Fati Hakim says the Nordic conversation about blockchain stops at cryptocurrency. With the blockathon in Stockholm she wants to show how the technology can solve problems far beyond finance.
Fati Hakim is the founder of the consultancy FirstBlock and the initiator of FirstBlock-athon, the blockathon taking place in Stockholm in September. Her reasoning for the event has less to do with the event itself than with what she believes is missing in the Nordics.
"I see the need for people to talk about the builder side of blockchain, not just the financial side."
Fati Hakim, founder of FirstBlock
She points out that the Nordics already have much of the financial infrastructure in place. Several exchanges are established, and the first stablecoin denominated in Swedish kronor has launched. What is missing, she argues, is the understanding that the technology can be used for something else.
"As soon as people in the Nordics talk about blockchain, they immediately think of cryptocurrency. That's what we want to change."
Her point is not that solutions are lacking. Companies are already using blockchain for traceability, verification and purposes other than trading and payments, but they rarely get attention, and the problems they could have solved remain unsolved because the knowledge isn't there.
That is the situation the event is meant to address. The blockathon is not primarily a contest for new ideas, but an attempt to give a different part of the industry a stage.
Her argument for why this is urgent runs through AI. Data has become a currency in its own right, and AI models consume vast amounts of it. That makes the question of who owns the data, and whether it can be verified, decisive.
"Blockchain is the trust layer, and that needs to be understood better."
She extends the line to digital identity. With forgeries of video and voice growing steadily better, she argues that a means of verification is needed — that the content is real, or that the person behind it is who they claim to be.
She knows the objection that blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. She met it in Germany, Austria and Switzerland before moving to Sweden.
Today those are precisely the countries delivering the most solutions in Europe, she says. That is also how she sees the Nordics now: not as a market lacking technology, but as a market that has yet to see what the technology is used for.
The threshold is meant to be low, Hakim stresses. Participants can come from any background — including those who have never written code themselves, but who know the problem they want to solve.
The blockathon runs in Stockholm from 7 to 11 September as part of Nordic Tech Week 2026. Applications are now open, and there are two ways in: as a founder with a startup, a product or a pitch, or as a participant without one. The event is called FirstBlock-athon.
Whether the conversation actually moves will be decided by what gets built over those four days.
00:00 Blockathon in Stockholm - what it is
01:55 Why is there a need for a blockathon
03:22 The builder side of blockchain
04:38 A solution searching for a problem?
05:08 Data is the new currency
07:05 Developers coming back from AI?
08:18 Challenges and problem statements
10:51 The blockathon is for everyone
12:15 How to engage and participate
14:25 Blockathon beyond Stockholm
Sources: Interview with Fati Hakim, Kaupr TV
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