The German subsidiary of the Austrian crypto platform Bitpanda will receive a Bafin license. The German financial regulator has granted Bitpanda Asset Management GmbH a license to hold and trade crypto assets, Bitpanda announced on Thursday. This means that the Vienna-based company can now also offer its crypto services on the German market.
Austria’s most valuable fintech was cleared 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 paycheck transferred to a bank in the Bahamas, so stop keeping your assets there,” Demuth wrote on LinkedIn shortly after news of FTX’s bankruptcy. At Bitpanda, client assets are strictly segregated from company assets, he said when he received the Bafin license.
The crypto trading platform is already registered in France, Italy, Spain, UK, Czech Republic, Sweden and Austria. The neobank N26, founded by two Viennese and based in Berlin, has been offering crypto trading to its customers in Austria since the end of October in collaboration 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 supply in Germany.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
