Digital assets in Frankfurt

The large Frankfurt institutions treat digital assets as one more product line next to securities. Commerzbank received a crypto custody license from BaFin as the first full-service bank in Germany, and it now offers bitcoin and ether trading and custody to corporate clients: Commerzbank holds the assets, and Crypto Finance, a subsidiary of Deutsche Börse, handles the trading. Deutsche Bank is preparing its own MiCA custody service for bitcoin, ether and the stablecoins USDC, EURC and EURAU.

DekaBank, which calls itself the securities house of the Sparkassen, is building a crypto trading offer for Sparkasse customers under MiCAR, as Philipp Schleu reported for Der Aktionär (in German). On the fund side, DWS is one of the founders of AllUnity, the Frankfurt e-money institution that issues the euro stablecoin EURAU, and Union Investment and DekaBank bought the Siemens digital bond. The page on crypto custody in Germany compares the custody routes of German banks.

DZ BANK, the central institution of the cooperative banks, has its head office in Frankfurt too. It holds a MiCAR approval from BaFin for meinKrypto, a crypto wallet in the banking app of the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken, and Boerse Stuttgart Digital keeps the coins. With DekaBank on the Sparkassen side, both large German banking groups now run their crypto offers from Frankfurt.

Deutsche Börse Group runs crypto spot trading for institutions at 360T's 3DX, crypto custody at Clearstream and tokenized commercial paper on D7 DLT, all from Frankfurt. Two newer venues for tokenized securities are based in the city: 360X, a BaFin- and ESMA-regulated trading venue backed by Deutsche Börse and Commerzbank and licensed under the EU DLT Pilot Regime, and 21X, which holds a DLT Pilot Regime license for trading and settlement.

Registers are the less visible part. Cashlink, a Frankfurt fintech, holds BaFin licenses as a crypto securities registrar and as a crypto custodian under the German Electronic Securities Act, and lists KfW, NRW.BANK, DZ Bank, Hauck & Aufhäuser and Bankhaus Metzler among its clients. A bond that exists only as a token needs such a register to be a security in law. The page on tokenization in Frankfurt goes through the steps of an issue.

Frankfurt is also where the money side of digital assets is decided. The Eurosystem's Pontes links market blockchain platforms with TARGET Services, so that a wholesale trade in tokenized securities can settle in central bank money. The Eurosystem accepts DLT-native securities from central securities depositories as collateral, and DekaBank and Eurex Clearing pledged commercial paper that the European Investment Bank had issued on D7 DLT to borrow from the Bundesbank.

The new EU Anti-Money Laundering Authority, AMLA, also sits in Frankfurt and will directly supervise about 40 cross-border financial firms with high money laundering risk, among which crypto firms can be.

Frankfurt has several dedicated digital assets events. The Crypto Assets Conference, hosted by Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and Deutsche Börse Group, gathers around 550 people on site and more than 3,000 online; Finance Loop has been a partner and held the Digital Finance Night on the evening of CAC 2026. Finance Loop was a sponsor of CAC 2025 with its own booth. The Forum für Digitale Vermögenswerte, organized by Web3 Network with Finance Loop as partner, brings together senior people from more than 200 market participants on tokenized securities, custody and MiCAR.

The Frankfurt Forum on Digital Assets & Applications, hosted by the consultancy d-fine at the Literaturhaus, put DekaBank, 360X, 21X and Seturion on a panel on DLT market infrastructure, and the Bundesbank, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, DZ Bank and AllUnity on a panel on money in DLT markets. At TechQuartier, MarketVector Indexes and Deutsche Digital Assets presented on crypto indices at a panel covered by Finance Loop. At TechQuartier, CoreLedger, Finemetal and S-Pro also discussed tokenizing gold and real estate at a real-world asset evening, and Bybit EU held a Crypto Evening on MiCAR and digital assets. The euro stablecoin issuer AllUnity hosts Capital & Code, a conference on stablecoins, tokenized funds and payments with Finance Loop as media partner of Capital & Code 2026, and Finance Loop has partnered with Frankfurt Digital Finance, a two-day conference at the Palmengarten whose first day covers digital money, crypto and tokenized finance. 21X, the Frankfurt DLT trading venue, has a strategic cooperation with Finance Loop.

Commerzbank offers crypto custody and trading to corporate clients together with Crypto Finance. Deutsche Bank is preparing a MiCA custody service for bitcoin, ether and stablecoins. DekaBank is building crypto trading for Sparkasse customers, and DZ BANK, headquartered in Frankfurt, runs its meinKrypto custody platform under a MiCA license from BaFin.

Yes. The Crypto Assets Conference at Frankfurt School, run with Deutsche Börse Group, gathers around 550 people on site. The Forum für Digitale Vermögenswerte and the Frankfurt Forum on Digital Assets & Applications are smaller professional forums. Dates are in the calendar above and on the events calendar.

Frankfurt School of Finance & Management hosts the Crypto Assets Conference with Deutsche Börse and the Frankfurt Quantum Finance Forum, and its research on blockchain began at the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center. The Centre for Digital Economics studies the infrastructure of the digital financial system.

Yes. Finance Loop holds digital assets meetups at TechQuartier and evening events around the Crypto Assets Conference, and the meetups page lists the formats.