Finland's Kvarn Capital lets other companies sell crypto services under their own brand, on Kvarn's authorisation. Goobit, itself refused a MiCA licence in Sweden, is the first customer to be made public.
Kvarn Capital is headquartered in Helsinki and offers partners access to its own MiCA authorisation through the Kvarn X Embedded product.
When Goobit launched its Futureproof savings platform on Monday evening, the parts requiring authorisation came from a Finnish company. This is not a one-off arrangement built for the occasion but a finished product Kvarn Capital sells to partners across the EEA. Kaupr has written before about crypto exchanges turning towards selling services to other companies. The Kvarn model is the next step: what is sold is not the technology, but the licence.
Kvarn Capital Ltd is headquartered in Helsinki and is authorised as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA, as well as being a payment institution. The authorisation is passported across the EEA, meaning it applies across borders without a fresh application in each country.
The partner product is called Kvarn X Embedded and is marketed as crypto-as-a-service. The partner builds the interface and owns the customer relationship commercially, while Kvarn executes orders, holds the assets and runs customer due diligence under its own authorisation. The company says a partner does not need its own licence as long as it provides only the technical interface.
Kvarn in turn is built on other firms' infrastructure. It lists Fireblocks, Talos, Wintermute, B2C2, Sumsub, Nuvei, Solidus Labs, Notabene and Chainalysis as suppliers behind the platform.
Under the model, accounts are opened with Kvarn Capital. Users become Kvarn's clients, and the Finnish company is the data controller for the relationship and handles customer service and statutory complaints.
For a saver in Sweden or Norway, that means the brand on the screen may be Nordic while the contracting party is Finnish and supervision sits with the Finnish regulator. Kvarn also states that crypto-assets are not covered by investor compensation or deposit guarantee schemes.
The revenue model is a share of the trading fee. The partner takes a cut of what Kvarn charges every time a user trades, and Kvarn's own calculator on the site works from an illustrative average trading fee of 0.8 per cent and a partner share of 50 per cent.
That means the partner's income follows the number of transactions. Futureproof is sold as long-term saving, but the portfolio is rebalanced towards fixed target weights, and every rebalancing is a trade.
Among the segments Kvarn lists are crypto brands and former VASPs, firms registered under the old regime before MiCA replaced it with a requirement for full authorisation. The pitch to them is that they keep their audience, brand and product while Kvarn carries the authorised service behind it.
Goobit fits that description. Finansinspektionen refused its MiCA application on 2 July, the company has appealed, and it says itself that the planned launch of Futureproof does not depend on the outcome.
"Partnerships in which each party operates strictly within its own regulatory perimeter are, in our view, the right model for the Nordic market," says Joonas Järvinen, founder of Kvarn Capital, in Goobit's press release.
Crypto-as-a-service has so far been about something else. In a master's thesis from KTH that Kaupr covered in July, the premise is that crypto exchanges have built expertise in compliance, custody and transaction monitoring, and sell it on to banks and institutions that lack both the technology and the people. K33 has described a similar model aimed at banks and neobanks.
Goobit does not lack that expertise. The company states in its rights issue announcement that it has its own technical infrastructure and its own compliance function, built over fifteen years in the bitcoin market. What it lacks is the authorisation.
At that point it is not capacity being bought, but access. And that is a different transaction from what crypto-as-a-service has been until now.
Read more: New study: crypto exchanges and brokers target banks and institutions and K33 connects crypto-as-a-service with its bitcoin treasury strategy
Kvarn does not say publicly how many partners use Kvarn X Embedded, or who they are. Goobit is the first to be made public.
Nor is it clear what vetting Kvarn applies to a partner refused authorisation by a supervisor in the EEA. In Futureproof, both the gold component and the interest-bearing component sit outside Kvarn Capital's authorisation: the gold is intended to come from Kvarn Metals Ltd in the same group, while the interest-bearing partner is not named.
Sources: Kvarn Capital, Goobit Group, Kaupr
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