Helsinki’s Crypto Claim to Fame – Cointelegraph Magazine

This “Crypto City” guide looks at Finland's crypto culture: the most popular projects and people, the financial infrastructure, which retailers accept crypto, and where to find blockchain education courses.

City: Helsinki Country: Finland Population: 1.55 million Established: 1550 Languages: Finnish and Swedish, English widely spoken.

Jump: Crypto culture: Where to spend crypto in Helsinki: Crypto projects and companies: Local crypto controversies: Crypto education and community: Famous Helsinki crypto images

Located on the Gulf of Finland, Helsinki is the capital of Finland and 1.5 million people – 30% of the country's population – call the metro area home. Its inhabitants spend the winter in the cold, still darkness, but enjoy the 11 pm sunset in the summer.

Major population centers are nearby, both Tampere and Turku can be reached within two hours by road or train. There are regular ferry services in the Baltic – including to Estonia's capital Tallinn, which can be reached in two hours by sea, and there are plans to connect the cities via an undersea tunnel. The nearby Helsinki-Vantaa Airport is the country's main international gateway and serves as a transit hub for Asia.

Finland has been ranked as the happiest country in the world for six consecutive years by the World Happiness Report. The income tax rate is 56% – one of the highest in the world – and every resident's tax information is public. Helsinki She hosted the 1952 Summer Olympics. The country joined the European Union in 1995 and adopted the euro as its currency in 1999. In 2023, Finland became a member of NATO.

As the capital, Helsinki's crypto events attract participants from all over the country, making it a natural gathering place for the industry. As a result, projects and companies from nearby cities such as Tampere and Turku are also included here.

The area was first established around 5,000 BC when the Ice Age receded. It was around. Like the Swedish Crusaders of the 10th and 13th centuries, the Vikings raided established settlements. The city became a Swedish trading post in 1550 and was defended by the Suomenlinna (Finnish fortress), Europe's largest sea fort. Later, in the Grand Duchy of Finland, under Russian control, the emperor moved the capital from Turku to Helsinki, which was closer to St. Petersburg. Finland in 2010 It was liberated in 1917, after which it resisted the Soviet occupation in the Winter War of 1940.

Helsinki's claim to crypto fame goes to Martti Malmi, a software developer who sold 5,050 bitcoins (BTC) in a $5.02 PayPal transfer in 2009, marking the first time bitcoin was exchanged for fiat currency. It happened before May 22, 2010, “Pizza Day,” when Bitcoin was first used to buy a physical good. Eventually, Malmi used most of his bitcoins to buy a studio in the metro area. If he had hung on to them, they would be worth $171 million today. Bitcoin was used to seed a new Liberty Standard that established BTC's initial price of 1,309.03 Bitcoins per $1.

From my email backups I found the first known bitcoin to dollar exchange. On 2009-10-12 I sold 5,050 BTC for $5.02.

— Martti Malmi (@marttimalmi) January 15, 2014

Malmö was in some ways a product of its environment, since Nokia began to dominate the mobile market, Helsinki has been known as a hotbed of technical innovation. In the year In 1991, Linus Torvalds began working on what became Linux at the University of Helsinki. It is also home to several video game companies, with Rovio's Angry Birds gaining international popularity in 2009. Helsinki is home to Aave founder Stani Kulekov, although he has moved abroad with the company.

In the year In 2019, Consensus, a then-strong Bitcoin maximalist group, translated Saiphedian Amos' 2018 book The Bitcoin Standard into Finnish, and later translated The Little Book of Bitcoin by Bitcoin Collective. According to one member, the organization has since become more accepting of other cryptocurrencies and blockchain use cases.

The “crypto community” in Helsinki and Finland is somewhat fragmented and divided, many enthusiasts are interested in one aspect – Bitcoin, NFTs, or Web3 – without covering the whole and has few common threads. Still, some undercurrent is evident.

Paying with Bitcoin is not common in Finland, where card and app payments are regulated. One notable exception is a restaurant where a few people buy burgers and beers at the monthly bitcoin gathering.

On the bar side, Taudo Baari and Time Bar also accept crypto. There is also an Osuva shooting range.

Samuel Harjunpa, CEO and co-founder of hardware startup Xellox and a regular at the Faroe Bitcoin Summit, comments to the magazine about the state of Bitcoin adoption:

“A few restaurants and pubs are already ‘orange filled' – the biggest hurdles are payment infrastructure and accounting.

Today, Helsinki has a vibrant tech and startup scene with many workplaces. The city hosts the annual Slash Startup Conference, which attracts 25,000 attendees.

Web3 Helsinki is a student-run organization that organized its first event on April 20, 2020, with around 150 people in attendance, possibly the largest single event of the year.

This year's events include the Web3 Bash at the end of April, the Aurora Nordic Web3 Conference in June. On June 6, the BRIDG3 Blockchain Summit was held at the Tampere Nokia Arena, focusing on Web3, meta-adverse and decentralized autonomous organizations.

The Finnish Bitcoin Association was founded on May 6, in an event attended by Magazine, membership fees are paid primarily with Bitcoin through the Lightning Network. When the gender rituals were completed, the saunas that hosted the communal area were lit.

For those looking for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Fungi is a platform that promotes a codeless solution that allows organizations to build NFT-based communities. One of these was cornerstone.land, a metaverse island for VR studio Zoan, where 100 locations could be purchased as NFTs.

HABBO NFT, run by local creators of the 23-year-old online chat room game HABBO Hotel, has dropped an 11,600-piece token inventory on Openea and is now working on an NFT-based game. A group called The Future of Art is dedicated to promoting digital art and operates the NFT Gallery.

Search LinkedIn's competitor Kleoverse is a “skills certification” Web3 platform for employers and job seekers that displays badges of knowledge in programming languages ​​rather than text on a resume.

Faver is building a Web3 social media application powered by the Lens protocol, which bills itself as the “Web3 Social Layer.” Faver is one of many local projects he's worked on with tech design studio STRGL, which works on protocol-level Web3 solutions. STRGL Managing Director Kasper Karima sees Helsinki as a haven for developers:

“Finland's role in blockchain innovation through its dynamic engineering community makes Helsinki the perfect place to assemble a team skilled in research, design and development.”

One of the most popular crypto companies in the country is P2P exchange LocalBitcoins, which employed about 50 people before closing its doors in February 2023. CEO Nicolas Kangas told Cointelegraph that this was due to “changing our business and the market was declining. Back to growth.

Bitiraha, which translates to “bit money” in Finnish, is another old local crypto company. In the year Founded around 2012, it installed the country's first Bitcoin ATM in a Helsinki train station in December 2013.

The company is a distributor of cashless physical bitcoins and eventually developed its own line of “Denarium” wallets. The parent company Coinmotion, based a few hours north of Jyväskylä, now operates a cryptocurrency exchange.

Another major Finnish exchange called Northcrypto is based in Turku.

A one euro stable coin was minted in the city. Membrane Finance's EUROe was launched in February 2023 and is designed to be a “full-fledged stablecoin regulated by the European Union” that complies with the latest legislation. While this is notable considering the relatively few active Eurostocoins, the volume is low at around $20,000 per day.

Helsinki native Anita “CryptoGranny” Kalergis spends most of her time in Dubai, where she organizes blockchain conferences. She feels that Finnish entrepreneurs and decision-makers lack courage, prefer to let someone else lead and maintain regulatory certainty from national and EU levels. “Most activities are not introduced; “It's especially the older traders who are afraid to rock the boat or make big moves,” she said.

“Companies here build up to 95% of something before they open their mouths, while projects in other countries raise funds and form partnerships based on a white paper while ‘trying it in production'.”

In the year In 2018, Finland's customs service planned to auction off 1,666 BTC seized by the drug registry, but decided not to proceed due to “the fear that the virtual currency would end up in the hands of criminals,” the cryptocurrency said in 2018. In July 2022, the state finally auctioned nearly 2,000 BTC for $47 million, with the proceeds going to Ukraine.

In December 2021, local media reported on a trend of investment fraud involving celebrities including industrialist Hecki Herlin and current Prime Minister Sanna Marin.

Earlier in 2018, police issued a warning regarding a Bitcoin blackmail trend involving false claims that users visiting sex work websites have webcams. In the year In 2022, a Helsinki watch dealer fell victim to a classic crypto scam, handing over $400,000 worth of Rolex watches, mistakenly believing he had accepted a bitcoin transaction.

Cryptocurrency, often associated with scams in the news, has led to relatively high levels of skepticism in much of society. Pekka Pilkanen, head of finance at the Finnish Customs Service, commented on the 2018 decision to end the sale of customs raids, expressing concerns about money laundering, and told national broadcaster YLE that “buyers of cyber currency rarely use them for regular transactions.”

Although the coverage is evolving, the national media regularly interview the fintech head of the Central Bank of Finland, Aleksi Graeme, as an official expert.

As one can see from this article, the term “Web3” is preferred, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations of cryptocurrency.

Neither the country's political party nor any major party or other major public group can be described as “pro-crypto”.

One reason for this may be Finland's stable, highly functional and highly trusting society, in which many people do not need to “disrupt” or fix something with cryptocurrency. While bank transfers are free and instant across the EU, the use of cash is increasingly rare. Virtually no one is unbanked, and the most trusted institution is the police, which is 95% publicly funded. But Harjunpa, a startup working on a solution to protect private keys, has disconnected:

“A lot of people don't understand Bitcoin and think it's something between criminal money and a pyramid scheme.”

The “moonshot” mentality and dreams of quick riches found in many cryptocurrency investors are generally viewed in a particularly negative light, with Malmi saying he never set out to make money with Bitcoin “probably because of the Finnish culture” and his idealistic mindset.

Similarly, cryptocurrencies are seen by some as a cause of inequality in a country where extreme wealth disparity is considered taboo.

The Finnish Innovation Fund, or Sitra, described Web3 services as a priority to accelerate local development, saying, “It is in Finland's interest to play an active role in ensuring that Metaverse is developed in line with European values.”

The fund worked with the National Gallery of Finland to create an art gallery in the Decentraland metaverse, whose building was modeled after the Finnish Pavilion at the 1900 Paris World's Fair.

In the former capital city of Turku, the University of Turku hosts the critical question of DAO's (CIDS) research group of which the author is a part.

Marty Malmi, the first person to sell Bitcoin for fiat; Henry Breed, Coinmotion Board Member; Alexi Loitoja, CEO and founder of Kleoverse; Niko Laamann, founder of Consensus.

Consensus Chairman Martin Wichmann; Antti Inanen, founder of Fungus; Sointu Karjalainen, founder of The Good Cartel; Juha Viitala, CEO and Co-Founder of Membrane Finance; Mika Timonen, founder of Habo NFT; Oli Tianin, CEO of Equilibrium Labs; Kasper Karimaa, Director General of STRGL; Jarmo Suoranta, CEO of TX – touched tomorrow.

Keir Finlow-Bates, CEO of Chainfrog; Ville Runola, CEO and Founder of North Crypto; Samuel Harjunpää, CEO and co-founder of Xellox; Jonathan Lintala, CEO and co-founder of Favour

Cointelegraph team members are usually located in Helsinki: Elias Ahonen.

If you have any comments to add to this guide, please contact eliasahonen@cointelegraph.com.

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Elias Ahonen is a Finnish-Canadian author based in Dubai, who bought his first bitcoin in 2013 and has since worked as a small blockchain consultancy around the world. His book, Blockland, tells the story of the industry. He holds a Master's degree in International and Comparative Law and wrote a thesis on NFT and Metaverse Regulation.

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