Five Swedish fintech stars just presented their vision of a national cryptocurrency

• Sweden's central bank is mulling the world's first national cryptocurrency, the e-krona, and has called on companies and entrepreneurs to help design it.
• Now a team of Swedish fintech icons behind companies lik Klarna, Trustly and BTCX have sent in their own proposal.
• While their concept is based on the blockchain and peer-to-peer transactions, it differs markedly from bitcoin.

As Business Insider’s Will Martin wrote last week, Sweden's central bank is experimenting with the idea of a national digital currency, called the e-krona.

Exactly what the currency should look like however, is very much an open question. The central bank, called Riksbank, proposed some key features earlier this year, and at the same time called openly for proposals and ideas from companies and entrepreneurs.

Now a team of Swedish fintech founders have come up with a proposal of how the e-krona should work. The team includes Victor Jacobsson, co-founder of Klarna; Christian Ander, the founder of the country's first bitcoin exchange, BTCX; Trustly co-founders Joel Jakobsson and Lukas Gratte, and entrepreneur Marcus Boström.

”We want Sweden, as early as possible, to have a digital currency. It will put Sweden on the map and give us a head start [in innovation] against the rest of the world, and also contribute to an inflow of many skilled people to Sweden,” Christian Ander says to Breakit, adding that the proposal was born over dinner between the five.

Not another bitcoin

The team's open source proposal, which has been sent to the Riksbank, is called (tr. from Swedish) a ”Concept proposal for an anonymous, register-based e-krona with an offline-facility.”

The concept is based on open source code and so called e-checks, which can be used both online and offline.

When an issuer sends an e-check to a recipient of a payment (who is online), it would be sent to the Riksbank for validation. The digital currency would hence enable "anonymous payments by allowing accounts without identified account holders," the proposal says.

While it's based on the blockchain, Ander's and Jacobsson's e-krona would not follow bitcoin's distributed system. "We think the Riksbank wants a central authority that verifies transactions," Ander says.

However, it would have a peer-to-peer facility between private individuals. ”If bitcoin is [the equivalent of] BitTorrent, then the e-krona is Spotify,” says Christian Ander.

The five entrepreneurs are not alone in sending proposals to the Riksbank. Swedish news site NyTeknik reports that incumbents like IBM, Visa, Ericsson and SEB have given recently aired their opinions to the Riksbank, as have Swedish fintech companies and institutions like the MIT.

When asked by Breakit if the team would proceed with their proposal if the Riksbank approved, Ander said they could "absolutely" open to even building a company around it.

The Riksbank has itself presented two possible ways that the e-krona could work, one based on value and another on a register-based system. The register-based system would be based on blockchain technology.