At Nokia, Konstantin Richter tried to persuade his bosses to buy Spotify. The deal did not happen. He had joined the company in 2005, and the episode, which he later recalled, is a tidy introduction to a career spent around networks and the people deciding what should run on them. A promising connection can be obvious to one person and inconvenient to everyone who must approve it.
Richter eventually became an entrepreneur. His interests took him through media software and into blockchain infrastructure, where he founded Blockdaemon in 2017. There is a certain comedy in the destination. Someone impatient with corporate machinery ended up building a business that helps financial institutions use a technology famous for wanting to rearrange corporate power. Much of the work involves making those institutions comfortable enough to proceed.
His subject is the unglamorous middle: the operating machinery between an idea and a service somebody can depend on. Crypto supplies plenty of excitement without his assistance. Richter has made a career of asking what happens when the excitement acquires customers.
The acquisition that stayed a pitch
Born in Germany and a graduate of European Business School, Richter began his career at Deutsche Telekom. He moved through T-Mobile International and Nokia, working on wireless networks, commercial models, partnerships and software distribution. The backdrop was mobile technology, but the underlying interest was broader. He wanted to connect people, and he was interested in the business that a connection could support.
Then came software companies concerned with distributing music, video and photography. His career included Audiotube, Lookbooks and Wiredrive. Content needed to travel between systems, be reformatted and arrive somewhere useful. That is a different business from operating a wireless network, although both require more than announcing that communication is now possible.
“The magic word was network effect,” he said. The phrase helps explain the continuity in his working life. A network becomes more interesting when participation creates value for other participants. Richter’s attention kept returning to the mechanisms that let those participants join, and to the commercial arrangements that made the machinery worth maintaining.
The expensive inconvenience
By 2015, Richter was active in blockchain as an advisor and contributor, with connections to Gem, Po.et and MadHive. His eventual company began with a practical annoyance. In 2017, he was running Ethereum nodes and found the available infrastructure inadequate for the job. The tools used elsewhere in cloud computing did not neatly accommodate what he needed.
That inconvenience supplied a business question: if using a blockchain requires this much operational effort, who will do it for organizations that have other things to build? Blockdaemon emerged from that question. The company was incorporated in San Francisco in October 2017 and joined the Plug and Play incubator that November. Its self-service node platform went live in February 2018.
A node is one of the computers participating in a blockchain network. The practical work includes keeping the software running, making data available and maintaining access as the network changes. To a customer, the interesting thing may be the financial service being built on top. Richter chose to sell help with the work underneath.
It is an infrastructure founder’s peculiar bargain. The customer wants the benefits of participation, while hoping to spend as little time as possible thinking about the means. When things work, the mechanism recedes. A quiet day can be a product demonstration, though it makes a rather challenging conference presentation.
and developers
Monitoring and controls
different protocols
Eight months, three rounds
In June 2021, Blockdaemon raised a $28 million Series A led by Greenspring Associates. Goldman Sachs participated, investing $5 million, Richter said at the time. A company that had begun with an Ethereum operations problem was attracting money from an institution whose name required considerably less explanation than a blockchain node.
September brought a $155 million Series B led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The company put its valuation at $1.255 billion. It described plans to expand internationally, strengthen compliance and develop additional services for institutions. The shopping list was revealing: hiring and regulation sat beside product development. Connecting finance to a network involves people and procedures as well as software.
Announced round sizes, USD. Bars share one scale. These are company financings.
In January 2022, another $207 million arrived. Tiger Global and Sapphire led the Series C at a $3.25 billion post-money valuation. The sequence compressed three substantial rounds into roughly eight months. It gave Richter capital to widen the business, while putting a very large number next to a company selling services that most people would never encounter directly.
The valuation belongs to that financing moment. The more durable question is what the company could do with the money. Software businesses can collect capabilities as well as customers. Blockdaemon’s acquisitions would push Richter further into the controls, wallets and connections surrounding the original node service.
The founder who described his brakes
The collapse of FTX in 2022 brought the question of trust into brutal focus. Richter responded with a public letter that described Blockdaemon’s own rules. Transfers above $250,000 from board-approved accounts required board approval, he wrote. Changes to governance depended on shareholder votes. Even the founder could not simply step around those requirements.
“We have a long way to go before trustless systems are fully automatable,” he wrote. His position allowed centralized companies and decentralized systems to coexist. Both needed scrutiny. Software could offer protections only if people could examine it and evaluate how it was governed.
The letter was a useful character detail because it dealt in limitations. Founders are generally invited to explain what they might make possible. Richter was explaining what he was prevented from doing. A spending threshold is a small, concrete object in a conversation otherwise prone to discussing the future of civilization.
“We have a long way to go before trustless systems are fully automatable.”
Konstantin Richter · a letter after FTX
His earlier writing about running Blockdaemon had already put the CEO’s job in practical terms: provide the narrative and capital, then organize around product, people and partners. That description leaves room for persuasion without treating persuasion as the entire business. Somebody still has to ship software, support customers and find colleagues who can do the work.
There is an instructive tension here. Conviction helps a founder continue when other people disagree. Governance determines how much everyone else must depend on that conviction. Richter’s public argument makes room for both. You can believe a network will matter and still insist that the person operating the company has to follow rules.
A wider set of pipes
In July 2022, Blockdaemon acquired Sepior, a Danish company specializing in cryptographic key management. The acquisition extended the business toward securing the authority to move digital assets. Access to a network and control over a transaction are closely related problems, but they require different tools. Richter was assembling more of the operating system around institutional participation.
By 2025, expand.network added another connection. Blockdaemon announced completion of that acquisition in June, extending its ability to give institutions access to decentralized finance through APIs. The ambition was becoming broader than running a node: connect the institution to activities it could carry out once it arrived.
In a conversation with Ferdinand Dabitz on The New Money Podcast, Richter discussed that movement toward DeFi services, including borrowing and lending against assets on blockchain networks. His interests still ran toward the interfaces between systems. The customer should be able to use the service without having to assemble every component of the route.
He could also see the absurdities involved. Asked at Permissionless IV in 2025 about a possible onchain public offering, he made the answer conditional on investor returns and the right legal structures. He added a joke about avoiding “an orange jumpsuit.” The wardrobe reference did useful work. Even an experiment in how companies go public would have to survive contact with the law.
Who signs when software acts?
The next complication is a customer that can act through software. In September 2026, Blockdaemon described its DeFi MCP server and a gateway supplied by Zuplo. AI agents could use financial tools, while authentication, curated capabilities and logging governed their access. Quoting a swap and checking a lending position became requests an assistant could help initiate.
For Richter, this brings an old problem into another interface. Institutions need to establish who authorized an action, which permissions applied and what record remains afterward. The company’s recent writing emphasizes verifiable actions and institutional control. A conversational request can be easy to make; responsibility for the resulting transaction still has to go somewhere.
His own writing is candid about the persistence required. “Conviction matters when it is expensive,” he writes in Courage and the Reset, urging builders to preserve useful partnerships during difficult markets. It is a more revealing aspiration than another funding target: build financial infrastructure that remains useful when enthusiasm becomes harder to finance.
From the unrealized Spotify pitch to the permissions around an AI agent, Richter keeps returning to the same troublesome interval. A network exists. Someone wants to use it. Between those two facts lies a surprising amount of work. He has spent much of his career making a business out of that interval, with the hope that a successful connection eventually feels ordinary.