Deutsche Bank Starts Holding Bitcoin and Ether for Its Corporate Clients in Europe

Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest bank, has launched a crypto storage service called Digital Asset Custody (DAC). It is open to corporate and institutional clients in Europe. Ordinary account holders can't use it.

Why it matters

Custody means keeping assets safe on a client's behalf. For crypto, that means holding the private keys, the secret codes that control the coins. Many companies want to own crypto but don't want to manage keys themselves. A big regulated bank doing it for them removes one of the main reasons they stayed away.

For ordinary holders, it is another sign that crypto is becoming a standard part of banking. The more large firms can hold it easily, the more potential buyers the market has.

What the bank will hold

At launch, DAC supports:

• bitcoin and ether;
• Circle's USDC (a dollar stablecoin) and EURC (a euro stablecoin);
• EURAU, the bank's own euro stablecoin.

The bank says it will use both "hot" storage (connected to the internet, for quick transfers) and "cold" storage (offline). Private keys are protected by dedicated hardware, and each transaction needs approval from several employees.

What's next

Deutsche Asset Management, the bank's fund arm, said it will look at issuing tokenized money-market funds and exchange-traded products based on crypto and stablecoins. A tokenized fund is an ordinary fund whose shares exist as tokens on a blockchain. No dates were given.