Deutsche Bank Switches On Custody for Bitcoin, Ether and Stablecoins
Germany's largest lender now holds private keys for institutional clients in Europe, and it signed a digital-asset deal with its own money manager.
Deutsche Bank said on Wednesday that its digital asset custody service is live for paying clients, holding 5 tokens for institutions in Europe, Reuters reported. It announced the plan in September.
The bank's product page lists them: bitcoin, ether and the USDC, EURC and EURAU stablecoins. It is for institutional investors, companies, governments and wealth managers, not retail customers.
What custody means here
Owning crypto comes down to controlling a private key, the secret code that moves coins. A custodian holds those keys for the client. Deutsche Bank says it stores them in hardware security modules (tamper-resistant key vaults), offers warm and cold storage, and lets clients set their own approval steps for transfers. Clients reach it through the bank's Autobahn gateway or its Corporate Bank portal.
The service is booked out of Deutsche Bank AG in Frankfurt and offered across Europe through passporting, and the bank describes it as compliant with the EU's MiCA crypto rules. For now it offers custody, transfers to other parties, and moves between warm and cold storage. "Further capabilities" are planned, the page says.
A second deal inside the family
The bank also signed a memorandum of understanding with Deutsche Asset Management, the money manager it mostly owns that was until recently called DWS, Reuters reported. The two will explore commercial and technical work together in digital assets, the bank said, without naming products.
"In the medium term we aim to deliver a fully integrated, regulated ecosystem that supports the custody, tokenisation, and settlement of digital assets," Paul Maley, the bank's global head of trust and securities services, said, per Reuters.
What the bank didn't say
It didn't name its first clients, say how many signed up, or publish its fees, Bitcoin Magazine noted. Crypto held this way also isn't covered by a deposit-guarantee scheme, the outlet said, citing the bank's September release.
In our opinion: Germany's biggest bank opened the vault with a short menu of five tokens. The asset-management deal is the part to follow, because it keeps any new digital product inside one banking group. The bank has also told Reuters it wants to take custody to Asia. The first number worth asking for is the client count, which the bank has kept to itself so far.
Sources: Reuters via Euronext · Deutsche Bank: Digital Asset Custody · Bitcoin Magazine · PYMNTS
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