The twelfth episode of Kaupr Weekly is out. Morten Myrstad walks through how central banks, banks, fintech companies and exchanges are now building onchain, and asks whether anyone in finance can still look away.
Kaupr Weekly is a short podcast with Morten Myrstad on the long-term trends in onchain finance, fintech, stablecoins and the future of payments.
Whether finance is finally moving onto the blockchain is a question that could have been asked almost every year for the past five or six years. In the twelfth episode of Kaupr Weekly, the starting point is two headlines: an opinion piece in Fortune arguing that onchain finance is coming to Wall Street, and "Central banks on chain", taken from the European Central Bank's own website. The host is Morten Myrstad, founder and editor of Kaupr.
The most important milestone right now is Pontes, the ECB's solution that lets banks and financial institutions holding securities on the blockchain settle their trades in central bank money. According to Myrstad, it has barely made the headlines.
Meanwhile, DNB is testing tokenised deposits, meaning bank money issued by the banks themselves on the blockchain, together with other European banks in the CBMT project. Norges Bank has named twelve Norwegian banks it is talking to about digital money, 37 European banks in the Qivalis consortium are planning a euro stablecoin, and the digital euro is advancing both through a pilot and in negotiations in the European Parliament.
"Taken together, all these agendas should serve as a wake-up call to traditional finance and to the fintech industry," Myrstad says in the episode.Morten Myrstad, host of Kaupr Weekly
The episode then turns to private players. Circle, the issuer of the stablecoins most used in the European market, has launched its own blockchain, Arc, with more than a hundred partners from the start. Stripe, Revolut and Robinhood combine ordinary currency and stablecoins on the payments side.
On the investment side, DTCC, which handles clearing and settlement of US stock trades, is building solutions for round-the-clock trading on the blockchain. In the US, the SEC has opened a five-year test in which tokenised stocks can trade under existing rules, and in the EU the Commission wants to raise the cap on trading in the pilot regime for tokenised securities.
Myrstad also brings in Kaupr's own trials with payments where AI agents pay per use, and two Nordic examples. Sweden's Centiglobe is building a network for cross-border payments based on tokenised deposits, and NBX has applied for a banking licence in Latvia. The episode ends by asking whether anyone can still afford to look away.
This is the twelfth episode of Kaupr Weekly and the seventh week in a row since 9 August. The previous episode was titled "A Solution Searching for a Problem — What Stockholm Showed".
Kaupr has followed several of the pieces separately, including DNB's participation in CBMT and the ECB's Pontes. The episode puts them together.
More episodes are at today.kaupr.io/listen, and you can follow Kaupr Weekly on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Sources: Kaupr Weekly, Kaupr
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