forbes.com
Gerald Podobnik, co-head of Deutsche Bank’s corporate bank, said in a statement on Wednesday that “digital assets are not a replacement for the traditional financial system but an important complement to it,” as Germany’s largest bank confirmed it will begin holding bitcoin and ether for institutional clients in Europe before the end of the year. Bitcoin traded at $75,547 on Wednesday afternoon, little changed over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
The announcement landed a day after the U.S. Senate voted 49-50 against advancing the Clarity Act, the market-structure bill the crypto industry had spent the year lobbying for. Deutsche Bank’s route runs through Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regime instead. The bank expects to receive its custody licence in October, a spokesperson told Cointelegraph.
“We see them as new rails that can coexist with existing market infrastructures while benefiting from the trust, security and safeguards that regulated financial institutions provide,” Podobnik said. “Our aim is to offer clients a secure and regulated gateway to this evolving market.”
What the bank will actually hold
At launch the service covers “a selected range of digital assets, including Bitcoin and Ether, as well as selected stable coins or e-money tokens, including USDC and EURC, EURAU,” the bank said. Circle issues the first two. EURAU is the euro stablecoin of AllUnity, a joint venture between Galaxy, Flow Traders and DWS, the asset manager Deutsche Bank majority-owns, which received a BaFin e-money licence in July 2025. “Tokenized financial instruments are also included in the roadmap,” the release added.
The first clients will be corporates, asset managers, hedge funds, custodians, brokers and sovereign institutions served by the corporate and investment banks, the bank has said. Deutsche Bank will manage the wallets and the private keys itself, and the keys will sit behind hardware-based protection, multi-person approvals and separate warm and cold storage.
For Ido Sofer, founder and chief executive of the key-management firm Sodot, a bank keeping the keys in-house is the tell. “When you hear a bank is launching their own custody solution and they’re hiring blockchain engineers and so on, that means that they’re saying, okay, I want to go all in. I want to have those in-house capabilities and I want this as a business line,” Sofer said on the On The Margin podcast in April. “It really shifted from this is an experiment to this is a growth vector in the business line.”
Three years in the making
Deutsche Bank applied to Germany’s BaFin for a digital-asset custody licence in June 2023 and named the Swiss firm Taurus as its technology partner that September. In July 2025 Bloomberg reported that the bank was aiming for a 2026 launch and had brought in Bitpanda’s technology unit alongside Taurus. Wednesday’s release names neither company. It says only that the service “will use selected external technology and infrastructure providers for defined technical components.”
The bank is late to its neighbourhood. Landesbank Baden-Württemberg announced institutional custody with Bitpanda in 2024, DZ Bank’s meinKrypto platform received its MiCA authorisation in December 2025, and Standard Chartered and BBVA already run regulated custody in Europe, as CoinDesk noted. What Deutsche Bank brings is scale: it is one of the banks the Financial Stability Board classes as globally systemically important, and its clients are the ones who have been asking who should hold the keys since the summer’s hacks.
No deposit-guarantee scheme cover
The release ends with a warning. “Digital assets involve material risks, including price volatility, fraud, cyber incidents and failures of market participants,” it says. “Crypto-assets are not covered by a deposit-guarantee scheme comparable to the protection applicable to eligible bank deposits.”
That is the trade the bank’s clients are being offered: a regulated custodian’s controls, without a regulated deposit’s insurance. Michael Tanguma, co-founder and chief executive of the bitcoin custody firm Onramp, argues the market has already made its choice.
“Nobody would tell an individual to take all their gold out of the bank and park it underneath their mattress,” Tanguma said in an interview in August. “It’s a misnomer and fallacy to say that self custody is the only way.”
The business logic is older than the technology. A custodian that holds the keys also holds the client relationship, and can sell into it, Sofer said: “It’s gonna be hard for you to leave.” That is the same logic that had Wall Street rushing at bitcoin in April, and that has BitGo moving DeFi yield inside its own vaults.
Podobnik left the door open on scope. “The service will be further developed in line with client demand, regulatory requirements and the bank’s risk appetite,” he said. The release adds that timing, geography and the asset list “may change as a result of regulatory requirements, internal approvals, market developments or client demand.”
Sofer’s read is that none of that hedging matters much once a bank of this size has committed. “When a bank does something, this is for like five, 10 years, right?” he said. “They don’t say, well, let’s do this for a couple of quarters and re-evaluate.”