Crypto and tokenization at Deutsche Börse Group

Deutsche Börse Group, headquartered in Frankfurt, calls itself an international exchange organization and innovative market infrastructure provider on its business areas page. Its trading and clearing segment holds Xetra, the reference market for German equities and a large European ETF venue, Eurex for derivatives, 360T for over-the-counter foreign exchange trading, and, listed next to them, Crypto Finance for digital asset trading and custody. The post-trade segment is Clearstream, which settles and holds securities for banks and asset managers. Its German central securities depository, now called Clearstream Europe, handles more than half of all TARGET2-Securities volume, and the Clearstream business holds about 20 trillion euros in assets under custody (Clearstream).

The group's onchain services build on that infrastructure. A bitcoin held at Clearstream sits in the same account as a client's bonds, a crypto future at Eurex clears through the same clearing house as a Bund future, and a tokenized commercial paper on D7 can end up as collateral at the Deutsche Bundesbank. The market background is on the pages on capital markets in Frankfurt and onchain capital markets.

Deutsche Börse took a two-thirds majority in Crypto Finance, a Swiss firm that offered brokerage in more than 200 digital assets, its own custody and FINMA-regulated crypto funds (Deutsche Börse). Crypto Finance describes itself as a provider of institutional-grade trading and custody for digital assets and part of Deutsche Börse Group. It works through two regulated companies: Crypto Finance AG, supervised by FINMA in Switzerland, and Crypto Finance (Deutschland) GmbH in Frankfurt, supervised by BaFin.

The German company received four BaFin licenses for crypto trading, settlement and custody, and later a license under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR), which lets it serve clients across the EU. On that license it runs a staking service for Ethereum and Solana, built with the staking provider Figment, for institutional clients whose assets it already holds. Crypto Finance is also the sub-custodian behind Clearstream's crypto custody and the settlement agent for the group's crypto trading venue, so most onchain services of the group run through it. Crypto staking and crypto custody have their own pages.

Deutsche Börse opened the Deutsche Börse Digital Exchange (DBDX) as a regulated spot market for crypto assets, open only to institutional clients. Deutsche Börse ran the venue under a multilateral trading facility license, Crypto Finance (Deutschland) settled and held the assets, and trading started on a request-for-quote basis.

The venue then moved into 360T, the group's foreign exchange trading platform, as 3DX Digital Exchange. Ledger Insights reported that 360T received a BaFin license as a crypto trading platform under MiCA shortly before the launch, that Crypto Finance handles custody and settlement, and that 3DX started with bitcoin and ether against dollars and euros. A bank that already trades currencies on 360T can trade crypto through the same connection. How 3DX compares with retail exchanges is on the page on the largest crypto exchanges in Germany.

Clearstream opened custody and settlement for bitcoin and ether to institutional clients of its international central securities depository, Clearstream Banking S.A. in Luxembourg. A client uses its existing Clearstream account and Swift messaging and signs no separate contract with a crypto firm; Crypto Finance (Deutschland) holds the coins as sub-custodian, and the bitcoin shows up in the same custody report as the client's bonds. Clearstream later added six more cryptocurrencies: XRP, Cardano, Solana, Litecoin, Stellar and Avalanche.

D7 is the digital post-trade platform that Clearstream runs for Deutsche Börse. Its first issue was a KfW bond of 20 million euros with a term of two years, the first digital fixed-income bond issued as a central register security under the German Electronic Securities Act, the eWpG (Clearstream). Clearstream's digital solutions page now counts more than 45,000 digital issuances a week and over 90 billion euros in issuance volume on D7.

D7 DLT adds a distributed ledger to the same platform. It complies with the EU Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR), runs on infrastructure from Google Cloud, starts with commercial paper and medium-term notes, and connects to 360X, the group's trading venue for DLT securities. The European Investment Bank issued the first DLT-native commercial paper on D7: 77.5 million euros for ten business days, with Citi as dealer and DekaBank, DZ BANK, Eurex Clearing and Union Investment among the buyers. After the ECB accepted DLT-native securities from central securities depositories as collateral, DekaBank and Eurex Clearing pledged the paper through Clearstream's triparty service to borrow from the Deutsche Bundesbank. Clearstream also takes part in the Eurosystem's Pontes service for DLT settlement in central bank money.

In an interview with Norton Rose Fulbright, Jens Hachmeister, who heads issuer services and new digital markets at Clearstream, explains why the group built D7 for same-day issuance and automated processing. More on the instruments: tokenized securities, tokenized bonds and tokenization in Germany.

Eurex lists futures and options on the FTSE Bitcoin Index and the FTSE Ethereum Index in euros and dollars, nano futures at a hundredth of a bitcoin and a tenth of an ether, and options on the iShares bitcoin ETP. Eurex Clearing clears all of them as central counterparty. Eurex Clearing also launched a DLT-based collateral service with the technology firm HQLAX; in the first transaction J.P. Morgan moved securities for the Dutch pension investor PGGM to Clearstream as margin collateral.

On Xetra, investors trade crypto exchange-traded notes from 16 providers on 24 cryptocurrencies and 23 crypto baskets, and Eurex Clearing clears the trades. Deutsche Börse says it was the first exchange in the world to offer centrally cleared crypto products. The crypto ETP page covers how these notes work.

The group has signed three stablecoin deals. With Circle it signed a memorandum of understanding to list and trade EURC and USDC on 3DX and through Crypto Finance, and to hold them in Clearstream custody with Crypto Finance as sub-custodian (Clearstream). With Societe Generale and SG-FORGE it agreed to use the MiCA-regulated EUR CoinVertible and USD CoinVertible for settlement, collateral management and treasury at Clearstream, and to list them on the group's digital trading venues (Deutsche Börse). Ledger Insights tied the SG-FORGE deal to settlement timing, for example for Asian investors after the move to shorter US settlement cycles.

The third memorandum is with AllUnity, an e-money institution backed by DWS, Flow Traders and Galaxy that issues the euro stablecoin EURAU. EURAU goes into Clearstream custody, again with Crypto Finance as sub-custodian, and later into the rest of the group's services (Deutsche Börse). The issuers are compared on the page on euro stablecoins under MiCA.

Deutsche Börse Market Data + Services publishes 41 real-time data points from Xetra, Eurex, 360T and Tradegate onchain through Chainlink's DataLink service, readable on more than 40 public and private blockchains (Deutsche Börse). A smart contract that prices a tokenized fund or a loan against collateral can read the same exchange prices a trading desk sees.

With the crypto exchange Kraken, the group agreed a partnership in which Kraken connects to 360T for foreign exchange liquidity, Crypto Finance and Clearstream hold assets, Kraken's tokenized xStocks reach the 360X venue, and Eurex derivatives become tradable on Kraken once regulators approve. Deutsche Börse then bought a 1.5 percent stake in Kraken's parent Payward for 200 million dollars. Iris Bülow of Das Investment (in German) put the deal next to the planned merger of Boerse Stuttgart Digital and Tradias.

The group's digital asset teams meet the wider market in Frankfurt at the Crypto Assets Conference, which Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and Deutsche Börse Group host together on the Frankfurt School campus. The Frankfurt School Centre for Digital Economics, formerly the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center, organizes it on the Frankfurt School side. Finance Loop was a partner of CAC 2026 and a sponsor of CAC 2025, with a booth and staff on site. Around the conference, Finance Loop has covered evening events at TechQuartier, such as a Chainlink panel before CAC 2024 and an evening on real-world asset tokenization the day before CAC 2025. Finance Loop runs events in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg, and the calendar above lists the next digital asset dates.

Yes, for institutions. The group's crypto spot venue started as Deutsche Börse Digital Exchange (DBDX) and now runs as 3DX at 360T, with Crypto Finance settling and holding the assets. Private investors reach crypto through Deutsche Börse by buying crypto ETNs on Xetra through their bank or broker.

D7 is Clearstream's platform for issuing and processing securities in digital form, without a paper global note. D7 DLT is its blockchain variant for tokenized commercial paper and medium-term notes, run under the EU Central Securities Depositories Regulation.

Crypto Finance AG is the Swiss crypto trading and custody firm in which Deutsche Börse holds a majority. Its German company, Crypto Finance (Deutschland) GmbH in Frankfurt, holds BaFin licenses and a MiCAR license and acts as sub-custodian for Clearstream's crypto custody.