Germany's largest bank to store crypto, Asia to follow

Crypto promises financial sovereignty, but with the growing adoption, more and more banks are entering the world. Germany is at the forefront of this within Europe and the country's largest bank will start storing crypto coins within a few weeks. And the service should also run in Asia next year.

Deutsche Bank also wants to bring its custody service to Asia in 2027, news agency Reuters reported on Friday. That's what Gerald Podobnik, co-head of the corporate bank, said. Which countries are first in line is still unclear.

First it's Germany's turn. Institutions and companies can store Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and the stablecoins USDC, EURC and EURAU at the bank. Stablecoins are crypto coins whose value is tied to the dollar or euro.

The bank manages the private keys, the digital keys that give access to the coins. The knife cuts on two sides: customers do not have to set up expensive security themselves and the bank holds them as customers.

That is contrary to the original idea behind crypto, in which you control your keys yourself. For pension funds and asset managers, certainty weighs more heavily because they have to adhere to strict custody rules.

Deutsche Bank is not a pioneer in its own country. Commerzbank already received a custody permit in 2023 and Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) has been holding crypto for institutions since April 2024.

DZ Bank was also given the green light under MiCA for its crypto platform meinKrypto at the end of 2025. Dutch banks are more cautious: ABN AMRO, Rabobank and ing have been offering crypto ETPs since this year, exchange products that follow the price of a currency.

Deutsche Bank has been toying with the idea of storing crypto for customers since the end of 2020. At the beginning of that year, their own economists wrote that Bitcoin moved up and down too hard to store value.

In February 2023, the bank joined a financing round of the Swiss tech company Taurus. That summer, a permit application was submitted to the German regulator BaFin, and in September 2023 Taurus became the technical partner.

On September 16 of this year, Deutsche Bank officially announced the launch. The permit under MiCA, the European crypto law, followed on 12 October, according to the register of the European market regulator ESMA.

In the meantime, the bank has been nestled in the crypto market via side paths for years.

Subsidiary DWS, a large asset manager, brought two exchange products on Bitcoin and Ethereum to the Deutsche Börse in April 2024 with Galaxy Digital. DWS is also a partner in AllUnity, the publisher of EURAU.

That euro stablecoin will soon end up in the safe of the parent company. In addition, Deutsche Bank is the house bank of Bitpanda and has been processing direct payments for German users of the platform since June 2024.

In June 2025, the bank also presented DAMA 2, a blueprint for tokenization: converting funds and other assets into digital tokens. That platform runs on an extra layer on top of Ethereum (ETH).

The bank earns little from the storage itself. Podobnik said in September that the service will only make money if the bank adds more services to it.

Those services are now on the schedule. Deutsche Bank wants to help customers convert to stablecoins and issue digital bonds. There will also be tokenised deposits: bank balances that are stored on a blockchain as a token.

Asia must deliver the growth. The corporate bank wants to grow its turnover by an average of about 8 percent per year from 2025 to 2028, Podobnik said. After three years, turnover is then more than a quarter higher.

It won't be easy. Standard Chartered and the Spanish BBVA already offer crypto custody, and the UK bank has a large network in Asia. In addition to Taurus, Deutsche Bank also works with Bitpanda for the custody service.