NBX secured MiCA authorisation in June, but operating income fell 45 per cent to NOK 6.1 million in the first half. The loss after tax widened to NOK 16.6 million, most of it driven by the drop in value of its bitcoin holdings.
Photo: Stig Aleksander Kjos-Mathisen is chief executive of NBX.
"The first half of 2026 was hard for our market and I will not dress it up. Volumes were thin, risk appetite was low, and capital was expensive for companies of our size," Kjos-Mathisen writes in his letter to shareholders.Stig Aleksander Kjos-Mathisen, chief executive of NBX
Norwegian Block Exchange (NBX) is a Norwegian crypto exchange headquartered in Oslo and listed on Euronext Growth. It holds an electronic money institution licence, and at the end of June was authorised as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA, the EU's rulebook for crypto-assets.
The half-year report shows operating income of NOK 6.05 million, against NOK 11.08 million in the same period last year. The result after tax was a loss of NOK 16.64 million, compared with a loss of NOK 7.68 million a year earlier.
Income from platform and exchange, which covers trading, fees and staking, fell 51.8 per cent to NOK 3.67 million. Traded volume on the platform excluding OTC fell from NOK 481 million to NOK 253 million. OTC trades are larger deals made directly between the parties, outside the order book.
Institutional services moved the other way. Income from OTC and from holding crypto-assets in custody for clients nearly tripled to NOK 2.29 million, helped by a custody mandate linked to Cardano. OTC volume rose from NOK 45 million to NOK 110 million.
Two income lines all but disappeared. The card programme generated no income after the previous credit card was paused in September 2025, and listing income fell from NOK 1.4 million to under NOK 0.1 million.
Customer growth also slowed. NBX added 3,443 new registered users in the half, 41 per cent fewer than in the first half of 2025.
The result before tax was a loss of NOK 21.33 million, NOK 11.49 million worse than a year earlier. Of that deterioration, NOK 8.18 million sits in net financial items, where the revaluation of bitcoin and other holdings alone accounted for minus NOK 8.40 million. NBX books this revaluation under financial items, so the operating result is not affected by the bitcoin price.
The company stresses that this is an unrealised loss that reverses if the price does. NBX held about 24 bitcoin at the end of June and had added to that to reach 28 bitcoin by August.
The operating result was a loss of NOK 11.97 million, against NOK 8.67 million a year earlier. EBITDA, operating result before depreciation and amortisation, came to minus NOK 9.54 million.
Total operating expenses fell 8.7 per cent to NOK 18.02 million. The decline reflects the disappearance of costs tied to the discontinued card programme. Excluding the card programme from both periods, the cost base rose from NOK 15.49 million to NOK 18.01 million.
Payroll costs rose 25 per cent to NOK 8.00 million. NBX attributes the increase to a dedicated anti-money laundering and compliance team in Latvia, new hires in the platform and stablecoin operations, and advisory work related to the banking application in the Baltics. Management has launched a review of costs, and the board will consider its conclusions in the second half.
The MiCA authorisation from Finanstilsynet, Norway's financial supervisory authority, covers seven crypto-asset services, including custody, operating a trading platform, exchange and transfers. Finanstilsynet's register shows the services may be provided from Norway into 29 other EEA states.
Kjos-Mathisen points out that NBX now holds both an e-money licence and MiCA authorisation, and that only a small number of European companies hold both. The combination allows it to issue e-money while holding and trading crypto-assets for clients within a single regulated group.
"It was not an investment chosen from a menu of options. It was the condition of still being here," he writes of the cost of the licensing process.Stig Aleksander Kjos-Mathisen, chief executive of NBX
In May, NBX was also approved by SIX Exchange Regulation as a custodian of crypto-assets for products listed on the Swiss stock exchange SIX Swiss Exchange.
The NBX Visa Flex Card opened a waitlist in June and is planned to launch in the second half in Norway, Germany, Sweden, Finland and Latvia. The card is prepaid and debit at launch, draws on the customer's balance in kroner or in the company's own stablecoins, and pays cashback in bitcoin, tokenised gold or tokenised silver. A credit function is planned from 2027, but requires a separate application.
Registration of USDM, a dollar-denominated stablecoin NBX issues in the EEA, is still pending. The whitepaper was filed with Finanstilsynet in the summer of 2025. Until registration is in place, distribution to partners in the EU remains restricted, according to Kjos-Mathisen. At the end of June, NBX had about US$3.9 million of USDM in issue.
In August, NBX Digital Asset Bank AS was registered in Latvia as a wholly owned subsidiary. The company is preparing an application for authorisation as a specialised credit institution, but the application has not been submitted, and the registration confers no right to conduct banking activities.
Equity rose from NOK 73.38 million to NOK 99.95 million over the year. The main reason is that NOK 19.8 million of convertible debt was converted into 73.5 million new shares at NOK 0.27 each. NBX has also raised capital through an agreement with investor LDA Capital, which subscribed for 21.7 million shares during the half.
The company's own cash stood at NOK 0.85 million at the end of June. The rest of its NOK 45.32 million in bank deposits was customer funds.
NBX also acquired the customer base of Norwegian crypto exchange JuJu, with more than 4,000 customers, for up to NOK 5 million payable in new shares. The share price rose 92 per cent over the half and closed at NOK 0.76 on 30 June, the day the MiCA authorisation and the JuJu acquisition were announced.
Sources: NBX
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