Northstake
Northstake is a financial technology company from Copenhagen that builds regulated staking products for financial institutions. Its clients are asset managers, custodians, fund issuers and node operators that want ether staking rewards in a structure their supervisors accept. The Danish Financial Supervisory Authority has supervised Northstake since its start, and the company holds a license under the European MiCA regulation.
The main product is the Staking Vault Manager, a set of tools for the stVaults that Lido introduced with its third version. An institution stakes ether in its own segregated vault, picks the node operators that run its validators and can mint stETH against the vault when it needs liquidity.
How the Staking Vault Manager works
The Staking Vault Manager went live in February 2026 and works on the main network of Ethereum. Clients use a web interface, a REST API or a TypeScript SDK to create vaults, assign node operators, stake and withdraw, and the platform delivers reward and transaction data per vault for reporting. Professional operators such as P2P.org, Pier Two, Solstice Staking and InfStones run the validators behind the vaults.
Staking Vault Manager Pro adds yield strategies and white-label pooled staking products built on the DeFi Wrapper of Lido version 3. The custodian Balance offers its custody clients access to Lido stVaults through Northstake.
MiCA license from the Danish supervisor
Northstake received authorization as a crypto-asset service provider from the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority in April 2026. The register of MiCA licenses lists Northstake ApS with the date April 7, 2026, and the license lets the company serve institutional clients in every EU member state. A provider with this authorization meets MiCA requirements on capital, governance, business continuity and the protection of client assets, and Northstake checks transactions with Chainalysis.
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Liquidity for staked ether in ETFs
Before the vault product, Northstake ran an ETH validator marketplace where institutions could sell staked validators to market makers instead of waiting in the exit queue. The Canadian asset manager 3iQ tested the model to add liquidity to the validators of its ether exchange-traded fund, and the market makers Keyrock, Nonco and GSR backed it. With such liquidity a fund can stake a larger share of its ether and still pay out redemptions on time.
Who leads Northstake?
Jesper Johansen founded Northstake and leads it as chief executive, after more than 15 years in technology consulting at Accenture and Deloitte. Luca Sorlini is chief product officer, Søren Als is chief technology officer, and Helle Lauritsen heads risk and compliance. Claus Nielsen, a former head of markets at Saxo Bank, advises the company, and in 2023 Northstake raised about three million dollars from investors.
Northstake and Finance Loop
Finance Loop follows how European asset managers add staking to regulated products in the track Investment & Digital Assets, and the license questions in the track Risk & Compliance. Northstake from Copenhagen is a staking specialist that holds a MiCA license from the Danish supervisor.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the institutional use of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.