Three routes and no dates: the BaFin refuses bitcoin.de the MiCAR licence, futurum bank AG keeps holding customer assets

If you hold crypto assets at bitcoin.de, the short answer is this: on the operator's own account your balance is still there, but you cannot trade with it for the time being. The German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) has refused futurum bank AG, the operator of bitcoin.de, authorisation as a provider of crypto-asset services. The parent company Bitcoin Group SE announced this on Tuesday, October 6, in a mandatory disclosure, stating at the same time that customers' assets would continue to be held securely until their transfer to an alternative regulated custodian and that all customer claims would remain unaffected.

An ongoing procedure has thereby turned into a decision. At the end of September the position was still that the application sat with the supervisor and the platform was waiting for the permission; we wrote about that on September 29. This piece sets out what the refusal triggers in practice: what happens to your balance, which routes Bitcoin Group SE itself names, what a change of custodian means for your holding period, and how you can tell at another exchange whether it holds the permission that has just been refused here.

The BaFin refuses the MiCAR authorisation, and the forbearance ends with it

MiCAR is the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114; it sets out who may offer crypto-asset services commercially in the European Union and which duties come with that. A crypto-asset service is any commercial activity involving other people's crypto assets, from exchange through trading venue to custody. Whoever offers one needs authorisation from the competent supervisor; in Germany that is the BaFin.

It is precisely that authorisation the authority has refused futurum bank AG. The Bitcoin Group SE disclosure contains the sentence that changes the situation: with it, the previous forbearance of the provision of crypto-asset services by futurum bank AG no longer exists either. Forbearance is the supervisor's tacit acceptance of an activity while a procedure is running. It is not a permission, and the forbearance ends as soon as the procedure is decided.

The company itself relays the reasoning. In the BaFin's view, according to the disclosure, the current degree of progress on implementation and operationalisation, and the further progress achievable in the short term, were insufficient, making a refusal of authorisation unavoidable at this point. Moritz Eckert, chief executive of Bitcoin Group SE, calls the decision a setback in the same disclosure, considers it wrong on the substance and points out that the implementation of the required points had already been advanced. That account comes from the company affected; no public reasoning of its own from the supervisor on the matter is available.

Important for placing this: a refused authorisation is an administrative decision about requirements on organisation, processes and documentation. It says nothing about a company's solvency and nothing about the existence of customer claims.

The wording on custody: customer assets secured, claims unaffected

For you as a customer, everything hangs on two sentences of the mandatory disclosure. The first: futurum bank AG continues to hold customers' assets securely until their transfer to the alternative regulated custodian. The second: all customer claims remain unaffected. Both sentences appear in a publication by a listed company, which stands behind their content.

Custody here means that a service provider holds the keys to your crypto assets and manages them for you, while the assets are economically yours. It is precisely that separation between holding and being entitled which explains why the disclosure makes two separate commitments: one on custody and one on claims.

What the disclosure does not say is at least as important. A date for the transfer to the alternative custodian is not stated there, the future custodian is not named, and on the question of whether and from when withdrawals are possible there is not a sentence. All that is announced is that futurum bank AG will inform customers on its own website in the near future about the specific arrangements, the steps required of customers and the timetable. Anyone planning a withdrawal today therefore has an assurance about existence, but no date.

From marketplace to broker: the chronology since June 12

The refusal hits a platform that has not been running normally for months. According to the trade publication Cointelegraph, trading at bitcoin.de has been largely suspended since June 12. Behind it is a rebuild: the original marketplace, on which buyers and sellers were brought together directly, was to become a broker model, with more than a hundred crypto assets, with swap functions and with staking. The launch was scheduled for the end of June and was postponed because the authorisation was missing.

In a statement in August, according to the same report, the customers' holdings had already been moved to a new custody infrastructure and the old trading system had been switched off. That explains why holdings and trading are two different things here: the assets sit in a new environment, only the marketplace on top of it is missing. How the standstill began, we set out in August, and what the shareholder meeting at the end of August produced on it is covered in a separate piece.

The order of magnitude makes the situation relevant: Bitcoin Group SE states more than 1,100,000 registered users for bitcoin.de and an operating history of over ten years. By its own account, the holding owns 100 percent of futurum bank AG and 50 percent of Sineus Financial Services GmbH, an investment firm supervised by the BaFin. Anyone affected here is therefore not part of a niche but of one of the best-known addresses in the German crypto market.

Crypto assets are not deposits: deposit insurance does not apply here

One expectation dissolves at this point. The statutory deposit guarantee protects money in an account up to 100,000 euros per customer and institution. Crypto assets, however, are not deposits but assets held in custody, and there is no deposit guarantee for crypto balances in Germany; we described that on October 4 in our overview of the Crypto Markets Supervision Act.

A different principle takes the place of deposit insurance: the segregation of holdings. Crypto assets held in custody are to be kept separate from the service provider's own assets, and the Crypto Markets Supervision Act regulates in Section 45 how crypto assets held in custody are allocated in an insolvency. That is a general rule for every custodian in Germany. It is expressly not a statement about futurum bank AG; on its own situation, Bitcoin Group SE states that all customer claims remain unaffected.

In practice that means the protection of your balance here does not hang on a guarantee fund, but on the holdings being kept cleanly segregated and transferred correctly. That is why the announced move to a regulated custodian is the decisive event of the coming weeks, and why it is worth reading the official announcements on it.

Objection, new application, cooperation: the three routes of Bitcoin Group SE

The disclosure names three routes, and none of them carries a date. The first is the objection, the formal appeal against an administrative act lodged with the authority that issued it. The company writes that it is reviewing the decision and has the opportunity to object. A deadline for that is not stated in the disclosure; anyone naming a concrete deadline is not reading it from this source.

The second route is a renewed application for MiCAR authorisation at a later point. The third is the one the company says it is currently pursuing: a cooperation agreement with regulated German companies, one for trading and one for custody, so that trading becomes possible again through the technically renewed bitcoin.de app. The time horizon the disclosure gives for that reads: within the next few weeks.

For you, the combination of three routes and zero dates means above all one thing: there is no predictability at present. Anyone who depends on being able to trade at a particular moment should not tie that part of their holdings to an assurance without a date. Anyone who can leave things sitting has, going by the wording of the disclosure, no cause for hasty decisions.

What a change of custodian triggers for the holding period and documentation

For crypto assets held privately, a one-year holding period applies in Germany under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: if more than twelve months lie between acquisition and disposal, a gain from the private disposal stays tax-free. Within the year the tax liability applies, and the proof of the acquisition date and acquisition cost lies with you, not with the platform.

What a transfer to another custodian triggers in tax terms depends on the specific arrangements, which futurum bank AG has not yet published. As long as those conditions are open, any blanket statement on it is unserious. What holds up is the preparation: pull a complete export of your transactions now, while access to the account exists, secure the account statements and trading records, and note the holding per crypto asset with a date. If the custodian changes later, you will have the earlier position in black and white.

The second part of the preparation concerns custody itself. A hardware wallet is a device that keeps your private keys offline, so that no service provider stands between you and your crypto assets. Anyone holding part of their stock for the long term can remove exactly that part from dependence on authorisation procedures; a market comparison is in our overview of hardware wallets. The price for it is personal responsibility: whoever loses the key loses the coins, and nobody can retrieve them.

Transitional permission, the KMAG and the company database: the frame around the decision

MiCAR applies directly throughout the European Union, but it contains no German procedural rules. That gap is closed by the Crypto Markets Supervision Act, KMAG for short: it is the German implementation of the MiCA regulation, entered into force as Article 1 of the Financial Market Digitalisation Act and replaced the crypto rules in the Banking Act, where they had until then been treated as crypto custody business.

Decisive for understanding the present case is the transitional permission: under Section 50 of the KMAG, providers already in the market were allowed to keep working at first while they applied for the new authorisation. That transitional permission expired on December 31, 2025. Since then there has been no grey area left for crypto providers in Germany, and that is exactly why the forbearance mentioned in the disclosure was the last thing the operation could rest on. The duties an authorisation brings with it in detail we have set out separately in our overview of the MiCA obligations.

Anyone wanting to complain about the relationship between customer and provider will also find the route in the regulation: which deadlines apply to a complaints procedure and when the supervisor is brought in, we explained in August.

How a MiCAR authorisation becomes visible at another exchange

The case supplies a test question that reaches beyond bitcoin.de: does the provider holding your money and your coins actually have the permission, or is it merely applying for one? Two registers answer that. The BaFin's company database is the official register of authorisations granted in Germany; the public register of the European securities supervisor ESMA lists the authorised providers of crypto-asset services across the whole union. If a provider is not in there, that is not a detail but the answer.

Two qualifications belong with it. First, an entry says nothing about price losses: an authorisation covers supervision, capital and organisational requirements, it is no guarantee for your money and no promise of rising prices. Second, websites keep turning up that advertise with genuine register numbers belonging to other companies; a cross-check is therefore only worth anything via the name, the address and the domain together. Which venues in Germany can show a permission and how they differ on fees and selection is shown by our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

A note of our own on the market environment: Bitcoin and the large altcoins carry on moving independently of this procedure. The refusal concerns access through one particular provider, not the crypto assets themselves.

bitcoin.de: Your next three steps

1. Secure the holding and the history while access stands. Export transactions, acquisition data and the account statement and file them separately from the platform. Tools that log exactly that permanently are in our comparison of tax and portfolio tools.
2. Wait for official announcements and ignore third parties. Bitcoin Group SE has announced that it will publish the timetable and the required steps on its own website. In situations like this, supposed helpers typically get in touch by email, telephone or messenger; nobody reputable asks for your seed or requests an advance payment to recover funds. If you need an alternative venue, pick it from the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges and look up the register entry yourself.
3. Take the long-term part out of third-party custody. What you intend to hold for years anyway does not belong on a trading venue. Which devices are candidates for that and how they differ is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)