HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
Award winning Danish blockchain expert with a vast knowledge of the cryptocurrency space and regularly features in publications. In 2015, I became internationally known as Bitcoin Jack after paying solely with Bitcoin for an entire month. With my outgoing personality and quick thinking, I deliver inspiring stage presence and display my capabilities at numerous expos and conferences.
With a vision of making payments faster, cheaper and smarter I founded the fintech company ARYZE together with CFO Morten Christorp Nielsen in 2017 which has won multiple awards. I have also been featured as one of the top 100 talents in Denmark in 2019 and on Forbes 30 under 30 in 2020.
With a great insight in terms of trends within cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, digital payments and tokenization, I have the unique skill of being able to combine new technologies and to be able to explain them to all levels of technical understanding.
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
ARYZE . We are building a full reserve digital bank with cloud regulated banking tied with the world of blockchains.
The closest thing to a CBDC without it being issued by a central bank.
What is the origin story?
The idea for ARYZE was devised to unlock some of the biggest problems within the financial sphere by turning ‘smart money’ into real money and thus creating Digital Cash.
ARYZE was founded in August 2017 with a mission to make payments cheaper, faster and smarter. Just six months later, ARYZE won Best Fintech at Venture Cup, Denmark’s most prolific idea competition. In June 2018, ARYZE was named Denmark’s Best New Startup at Copenhagen Fintech Week. Before the end of 2018, ARYZE was already featured on Forbes.com.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
Coming from Denmark, one of the most digitalised countries in the world, when it comes to payments, we have the know-how to tackle fundamental issues in legacy systems. We will do that by bridging the traditional banking world with the world of blockchains, all set under a fully regulated ecosystem. We have IBM and Episode Six as foundational partners and they will help us build our backend. Together with a very experienced and knowledgeable advisory board ranging from financial professionals, figures with relevant regulatory backgrounds and academics.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
I would be dedicating myself to sound engineering, one of my many passions in life.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
We measure success by the speed in which we close our fundings. Our latest seed funding raised nearly 1 M USD and broke the records as the fastest-closing funding on the Danish Investors Network - KEYSTONES.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
We have a lot of backing and interested investors in what we are trying to achieve.
ARYZE aims to reduce money transfer costs to near zero, and to provide solutions to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals 9, 10 and 16. By focusing on promoting global financial inclusion, enabling the two billion unbanked people worldwide to access basic financial services.
We have won several awards and have made history as the first Danish Fintech
effectively accomplishing the first successful ICO done in Danish soil in cooperation with the country’s financial authorities and under Danish jurisdiction.
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
We are very excited about cloud-banking and blockchain technology. We believe that the market deserves something better than Tether and a combination of each technology, cloud-banking and blockchain with the right financial strategy and infrastructure, can achieve great things in the payments industry that will revolutionise the way we handle and transfer money today. We are not worried/concerned about any particular type of technology.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
I always go to Hackernoon to read the latest stories in Tech and become acquainted with interesting aspects happening in the Tech industry that you normally do not get from any other media. The content quality is superb and a great inspiration to our own content team in developing ideas for podcasts, articles and interviews alike.
What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?
Do not listen to those who want to change your essence. In my late teens and up to early twenties, I was stigmatised as a person with way too much energy and bordering hyperactivity. Later on, i learned that it was that same energy and hunger for knowledge and new experiences what eventually brought me to where I am today as the CEO of a Fintech with huge ambitions and potential to become the next Amazon of payments.
What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?
Focus on your goals and do not compare yourself with other people, only compare yourself with who you were in the past.
ARYZE was nominated as one of the best startups in Copenhagen in Startups of the Year hosted by HackerNoon