Sparkasse crypto trading opens to 50 million customers, keys included

German savings banks started selling crypto to retail customers on 19 October. The service runs inside the existing Sparkasse banking app under the name Krypto powered by Deka, with DekaBank operating it alongside Boerse Stuttgart. Five assets are on the list: bitcoin, ether, XRP, solana and POL.

The Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe reaches roughly 50 million customers, which is about three in five people living in Germany. No single launch date covers them. The DSGV expects 30 to 40 institutions to join each month, with most of the 230-plus interested banks connected by the middle of 2027, and it leaves the timing to each bank.

“When a savings bank starts is for it to decide.”

— Joachim Schmalzl, Executive board member, DSGV

What it costs

The fee reads cheap and is not. An order costs €0.99 flat plus an undisclosed spread. On a €1,000 purchase that flat part is 0.099%. On a €50 purchase it is 1.98%, twenty times the rate, and €50 is exactly the size of order a first-time buyer places. The spread sits on top of both and nobody outside Deka knows how wide it is.

Who holds the keys

Custody is the real trade. DekaBank holds the private keys in a shared omnibus wallet, so no customer holds their own. Withdrawals go only to addresses belonging to licensed crypto service providers, which rules out a Ledger or a Trezor at home. There is no staking, and the statutory deposit guarantee that covers a current account does not cover any of this.

The five-asset list is worth measuring rather than listing. Bitcoin, ether, XRP and solana are together worth $2,079.5bn of the $2,752.8bn in crypto this morning, so the shortlist hands a customer 75.5% of the market. POL adds $0.98bn, four hundredths of one percent, which makes it the one name on the list that needs explaining.

Why now

The DSGV calls these highly speculative investments with a risk of total loss in its own materials, and the product is not being advertised. A bank group that spent years declining to touch this is now distributing it to fifty million people while telling them not to.

Europe built the road for this. MiCA is what lets a bank list crypto next to a savings account, supervision has moved from writing the rules to checking who follows them, and the ECB has been reworking how bank money and tokens sit together, including the deposit rule it wanted back. What settles the German question is the monthly count: 30 to 40 banks a month is the pace the DSGV claims, and the first month ends on 19 November.

Informational material, not investment advice. Market figures were read on the morning of 20 October 2026, and the spread Deka charges on top of the order fee has not been published.