In this episode of The Connector Podcast recorded at Nordic FinTech Week in Copenhagen, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Henrik Axelsen, co‑founder of Pixel Pie. Henrik explains the company’s mission to shape the "Finternet" – a future financial internet envisioned by the Basel Committee as a network of unified ledgers anchored by central banks. He clarifies that Pixel Pie builds a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform that is not a single blockchain but a modular system handling identity, payments, and digital assets. The conversation covers the need for interoperability and orchestration across public, private, and alternative DLTs (e.g., Hedera), emphasizing real‑time finality and authoritative ownership to prevent scams. Henrik describes Pixel Pie’s universal wallet concept, likened to Vitalik Buterin’s soul‑bound tokens, which gives users control over verified digital identities and credentials, useful for freelancers and gamers. Regulatory challenges are highlighted, especially the EU’s MiCA framework and the fragmented treatment of crypto assets in the US and other jurisdictions; Pixel Pie aims to act as a compliance‑focused DLT gateway for creators. The discussion moves to NFTs, which Henrik frames as immutable digital twins or product passports rather than speculative meme assets, enabling provenance, circular‑economy tracking, and metaverse integration. Gaming use cases illustrate sub‑identities, cross‑chain asset migration, and real‑time settlement of skins or avatars. Finally, Henrik reflects on FinTech Week, noting abundant ideas but limited concrete progress, and urges traditional finance to embrace the emerging DLT ecosystem. Contact information (pixelpie.com) is provided at the end.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
And here we are one last time at the Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen, live En today, ik heb met me Henrik met een missie met zijn company Pixel Pie te veranderen de financiële industrie. Maar ik laat dat aan jou om te verklaren waarom en hoe.
Oké. Ja, zo, zo. Ik denk we want we call it shaping the finternet, like the future of the internet. Actually, I didn't invent that. That's was actually something that came out of report from the Basel Committee working paper in April where they have decided that the future financial internet is called the Finternet. They believe it consists of unified ledgers with a central bank at the end of each central node in each market in the world. We thought it was really cool because what they are writing is actually distributed ledgers, but they don't say DeFi, they don't say Web3, they say unified ledgers, but it's distributed ledger technology. So we are building a platform that is basically distributed ledger technology. It's not blockchain. It's distributed in the sense that we have different components operating different tasks. So we manage identities as one key functionality. Then we have payments. That's one another key functionality. And then we have digital assets as the third sort of key component. And the point is then to be able to orchestrate so that only authoritative owners of assets or money can transact. So we want to avoid scams. We want to have full transparency and auditability and provenance in everything we do. And we would like to support businesses that seem or that see a business case in blockchain or other distributed technologies. So it's not crypto. It happens to be called crypto by regulators, but it's actually blockchain-based business models. Which we think is going to be the future. It's not necessarily blockchain because blockchains are good for some things but not everything. For example, it doesn't have, say, real-time finality. Permissionless public blockchains don't have that. They have a probabilistic consensus model which actually is unstable for quite a while. So it's unfit for, say, capital markets with high-frequency trading because it doesn't settle and you can't unwind trillions of dollars 3 weeks later when somebody else wins the game, a theoretical question in the consensus model. So we, we try to orchestrate all these things between permissionless, public permissionless blockchains or private blockchains or other types of distributed technology like acyclical graphs like Hedera or whatever is the next thing that comes around. For sure, we know it's not going to be legacy COBOL, uh, core banking systems that will win. It will be something more transparent, and we want to shape that. And so, so that's what we do. So basically, on-ramping, if you want to use crypto words, on-ramping, off-ramping, that's sort of from fiat to crypto. Even if it's not crypto, it's native utility tokens that you need to use because on like a blockchain on Ethereum, you have to pay Ether to be able to transact. And then It's very much focused on businesses that see a point in that, which is very much the creator economy. So that would be brands, fashion, music, video, and in our case, gaming is where we start because my co-founder Morten used to run a gaming studio in the UK working with big brands like BBC and FIFA to help them create NFT games on their brand. So basically, I mean, like if you have BBC, they, I think they have a transmedia storytelling strategy. They want to move from platform to platform. And in this case, case to NFT and metaverse space. So he helped them create games around that. A lot of this runs into regulatory complexity quite soon with the markets and crypto asset regulation coming into effect now.
MiCA.
Yeah, MiCA. And then outside of the EU, I mean, in the US, everything seems to be a security these days, or it has been forever, including NFTs. And in other regions, there's different regulatory treatments. It's either a crypto asset or it's a commodity or it's nothing or it's a security. We would like to help creatives, creators take away that regulatory complexity and just help them become compliant so that they can remain focused on being creative. So we want to be the sort of outsourcing partner. And the way we think of us is maybe like a DLT gateway. DLT would then be distributed ledger technology.
A word that comes to me, to my mind when I hear your story, very fascinating story, by the way, interoperability.
Yes, exactly. We would like to be the DLT gateway that ensures interoperability. So for example, on our identity solution, we're working on creating a universal wallet, very much sort of aligned with, I think, what Vitalik called the soulbound token, where you own and you monetize and you control your identity. It's not big tech, it's you. So we create a wallet solution which we have operational with both identities compliant with GDPR and also with credentials. where people can then, you can say, maybe create a LinkedIn with verified credentials rather than just whatever you say. So this works for freelancers in the gig economy where you have to prove that you actually are able to do something, a weird skill or a popular skill that people would demand from you as a contractor, because half the world are freelancers. Yeah, the other half are gamers.
And I think that, that's probably the, the next step in identity management. Because there's a lot of use cases nowadays in the more traditional digital entities, identities, sorry. But the fact that you would be able to sort of prove your work, your contribution, that's, I think, the next step in the internet.
And then when you say interoperability, what we would like, or what we spent quite a bit of time on, is then, okay, so what does it mean if you are— I mean, Koen, you sit here as your physical you. now, and tomorrow you sit— yes, you sit, then you're in a game and you probably have a handle, uh, you call, I don't know what, the Brave Belgian.
The Brave Belgian Knight.
Yeah, something like that. And then in another game you are something else, and then you have a civic identity and you have a professional identity. You have many identities. So we work with the concept of sub-identities, and you may want to deploy, say, your gaming identity Because you love a game and the gaming studio suddenly thinks, well, actually this is a really cool game. It works currently on Ethereum. I want to move it to Solana. We will then help migrate that. But actually that's not trivial because your digital representation on Ethereum is consisting of a lot of technical attributes. We have to ensure that you don't become somebody else while you transform yourself over to another blockchain or DLT. So that's what we would like to help because—
Orchestration is another word.
Yeah, exactly. So you have the interoperability. The second thing is the orchestration. In this gaming or other Web3 business models, there's a lot of transactions in and out of traditional money, digital money, different assets, NFTs, whatever. We would like to orchestrate so that there is only authoritative owners. So get rid of scams, only have those that are allowed to transact. So authoritative ownership is something that we spent quite a bit of time on, saying, do you own the asset or do you not own the asset? Do you own the money or do you not own the money? Only those that own monies can transact with those that own assets, so you don't have scams. So in the case of gaming, where suddenly—
It's pre-validation in the bank sector.
Yeah. So like in case of gaming, when you get tired of a game and you want to sell your skin or your avatar, right now it's quite difficult. Sometimes it's possible in some games, We would like to basically standardize and make this open economy so that you can transact and get paid in a sort of real-time settlement, like you would imagine everything would be.
If you give the example about a skin or something, then I guess NFTs are very close to that because it could also be something that you collect. How do you see the future of NFT? Because some may argue that maybe we're over the hype cycle or Are we starting? Where do you see this happening?
Well, I think in this, I mean, it depends on when you say NFT in that context, you probably refer to Bored Apes or something, a collection of pixels. Yeah. I mean, in this case, it's very much, I think we see it as a digital representation of something unique. So that would be your creation. It would be your music or your whatever. that has a digital twin, which is the NFT. It's not a fungible something. It's not like money or something that looks the same and there's a lot of them. This is unique identity things. That's what basically— so you could say, well, when we talk about personal identity before, you could say product identity. I mean, that's a big thing coming up also from a compliance perspective very soon and everything. Sure. What is this product? What is its reusability? Circular economy thinking, that sort of stuff. So for that to happen in a digital world, you need to create digital identities. And in the case of compliance, eventually you will have what you will call a digital product passport, which shows that this is a product that comes from wherever and it can be recycled and reused in this way or maintained in that way. That would be, you know, The story of the product is going to be an NFT if it is operated on a blockchain. If it is not operated— But the point with the NFT is it actually leverages the affordances of blockchain or distributed technology because it exists and it is immutable. Once it exists, you can't change it. So it's true. And you can use that for— you can basically use the Blockchain technology to ensure provenance and and and and proof of of of of yeah well what's it where does it come this is true this is legit it's almost like a car that has kilometers on the car do you know how much or how many kilometers has been driving yeah you could say in the past that was like analog now it's digital it could also be an NFT yeah because you would be more secure that is not hampered with so so but in the context of this I think NFTs for me is more like digital digital twins, and it will be digital replicas of real things or digital things. And we will see ourselves move in and out of physical worlds and digital worlds, a little bit like the visions around the metaverse, even if it's wherever that is. But it's inevitably going to go that way, I think. So there's a big future for NFTs, but not in the sense of investing in hyped meme stuff that's speculative. It's more like it is a digital representation of something minted on a blockchain immutably now forever.
It's more taking benefit of the actual technology, right?
Exactly.
Rather than the hype and—
Yep, exactly. So that's why we would like to be considered as those that help genuine— I don't want to call it genuine— traditional business models that see a point in the technology. We would like to help them navigate that, including economics and financials around that so that they can monetize their assets on distributed technology. That's basically just what we do.
Amazing. We're almost at the end of our podcast, and I was just having one question in my mind. We're here at the Nordic FinTech Week. What have you got out of this FinTech Week?
Well, that's a good question. I've been— I think I've seen a lot of interesting things. I've also become a little sort of depressed with— there's a lot of talk but not a lot of action.
I thought it was the weather.
Yeah, the weather might actually help in that sense. It's suddenly started to become Danish weather again. But no, but I think there's a lot of good potential. There's a lot of really interesting use cases being presented. But in some of the roundtables I participated in, I also see sort of, well, it's impossible and it's still compliance and the regulators are tough and we can't do this and we can't do that. I think there's sort of like a mental attitude that needs to be hyped a bit in the old finance that they need to embrace this or become obsolete.
That's a nice way to end. And if they want to join your story, how do they contact you, Henrik?
Or they can go to pixelpie.com. We have, I mean, I'm Henrik Axelsen. We are based in the Copenhagen FinTech Lab, which is, I think all in Danish finance knows that, but pixelpie.com is where you can just reach out.
Brilliant. Thank you very much for your insights. Thank you for joining. Thank you also to the audience, and stay tuned.
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