Deutsche Bank Confirms Bitcoin and Ether Custody Launch, Still Subject to Regulators

Deutsche Bank said on Wednesday that it will hold bitcoin, ether and selected stablecoins for European institutional and corporate clients, with the first customers going live this year once the applicable regulatory process is complete. The 2026 target had circulated in press reports for more than a year.

The service puts Deutsche Bank in charge of client wallets and private keys, so institutions can hold digital assets and send them to third parties. The bank said that reduces the need for clients to build and run custody infrastructure of their own. The bank said it designed the offering around hardware-backed key generation, multi-person approvals, split duties, warm and cold storage kept apart, a redundant technical setup and controlled recovery arrangements.

At launch the service will cover bitcoin and ether along with selected stablecoins and e-money tokens, including USDC, EURC and EURAU. The last of those is a euro stablecoin from AllUnity, a joint venture of Galaxy, Flow Traders and DWS, the asset manager majority-owned by Deutsche Bank, which launched the token in July 2025 after Germany’s BaFin granted it an e-money institution license. Deutsche Bank said the list may grow with client demand and that tokenized financial instruments sit on the roadmap.

The first clients will come from the bank’s Corporate Bank and Investment Bank: asset managers, hedge funds, brokers, custodians, corporates and sovereign institutions, each subject to due diligence and the bank’s risk appetite. Deutsche Bank said it will use outside technology and infrastructure providers for defined technical components, and did not name them.

“Digital assets are not a replacement for the traditional financial system but an important complement to it,” Gerald Podobnik, co-head of Deutsche Bank’s Corporate Bank, said in the announcement. He called them “new rails that can coexist with existing market infrastructures while benefiting from the trust, security and safeguards that regulated financial institutions provide.”

Deutsche Bank applied to BaFin for a digital custody license in 2023 and partnered with digital asset infrastructure firm Taurus that September. Commerzbank won a BaFin crypto custody license in November 2023.

The release carried extensive risk language. Deutsche Bank warned that digital assets carry material risks, among them price volatility, fraud and cyber incidents, and that crypto-assets fall outside the deposit-guarantee protection covering eligible bank deposits. It also said the timing, geography, supported assets and scope of the service could all still change.

The service, Podobnik said in the same release, will be “further developed in line with client demand, regulatory requirements and the bank’s risk appetite.”

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