Sparkasse Crypto Custody: Why You Get No Key to Your Bitcoin and What to Check First

When your Sparkasse starts offering Bitcoin in October, you will not be buying coins that you then move to a wallet of your own. You receive a position in your securities account, and the cryptographic keys behind it stay with the bank. That is the central difference between what a high-street bank offers and an account at a crypto exchange, and it decides what you can actually do with your holdings later on.

This article takes on exactly that point. It explains what custody in a bank account means in practice and in law, which obligations an authorised custodian has to meet under the EU regulation MiCAR, which three public registers let you look up who really holds your crypto-assets, and which questions you should settle before your first purchase. The launch timetable and the cost question we have covered elsewhere.

Crypto powered by Deka: what custody in a bank account actually means

The Sparkassen offering is called Krypto powered by Deka. It was developed by DekaBank, the securities house of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, and it runs inside the Sparkasse app rather than in a separate application. For trading and the technical infrastructure, DekaBank works with Börse Stuttgart Digital. According to the reports available so far, a launch from mid-October 2026 is planned, with an internal test phase in September and a rollout in waves. Each of the roughly 370 regional Sparkassen decides for itself whether and when it switches the feature on. There is therefore no nationwide launch date, and the question of whether your own institution is taking part is answered only by your own institution.

What this construction lacks is the part many investors take for granted: the withdrawal of the coins you bought to an address that belongs to you. The holdings stay in central custody. You see them in your account, you can sell them, and you can hold them. A transfer to the outside is so far not part of what the high-street banks offer.

The difference from an ETN and a fund unit

A crypto ETN tracks a price and is legally a debt security issued by its issuer. The bank offering works differently: what is bought is the crypto-asset itself, it is simply held in custody for you. Economically the coin is yours, but the party able to dispose of it is the custodian. This split between economic ownership and actual control is the core of every custody model, and it applies in exactly the same way at a centralised crypto exchange.

Private key, wallet and custody position: the three terms kept apart

A private key is a secret sequence of numbers that allows transactions on a blockchain to be signed. Whoever holds it can move the associated holdings. Whoever does not hold it cannot, regardless of what an account overview says.

A wallet is not a purse with coins inside it but the management of those keys. The coins themselves exist only as entries on the blockchain. A hardware wallet is a device that generates the key and never lets it leave, so that it cannot be skimmed off an infected computer. If you want to see how the common devices differ, our hardware wallet comparison is a place to start.

A custody position, finally, is an entry in your bank's books. It states that a certain holding is due to you. It says nothing about which blockchain address that holding sits on and who can move it. This is exactly where the bank offering differs from self-custody, and anyone who confuses the three terms underestimates either the risk or the convenience.

Why the Sparkasse makes no provision for a transfer to an external wallet

From the provider's point of view several reasons speak for the bank model, and none of them is arbitrary. A payout to any address of the customer's choosing turns the provider into a transfer service and brings obligations from anti-money-laundering supervision with it, among them checks on the origin and the recipient of crypto-asset transfers. It also creates sources of error that a bank serving a mass-market clientele is reluctant to carry: a mistyped address, the wrong network, a loss with no way back.

For you as an investor that has two consequences. The first is convenient: you need no seed phrase, there is nothing you can misplace, and if something goes wrong you have a counterparty with an address in Germany. The second is inconvenient: you are tied to the institution. Moving to another provider means selling and buying again, not transferring. Anyone planning such a move triggers a sale that matters for tax, and that is something entirely different from shifting coins between two addresses.

What a sale instead of a transfer triggers

On a transfer between your own addresses, the acquisition date does not change. On a sale followed by a fresh purchase, the period under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act starts again, and any gain is assessed in the year of the sale. That is no argument against the bank account, but it belongs in the calculation before you settle on a provider.

MiCAR Article 75: the obligations of the custodian holding your crypto-assets

Since Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets, MiCAR for short, the custody of crypto-assets is no longer a legal vacuum. In its guidance note on crypto-asset services, BaFin lists ten services that require authorisation. First among them is the custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients, defined as the safekeeping or control of crypto-assets or of the means of access to them. Anyone offering this commercially needs an authorisation.

Article 75 of the regulation describes what such a custodian has to deliver. Four points are relevant to you as a customer:

• There has to be an agreement with you that sets out at least the identity of the parties, the nature of the service, the security procedures applied, the fee structure and the applicable law.
• The custodian keeps a register of positions and of every movement of crypto-assets it holds on your behalf.
• Client holdings are segregated from own assets. That segregation applies on the blockchain as well: own holdings sit on different network addresses from client holdings.
• Under the national law applicable in each case, the crypto-assets held in custody should also stand legally separate from the service provider's own estate, so that its creditors cannot reach them in an insolvency.

That is considerably more protection than an unregulated provider offers, and it is the real reason banks are taking on this business at all. A guarantee against every loss it is not. The regulation sets obligations, it does not replace a deposit guarantee scheme, and crypto-assets are not covered by the statutory deposit protection that applies to balances in current accounts.

Insolvency of the custodian: why segregating client holdings counts

The question of what happens to your holdings in a worst case is decided at a single point: are they assigned to the custodian's estate or to yours. Where segregation is clean, they do not fall into the insolvency estate but are due to the clients. That is exactly what the segregation duty in Article 75 MiCAR aims at, and exactly why it is not red tape but the core of consumer protection in this model.

In practice that means the institution's credit standing matters less in a custody model than its organisation. What counts is whether client holdings are kept separate technically and legally, and whether the record-keeping stands up to scrutiny in case of doubt. A provider who does not answer these questions when asked has already given you an answer.

Three questions you can put to your institution

1. Who is the custodian of the crypto-assets, and under which authorisation does it operate?
2. Are client holdings kept separate from own holdings, and does that apply on the blockchain too?
3. Which documents do I receive on acquisition date and acquisition cost, and in what format?

Checking CASP authorisation: Bundesanzeiger, the BaFin database and the ESMA register

In the language of the regulation, an authorised provider of crypto-asset services is a CASP, in full a crypto-asset service provider. On its page on crypto-asset services, BaFin names three registers in which you can look up an authorisation: the Bundesanzeiger, the BaFin company database and the MiCAR register of the European securities regulator ESMA. All three are public and free of charge.

This check is worth doing not only at your own bank, where the outcome will hardly be a surprise, but above all at every other provider you are looking at alongside it. If you are weighing a regulated trading platform as an alternative to the bank account, our overview of regulated crypto exchanges lists the providers that operate in the EU with an authorisation. Querying the register does not replace that overview, it adds to it.

How to spot a sloppy claim

It becomes conspicuous when a provider advertises a registration that is not an authorisation at all, when it names a permission for a service other than the one actually offered, or when the name in the register differs from the one on the website. Group structures are a frequent stumbling block here: what is authorised is often a particular company, not the brand.

What stays closed to you without a key of your own

The practical limits of the bank account are concrete and can be assessed in advance:

• No self-custody. The phrase "not your keys, not your coins" describes exactly this position. You carry the custodian risk, not the risk of losing your own backup.
• No staking and no lending. Anyone holding Ethereum in a bank account does not take part in validation and receives no staking rewards, as long as the provider does not explicitly offer it.
• No on-chain use. Paying, applications in decentralised finance, signing a message with your own address: all of that presupposes control over the key.
• Trading only in the provider's hours. Blockchains run around the clock, bank offerings do not necessarily. Which trading hours apply is set out in the terms.

Against that stand advantages that should not be talked down. Settlement runs through an account you already have. There is no separate onboarding, no additional identity check and no payout address you can enter wrongly while setting things up. For beginners with small amounts that is a genuine gain in safety compared with a first attempt at running a wallet.

Holding period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: securing acquisition data in a bank account too

For private disposals of crypto-assets, Germany currently applies the one-year holding period of Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Hold for longer than a year and you dispose of your holdings tax-free. Sell before that and you pay tax on the gain at your personal rate, provided the exemption threshold is exceeded. So that the tax office can follow this, you need two pieces of information per position: the acquisition date and the acquisition cost.

In a bank account you get both from your institution, and that is a convenience advantage over records you keep yourself. Even so, you should not rely on it alone. Save the statements as you go and in a format you will still be able to read after changing provider. A tax and portfolio tool helps above all where you hold assets in several places, because otherwise the allocation quickly becomes hard to follow.

On top of that comes an open building site in 2026: a draft bill from the Federal Ministry of Finance would treat gains on crypto-assets as investment income in future, with a cut-off date for new acquisitions. Nothing has been decided, and today's rules continue to apply unchanged. We have written up the state of play on grandfathering and the cut-off date separately. For the custody question that means one thing above all: complete acquisition data is becoming more important rather than less.

Inheritance, power of attorney and account freezes: where the bank account has the edge

Self-custody has a weak spot that is rarely discussed: it works only as long as the holder is able to act. If the backup is lost, the holding is gone, and gone for good. If the holder dies without anyone being able to reach the backup, the same applies. In a bank account, by contrast, the familiar mechanisms take effect: heirs prove their entitlement, a lasting power of attorney has effect, and a court-appointed guardianship is recognised.

Conversely, the bank model has one case that self-custody does not know: the freeze. If an account is temporarily blocked as part of an anti-money-laundering check or on suspicion, you cannot reach your holding even though it is due to you. Both models therefore carry a risk of failure, it simply sits in different places. Those holding larger amounts often split them deliberately across both routes.

Bitcoin and Ether at launch: why the coin list differs from source to source

On the question of what is to be tradable at launch the statements diverge, and that should be said openly. In early September 2026 the Sparkassen- und Giroverband Hessen-Thüringen set out the launch for the 46 Sparkassen in Hesse and Thuringia, naming Bitcoin and Ether. Industry reports on the same project speak of a broader initial selection that, alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum, also covers XRP, Solana and Polygon.

Both can be true, because a rollout in waves means exactly that: what a single regional association announces for its own institutions need not be the full scope of the overall offering. For your decision the list is secondary in any case. What matters is what actually appears in your own institution's app on launch day, and that is settled only then. For the timetable as a whole we have gathered the detail in our assessment of the planned October launch, and the cost side in our analysis of commission and spread.

What the statements on custody still leave open

What is publicly documented so far is the division of roles between DekaBank and Börse Stuttgart Digital, along with the fact that customers receive a custody position and not a key of their own. What is not publicly documented is how the record-keeping is organised in detail, whether there is a register of holdings at individual customer level, and which evidence customers receive in a dispute. Those questions are answered only by the contract documentation, which has to be available to you before your first purchase. Read it before you agree, not afterwards.

Checking Sparkasse custody: what to take away

1. Establish before buying who holds the assets and under which authorisation. The contract documents name the custodian, the three public registers confirm it. If you are considering a trading platform alongside, apply the same yardstick and take a look at our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Decide deliberately between a bank account and self-custody. For small amounts and for inheritance cases much speaks for the bank account; for amounts you want to hold long term and control yourself, much speaks for a device of your own. The differences between the common models are set out in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Secure the acquisition date and the acquisition cost from your first purchase onwards. File the statements in a readable format and bring them together if you hold assets in several places. Which tools deliver that is set out in our overview of tax tools and portfolio trackers.

For further reading at the source: BaFin describes the crypto-asset services that require authorisation in its guidance note on crypto-asset services under MiCAR, and the authorisation of an individual institution can be looked up in the BaFin company database.

(As of September 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)