Blockchain in Germany

Yes, and the law says how. The federal government adopted a Blockchain Strategy and made electronic securities one of its central points; a joint paper of the finance and justice ministries on securities and crypto tokens came before it. The result is the Electronic Securities Act (Gesetz über elektronische Wertpapiere, eWpG). It lets an issuer create a security without a paper certificate and record it in a crypto securities register that can run on a blockchain. The register must be tamper-proof and log each entry in time order, and keeping it is a financial service that needs a BaFin license.

EU law adds two layers. The DLT Pilot Regime lets market infrastructures run trading and settlement of tokenized securities on a distributed ledger under eased rules, and MiCA covers crypto-assets and stablecoins that are not securities. The tokenization in Germany page goes through the eWpG in detail.

BaFin has granted more MiCA authorizations than any other national supervisor in the EU, and a MiCA license is valid in every member state, so several large crypto platforms run their EU business under a German license. The crypto in Germany page names them.

Blockchain in banking is about records that several institutions keep today: who owns a bond, who owes whom cash, when a trade is final. German banks now run those records on shared ledgers. The Eurosystem's Pontes service settles tokenized assets in central bank money, and its first group has more German names than any other country: Deutsche Bank, DekaBank, DZ Bank, KfW, BayernLB and NRW.BANK, plus the DLT operators Cashlink, Clearstream and SWIAT and the Deutsche Bundesbank.

The savings bank and cooperative groups build their own rails. SWIAT, owned by DekaBank, LBBW, SC Ventures and Comyno, carried a 300 million euro digital bond for Siemens. Boerse Stuttgart Digital trades and keeps crypto-assets for DZ BANK and DekaBank and is building Seturion, a settlement platform for tokenized securities. In Frankfurt, Deutsche Börse runs D7 and 21X a licensed DLT trading venue; the blockchain in Frankfurt page covers them.

Three associations speak for the field. Bundesblock, the Blockchain Bundesverband, was founded in Berlin and has more than 90 member companies and research institutions, which makes it the largest blockchain association in the DACH region. The Bitcoin Bundesverband represents the bitcoin industry and was founded in the Bundestag. DLT Germany calls itself an independent think tank that connects science, business, education and society, with free meetups, workshops and hackathons; its sister initiative DLT Austria covers the neighbor country.

Each city has its own profile. Frankfurt is about settlement, with the ECB, the Bundesbank, Deutsche Börse and the Frankfurt School. Berlin is about builders and politics, with Berlin Blockchain Week and the associations. Munich is about the university and insurers, with the TUM Blockchain Club, Tangany and Munich Re. Stuttgart has Boerse Stuttgart Digital and LBBW. For study, Frankfurt School offers a Master in Financial Technology, and the TUM Blockchain Club runs the free Web3 Talents program.

Finance Loop is a member of Bundesblock, a founding member of the Bitcoin Bundesverband and a network partner of DLT Germany, W3MUC and Web3 Network. It partners with conferences across the country: the Crypto Assets Conference in Frankfurt, the Forum für Digitale Vermögenswerte, a German-language forum on digital assets and tokenization, and CONF3RENCE in Dortmund, where it was media partner. The German Blockchain & AI Week in Berlin is on its events list as well. Finance Loop was an official sponsor of CAC 2025 with its own booth, and before CAC 2024 Chainlink held a panel at TechQuartier on the future of finance. At the Frankfurt Forum on Digital Assets & Applications, hosted by d-fine, DekaBank, 21X, Seturion, the Bundesbank, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank discussed DLT-based market infrastructure and payments. Finance Loop has a strategic cooperation with 21X and was media partner of Supertour Germany in Frankfurt, an evening for Solana builders hosted by Superteam Germany.

Finance Loop events in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg bring bankers, asset managers and compliance people together with blockchain developers and IT and AI engineers.

Blockchain in banking is a shared ledger that several banks keep in copies, so that ownership records and payments between them match without a reconciliation step. In Germany banks use it for digital bonds under the eWpG, for repos and for settlement of tokenized assets in central bank money through Pontes.

Yes. Bundesblock, the Blockchain Bundesverband, is the largest one, with more than 90 members. The Bitcoin Bundesverband represents the bitcoin industry, and DLT Germany is a think tank for distributed ledger technology.

The largest are the Crypto Assets Conference in Frankfurt, the TUM Blockchain Conference in Munich and the events of Berlin Blockchain Week. The Forum für Digitale Vermögenswerte in Frankfurt and CONF3RENCE in Dortmund add more. Dates are in the calendar above.

The technology itself needs no license. The business on it does: a crypto securities register needs a BaFin license under the eWpG, trading venues for tokenized securities need one under the DLT Pilot Regime, and crypto service providers under MiCA.