Commerzbank, a German bank, has applied for a crypto custody license with the country’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). As per Börsen-Zeitung, Commerzbank “applied for the crypto custody license in the first quarter of 2022,” as first reported on April 14.
The BaFin license allows financial institutions to store and exchange digital currencies on behalf of their customers. This license has been required for doing business with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) since January 1, 2020.
The anticipated crypto custody services will be offered largely to institutional clients by Commerzbank, which serves over 28,000 corporate client groups and close to 11 million private and entrepreneurial clients in Germany.
It has joined a long list of organizations that have applied for permission to become a crypto custodian. According to the financial authority, it has already received 25 license applications and has accepted four of them. Coinbase was the first entity to obtain a crypto custody license in Germany in January 2021. Commerzbank has become the first bank to apply for it.
Goldman Sachs, for example, plans to launch cryptocurrency services for its high-net-worth clients in the second quarter of 2022.
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