Sparkasse Crypto Custody: Check It Before You Buy

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.