Niels Van Groningen

Niels van Groningen is a Dutch entrepreneur and co-founder of Bitonic, the first Bitcoin company of the Netherlands. Bitonic launched on 1 May 2012 as the first Dutch bitcoin trading platform, started by a group of three friends.

The three founders shared a passion for programming, open source and the open internet before turning to bitcoin. Triggered by the credit card companies blocking payments to Wikileaks in order to attempt to censor them. Bitcoin turned from a technical curiosity into a tool for free speech and censorship resistence in the eyes of the Bitonic-founders. The company began in a spare bedroom before growing into a business with a handful of employees, after the founders spotted bitcoin's potential early in 2012 and decided to make it as simple as possible for a Dutch audience to get into Bitcoin.

After some run-ins with banks after sending funds to the Japanese MtGox platform in order to trade bitcoin, the three decided to use their expertise to help others dealing with similar problems. As such Bitonic was born.

A key part of Bitonic's early success was tying into iDEAL, the dominant Dutch e-payment system, which suited automated bitcoin trading thanks to its fixed fees and lack of chargebacks.

Both Bitonic and Niels have had afocus on the technological side of Bitcoin from the very beginning and the company has always been more shaped as an IT-company then a financial one. As such Bitonic has a track record of contributing to technical conferences and meetups since the early days of bitcoin, both internationally as in the Netherlands. Bitonic has always kept the promise of open payments, privacy and self-sovereignty close to its heart and this is still part of the company's DNA and strategy to this day.

Bitonic has continued to operate as a Netherlands-focused bitcoin business, and for a legal battle with the Dutch central bank (DNB) over anti-money-laundering identification requirements, a case that became a notable privacy/regulation flashpoint in Dutch crypto policy. Bitonic is licenced as a CASP under MiCAR, and while under current supervision regime of the Dutch Financial Markets Authority (AFM) continues to fight for its customer's right to financial self-sovereignty and to safeguard their data.