Deutsche Bank wants to offer custody of digital assets

Big adoption news. Shortly after Germany's largest bank filed a BaFin application for a corresponding license, the bank is pouncing. Deutsche Bank now wants to start holding crypto assets for institutional clients.

With this, Deutsche Bank wants to offer institutional clients the ability to hold crypto assets and tokenized assets on their behalf. This reports Reuters news agency. The move is possible thanks to a partnership with Swiss-based company Taurus. The partnership follows a funding round for Taurus in which the bank took a stake of about $65 million.

Deutsche Bank is Germany's largest credit institution. In 2022, it managed more than $820 billion. However, this is not the financial institution's first step toward crypto: in late June, Deutsche Bank confirmed that it had applied for a custody license for digital assets from the BaFin.

As part of a partnership with Memento Blockchain, the bank is also working on a management solution for digital funds. Meanwhile, the bank's fund house, DWS Group, is working with US-based digital asset manager Galaxy Digital to launch crypto-ETPs for investors in Europe.

Crypto trading is not part of Deutsche Bank's "immediate plans," a spokesman told Reuters. But clearly, Germany is further ahead than America in terms of upcoming crypto acceptance.