they have taken their project idea forward two months after Stockholm.
Photo: The UProof team – Ashita Kolla, Catalina Pizarro, Eylül Balcilar and Hadisa Anwari – won FirstBlock-athon in Stockholm.
FirstBlock-athon brought developers, researchers and organisations to Stockholm on 7–11 September, as part of the technology conference Nordic Tech Week and FirstBlock's "Impact" series. Of the eight problem areas participants could work on, only two sat within finance.
Fati Hakim, founder of FirstBlock and the event's initiator, had argued in the months before that the Nordic conversation about blockchain stops at cryptocurrency, while solutions for traceability and verification already exist without getting attention. "As soon as you talk about blockchain in the Nordics, it's immediately linked to fraud," she told Kaupr in August.
The week in Stockholm answered that in one respect: the teams delivered working solutions to problem statements from, among others, UNICEF, and a jury named a winner. On 11 November, Kaupr brings some of them together again, online under the title Impact Onchain, to see what has happened since.
UProof won the blockathon in Stockholm, and the whole team is taking part in the new webinar: Ashita Kolla, Catalina Pizarro, Eylül Balcilar and Hadisa Anwari. OWND, one of the finalists, is represented by Natalie Lipschutz, founder of OWND and co-owner of Acasting. Both teams will share where their project stands now, and what is still needed to move forward.
Fati Hakim, chief executive and co-founder of FirstBlock, is the initiator of FirstBlock-athon Stockholm. Hani Baloch, who works on ecosystem-building across the Nordics and the Gulf, was among those who came up with the idea for a hackathon of this kind. Mina Lindberg is COO of Nordic Tech Week, where Blockathon Stockholm was a central part of the programme.
Bertram Steininger, associate professor at KTH, brings the education and research perspective. KTH was a partner in the event and hosted, among other things, its AI track.
Turning a hackathon project into a company is a different task from developing the solution itself. Farhad Rasouli is a Venture Strategist at Sulis, which works on AI-driven venture intelligence to find, validate and establish new companies.
Tommy Andorff is chief executive of Neuro, which works on infrastructure for digital trust, identity and agentic payments – the piece that in practice decides whether a solution can be trusted once it leaves the demo stage.
Jesper Löfgren is Chief Representative Sweden at Dubai Chambers, which was a partner in the blockathon and connects Nordic business with Dubai. Whether a format like this can be moved to other markets, and how other ecosystems support blockchain talent, is his part of the conversation.
The webinar airs on Wednesday 11 November from 11:00 to 12:30 CET. It is free and streamed live on YouTube and on a dedicated landing page at Kaupr. The chat is open throughout, and viewer questions are taken live. A recording will be available afterwards.
The event is a Kaupr event in partnership with FirstBlock-athon Stockholm. Morten Myrstad is the moderator.
Sources: Kaupr, FirstBlock
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