About

Sveinn is a co-founder, the executive chair, and the former CEO of Monerium, the first company to issue onchain fiat (aka fully authorized and regulated fiat money stablecoins).

As CEO of Monerium, Sveinn led the team that secured the first license to issue e-money onchain, issued the first euros, dollars, sterling, and Icelandic króna onchain, and launched the first integration of a major currency payment system (SEPA) with web3, enabling direct and instant transfers of euros between offchain bank accounts and onchain wallets and powering pioneering onchain payment applications such as the Gnosis Pay VISA debit card.

Previously, he helped start a bioinformatics company, a telco, a mobile software company, invested in a PCR-based point-of-care testing platform, worked at a biopharmaceutical company, and advised and invested in the venture funds Arctic Ventures (Stockholm) and IQ Capital I (Cambridge, UK).

An early adopter of cryptocurrency, Sveinn participated in and helped organize the first two Bitcoin conferences in London, UK: Bitcoin London (2012) and CoinSummit (2013).

In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, Sveinn was a member of the Advice group which successfully campaigned for Icelandic voters to reject in a 2011 plebiscite taxpayer guarantees of private bank deposits, Icesave. Two years later, the Icelandic voters' decision was upheld in a landmark ruling of a European court which sets a precedent against comparable bank bail-outs in the European Economic Area.

Sveinn is a co-author of Minting Money With Megawatts which describes the economics of Bitcoin mining and was published as a cover feature in the Proceedings of the IEEE and as an iPython notebook on Github. The article was selected as a “notable writing” in the The Best Writing on Mathematics in 2017. He is also a co-author of two commissioned reports, Blockchains and the future of finance (May 2016) and Bitcoin mining - Global payments processing using Icelandic energy resources (August 2013). Additional peer reviewed publications are listed on Google Scholar.

His other writings include blogs and op-eds on subjects at the intersection of technology, commerce, economics, and science, including two curated articles on Medium:

Sveinn holds a PhD in Physics (Boston University), an MS in Economic Systems (Stanford University), a BS in Applied Physics (Columbia University), and a black belt in karate.

Press

Select press clips and interviews:

Events

Notable presentations, keynotes, and panel discussions:

Personal

Sveinn has lived in Reykjavik, New York, Boston, Tallahassee, Palo Alto, and London. Currently, he and his family split their time between Reykjavik and Boston.

About Sveinn