Crunchfish today announces the release of a pre-print version of a new whitepaper proposing a conceptual framework for the next generation of digital payment systems. Rather than focusing on how money evolves, the paper argues that the history of digital payments is fundamentally the evolution of trust architectures, introducing Portable Trust as the next architectural capability after Shared Trust. 

The pre-print whitepaper, titled The Evolution of Payment Trust Architectures – Extending Payment Systems with Portable Trust, expands upon Crunchfish’s earlier whitepaper on governed offline payments by presenting a broader framework for understanding how payment systems evolve through successive trust models. It argues that while previous generations delivered faster payments, broader interoperability and portable value, the next generation enables Portable Transactions by making transaction authority itself independently verifiable and portable. 

“Every major generation of digital payments has solved one fundamental limitation of the previous generation. This paper asks what limitation the next generation is solving. Our conclusion is that the next architectural capability is survivability. Portable Trust enables trusted transaction activity to continue beyond the continuous availability of the underlying payment infrastructure,” says Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish.

The paper proposes that payment evolution can be understood through four successive trust models:

• Trusted Session enabling Immediate Execution
• Trusted Assertion enabling System Interoperability
• Trusted Object enabling Portable Value
• Trusted Intent enabling Portable Transactions

According to the paper, the first three trust models expanded Shared Trust, while Trusted Intent introduces Portable Trust, allowing transaction authority itself to become portable and independently verifiable. The framework further positions Governed Offline as the first practical implementation of Portable Trust.

Pre-print Available for Review

Ahead of final publication, Crunchfish is making the pre-print available to payment professionals, central banks, regulators, academics, investors and other stakeholders for independent review and feedback. The pre-print can be requested via:

https://www.crunchfish.com/pre-print-executive-whitepaper-july-2026/

The final whitepaper will be published in August 2026 following completion of the review process and incorporation of selected feedback.

For more information, please contact:

Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish AB

+46 708 46 47 88

joachim.samuelsson@crunchfish.com 

This information was provided by the above for publication on July 16th, 2026, at 15:30 CEST.

Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance AB is the Certified Adviser. Email: ca@vhcorp.se. Telephone +46 40 200 250.

About Crunchfish – crunchfish.com

Crunchfish is a deep fintech company developing governed offline payments technology for payment systems, banks, and payment applications. The company enables offline payments as a Layer-2 solution on top of existing payment systems, allowing transactions to be executed without connectivity while ledger authority and settlement remain unchanged. Through a reservation-based model, resilience is achieved without creating parallel forms of money or unmanaged credit risk. Crunchfish’s architecture is patented and enables interoperability across multiple payment systems and markets. The solution strengthens system stability while also supporting economic incentives by ensuring that liquidity backing offline payments remains within the regulated financial system.

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The Bank of England has published an interim update on Phase 2 of the Digital Pound Lab, highlighting the work industry participants undertook to explore future Digital Pound use cases and technical challenges. Crunchfish participated in Phase 2 of the Digital Pound Lab, focusing on resilient digital payments and offline transaction capabilities. The work examined how payment activity can continue when connectivity or infrastructure availability cannot be guaranteed while maintaining institutional control, governance and settlement integrity.

The challenge of resilience is becoming increasingly important as societies become more dependent on digital payments. Modern payment systems provide speed and interoperability, but most remain dependent on continuous system availability to establish trust and execute transactions. Crunchfish explored its Governed Offline Payments architecture, which separates reservation, payment and settlement and enables transaction authority to survive beyond the session in which it was created. This approach allows payment activity to continue during disruptions without moving money outside the regulated financial system or introducing unmanaged credit risk.

“We believe the work undertaken in the Digital Pound Lab reflects the increasing industry focus on resilience as a strategic requirement for future digital money infrastructure,” said Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish. “The challenge is no longer only how to make payments faster or more interoperable. The challenge is how to ensure that payment activity can continue when systems become unavailable.”

The Digital Pound Lab brought together technology providers, payment innovators and infrastructure participants to explore practical implementation challenges for a potential digital pound. The published findings contribute to the broader discussion around resilience, offline payments and the future architecture of digital money. Crunchfish believes that the same trust architecture developed for Governed Offline Payments has relevance beyond a future digital pound. Similar requirements are emerging across instant payments, interoperable payment systems, and future digital money ecosystems where transaction activity must survive beyond continuous system availability.

The Bank of England Digital Pound Lab Phase 2 update is available at:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/the-digital-pound/lab/digital-pound-lab-phase-2-update where a Crunchfish demonstration video of governed offline payments is included.

Crunchfish’s participation in the Digital Pound Lab was announced in February:

https://www.crunchfish.com/crunchfish-selected-to-participate-in-the-digital-pound-lab/.

For more information, please contact:

Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish AB

+46 708 46 47 88

joachim.samuelsson@crunchfish.com 

This information was provided by the above for publication on June 30th, 2026, at 11:30 CEST.

Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance AB is the Certified Adviser. Email: ca@vhcorp.se. Telephone +46 40 200 250.

About Crunchfish – crunchfish.com

Crunchfish is a deep fintech company developing governed offline payments technology for payment systems, banks, and payment applications. The company enables offline payments as a Layer-2 solution on top of existing payment systems, allowing transactions to be executed without connectivity while ledger authority and settlement remain unchanged. Through a reservation-based model, resilience is achieved without creating parallel forms of money or unmanaged credit risk. Crunchfish’s architecture is patented and enables interoperability across multiple payment systems and markets. The solution strengthens system stability while also supporting economic incentives by ensuring that liquidity backing offline payments remains within the regulated financial system.

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Crunchfish today announces that the recording of Joachim Samuelsson’s keynote presentation at ImagiNxt.com in Mumbai on May 23, 2026 is now available online. In the keynote, titled “Communications Learned to Survive Failure. Payments Never Did.”, Joachim Samuelsson discusses why modern payment systems have become critical infrastructure and why continuous system availability can no longer be the only foundation for digital payments.

Drawing on the evolution of the internet, the keynote argues that communications became resilient by moving from centralized circuits to packet-switched networks. Payments, by contrast, still largely depend on continuous online authorization, clearing and settlement. When systems fail, payments stop.

Crunchfish’s perspective is that the next architectural step is governed execution: a model where user authorization is decoupled from online sessions and represented through a trusted intent. This enables payments to be executed locally, verified later and settled when systems are available again, while governance remains central.

The keynote also covers India’s leadership in digital payments, RBI’s focus on two-factor authentication and e-cheques, Crunchfish’s regulatory approval in the RBI sandbox, and the broader relevance of signed intent for offline payments and emerging agentic AI payment models.

The recording and the transcript are available at this link.

The presentation used during the keynote is attached to this press release and will be available on Crunchfish website.

For more information, please contact:

Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish AB

+46 708 46 47 88

joachim.samuelsson@crunchfish.com 

This information was provided by the above for publication on June 18th, 2026, at 15:15 CEST.

Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance AB is the Certified Adviser. Email: ca@vhcorp.se. Telephone +46 40 200 250.

About Crunchfish – crunchfish.com

Crunchfish is a deep fintech company developing governed offline payments technology for payment systems, banks, and payment applications. The company enables offline payments as a Layer-2 solution on top of existing payment systems, allowing transactions to be executed without connectivity while ledger authority and settlement remain unchanged. Through a reservation-based model, resilience is achieved without creating parallel forms of money or unmanaged credit risk. Crunchfish’s architecture is patented and enables interoperability across multiple payment systems and markets. The solution strengthens system stability while also supporting economic incentives by ensuring that liquidity backing offline payments remains within the regulated financial system.

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Crunchfish CEO Joachim Samuelsson will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Leadership Pulse Series – International A2A, taking place in Madrid on June 10, 2026. The event brings together senior executives, central bankers, payment scheme operators, fintechs, and infrastructure providers to discuss the future of instant payments and cross-border interoperability.

Joachim Samuelsson will deliver a keynote presentation titled “Offline Architecture: The Missing Strategic Layer in A2A Payments.” The presentation will explore how payment systems can be designed to remain operational when connectivity or central infrastructure is unavailable, and why offline capabilities are becoming a strategic requirement for resilient payment ecosystems.

The keynote will discuss three key topics:
 

• Offline Payments Within a Payment System – How can an instant payment system continue to operate without network connectivity or system availability? 
• Offline Interoperability Across Payment Systems – How can users pay offline across different payment systems? 
• Beyond Offline Payments – What other use cases benefit from portable user authorization?

By introducing an architectural approach that enables offline functionality both within and across payment systems, the presentation will highlight new opportunities to strengthen resilience, interoperability, and user autonomy in digital payments.

For more information about the event, visit Leadership Pulse Series.

For more information, please contact:

Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish AB

+46 708 46 47 88

joachim.samuelsson@crunchfish.com 

This information was provided by the above for publication on June 10th, 2026, at 08:30 CEST.

Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance AB is the Certified Adviser. Email: ca@vhcorp.se. Telephone +46 40 200 250.

About Crunchfish – crunchfish.com

Crunchfish is a deep fintech company developing governed offline payments technology for payment systems, banks, and payment applications. The company enables offline payments as a Layer-2 solution on top of existing payment systems, allowing transactions to be executed without connectivity while ledger authority and settlement remain unchanged. Through a reservation-based model, resilience is achieved without creating parallel forms of money or unmanaged credit risk. Crunchfish’s architecture is patented and enables interoperability across multiple payment systems and markets. The solution strengthens system stability while also supporting economic incentives by ensuring that liquidity backing offline payments remains within the regulated financial system.

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Crunchfish CEO Joachim Samuelsson will be the featured speaker at an upcoming Digital Euro Association (DEA) webinar titled: “Trust and Survivability by Design – From Offline Payments to Agentic AI Payments”. The webinar is open to the public and free of charge.

More than 30 years ago, the internet achieved communication resilience through decentralization and packetized communications. Payments and most digital applications still depend on continuous access to authorization, infrastructure and centralized systems. Offline payments provide a unique lens through which to explore a broader architectural transition toward survivable digital systems. The session will explore a fundamental question facing digital systems: How can digital applications remain functional and trustworthy even when the underlying system itself is unavailable?

The webinar will be structured around three complementary discussions:

1. Resilient Digital Money and Institutional Alignment

The first part will examine the three fundamentally different approaches to offline payments:

•         Immediate offline payments (portable money)

•         Deferred offline payments (portable risk)

•         Governed offline payments (portable authorization)

•         Where do money and risk reside?

•         Institutional Alignment: Bankable, Implementable, Governed

The discussion will focus on why different offline architectures produce very different institutional outcomes for central banks, system operators, banks, and wallets.

2. Trust, Authorization and Governed Execution

The second part will explore how survivability can be achieved while maintaining governance and settlement integrity. Topics include:

•         Reservation-backed governed execution

•         Portable authorization

•         Trusted sessions and trusted intent

•         The role of authorization in resilient digital systems

•         Why governance, not survivability, is the key design challenge

3. Industry Trends: Agentic AI, Interoperability and Programmable Money

The final section broadens the discussion beyond offline payments. Emerging developments such as:

•         Agentic AI payments

•         Programmable money

•         Interoperability

•         CBDC initiatives

•         India’s payments architecture

all point toward a future where authorization may become increasingly portable while execution remains centrally governed.

Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish, commented: “Offline payments are often viewed as a niche payments problem. I believe they are much more than that. They provide a glimpse into how digital systems can remain trustworthy and operational even when parts of the underlying infrastructure become unavailable. The same principles are beginning to emerge in areas such as agentic AI, programmable money and interoperable digital ecosystems.”

The webinar is hosted by the Digital Euro Association and moderated by DEA Executive Director Tamara Ferreira Schmidt. It will be possible to ask questions during the webinar.

Registration is free and open to all:


Date: 9 June 2026

Time: 17:00–18:00 CEST

Online Event

Free Registration: https://luma.com/c7rseywq

For more information, please contact:

Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish AB

+46 708 46 47 88

joachim.samuelsson@crunchfish.com 

This information was provided by the above for publication on June 3rd, 2026, at 14:30 CEST.

Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance AB is the Certified Adviser. Email: ca@vhcorp.se. Telephone +46 40 200 250.

About Crunchfish – crunchfish.com

Crunchfish is a deep fintech company developing governed offline payments technology for payment systems, banks, and payment applications. The company enables offline payments as a Layer-2 solution on top of existing payment systems, allowing transactions to be executed without connectivity while ledger authority and settlement remain unchanged. Through a reservation-based model, resilience is achieved without creating parallel forms of money or unmanaged credit risk. Crunchfish’s architecture is patented and enables interoperability across multiple payment systems and markets. The solution strengthens system stability while also supporting economic incentives by ensuring that liquidity backing offline payments remains within the regulated financial system.

Download as PDF

The interest from employees and other key resources in the new incentive programme is very strong. In total 3,100,000 warrants with a strike price of 12.28 SEK in June 2030 in the new series TO 2026/2030 have been subscribed to.

The interest in the incentive program has been very strong as employees and other key resources have subscribed to 3,100,000 warrants. 

The transfer of warrants has been made at market value at the time of transfer, calculated by Optionspartner AB as an independent valuation institute, using the Black & Scholes valuation model. Price per warrant was set at SEK 0.265. The company will receive the net amount of SEK 821,500 for these warrant transactions.

“It is very encouraging to see employees and other key resources subscribing to Crunchfish’s new incentive program and demonstrating their strong commitment to the future of the company “, says Joachim Samuelsson, Crunchfish’s CEO.

For more information, please contact:

Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish AB

+46 708 46 47 88

joachim.samuelsson@crunchfish.com 

This information was provided by the above for publication on May 27th, 2026, at 12:00 CEST.

Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance AB is the Certified Adviser. Email: ca@vhcorp.se. Telephone +46 40 200 250.

About Crunchfish – crunchfish.com

Crunchfish is a deep fintech company developing governed offline payments technology for payment systems, banks, and payment applications. The company enables offline payments as a Layer-2 solution on top of existing payment systems, allowing transactions to be executed without connectivity while ledger authority and settlement remain unchanged. Through a reservation-based model, resilience is achieved without creating parallel forms of money or unmanaged credit risk. Crunchfish’s architecture is patented and enables interoperability across multiple payment systems and markets. The solution strengthens system stability while also supporting economic incentives by ensuring that liquidity backing offline payments remains within the regulated financial system.

Download as PDF