Frankfurt (Reuters) – The German subsidiary of the Austrian crypto platform Bitpanda has received a Bafin license.
The German financial regulator granted Bitpanda Asset Management GmbH a license for custody and proprietary trading of crypto assets, Bitpanda announced on Thursday. This means that the Vienna-based company can now also offer its crypto services on the German market. The Bafin did not want to comment on the granting of the license.
Austria’s most valuable fintech was granted permission just a few days after the US crypto exchange FTX went bankrupt, from which Bitpanda boss Eric Demuth wants to distance himself. “You wouldn’t have your salary transferred to a bank based in the Bahamas, so stop keeping your assets there,” Demuth wrote on LinkedIn shortly after the news of the FTX bankruptcy. At Bitpanda, customer assets are strictly separated from company assets, he said when receiving the Bafin license.
The crypto trading platform is already registered in France, Italy, Spain, UK, Czech Republic, Sweden and Austria. The German neobank N26 has been offering crypto trading to its customers in Austria since the end of October in partnership with Bitpanda. Bitpanda’s Bafin license could bring the launch of N26’s crypto offering closer to Germany in the coming months. N26 did not want to comment on concrete plans for the crypto offer in Germany.
(Report by Marta Orosz, edited by Olaf Brenner. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected] (for politics and the economy) or [email protected] (for companies and markets).)