Current Position & Biography
Henrik Hjelte is a co-founder and board member of ChromaWay, the blockchain development company behind Chromia. The company's current team page lists Or Perelman as chief executive officer and Hjelte as a board member. Hjelte's earlier CEO position should therefore be treated as historical, not as his present executive role.
ChromaWay is associated with Stockholm, Sweden. Its own history identifies Hjelte, Alex Mizrahi and Or Perelman as the company's founders in 2014. Hjelte's background combines software development, finance and entrepreneurship. His relevance to digital assets comes from building a blockchain company and supporting its transition from enterprise projects to public-network infrastructure.
Notable Contributions
ChromaWay developed Postchain, a system connecting relational databases with blockchain-style consensus. The company's history records its announcement at Money20/20 in 2017 and its use in the Swedish land-registry project. This work investigated whether shared records and digital agreements could improve coordination among participants in property transactions. A pilot or technical demonstration is not the same as a nationwide production registry or a legal transfer of ownership.
The company also worked on an early digital-money experiment with Estonia's LHV Bank. ChromaWay dates that collaboration to 2015, and LHV's own later account describes its Cuber platform as a stablecoin-like experiment from that year. This is a historical example of bank-linked blockchain development, not a claim that the original experiment remains a currently available payment product.
Chromia extended the relational approach to a public blockchain for decentralized applications. The project dates its public mainnet launch to July 2024. Its design brings structured database capabilities into blockchain application development, rather than requiring every application to treat data as a separate off-chain component. These are contributions of the broader engineering team and ecosystem; they should not be attributed to Hjelte as a sole inventor.
Hjelte also participated in New America's March 2018 discussion of blockchain and land registries, where the event's photographic record identifies him as ChromaWay's then-CEO and co-founder. That record connects his public engagement to a concrete institutional-use case rather than only to token-market commentary.
Why Katharos Is Following Them
Hjelte's work links two important parts of the blockchain industry: experiments with established institutions and the development of public networks. The progression from database-oriented enterprise tools to Chromia provides a useful case study in how infrastructure companies attempt to make decentralized applications more practical.
The editorial interest is in the technology's actual use and limits. Relevant questions include how data is validated, which parties operate the network, what information remains private and what depends on conventional legal institutions. Those details matter more than treating a pilot announcement as proof that a whole industry has adopted blockchain.
Areas to Follow
Relational blockchain development and application usability. Evidence of adoption beyond pilots and demonstrations. The distinction between tokenized records and enforceable legal rights. ChromaWay's governance and the separation of board and executive roles.
Reporting Scope
Use the current board-member title and date older CEO references. Separate company claims from independently demonstrated outcomes, and distinguish historical experiments from live products. Credit technical work to the relevant team rather than implying sole authorship. Inclusion is not investment advice or an endorsement of CHR or any other digital asset.
Katharos Category
Exchanges & Infrastructure
Photo Credit
New America, “Blockchain and Land Registries- Lessons from the Field-13,” March 22, 2018 (capture date in EXIF), CC BY 2.0. Cropped and resized from the original event photograph. Photograph: Source 5; license: Source 6.