Germany’s ING Bank now lets retail customers buy Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana directly through standard bank accounts, signaling Europe’s most mainstream crypto adoption yet under MiCA rules.
Last Updated: February 06, 2026 at 6:40 PM UTC +1
Published: February 06, 2026 at 6:11 PM UTC +1
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As Europe’s biggest industrial nation and No. 1 force in fiscal politics with the European Central Bank (German Abbreviation: EZB) located in Frankfurt, another milestone was achieved in modernizing banking and trading in Germany. Despite the current Bitcoin crash and uncertainty among investors and holders, a major German finance institution, the ING Bank, has officially launched its free crypto-exchange. Retail customers can now directly buy Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and other exchange-traded notes (ETNs) through their regular security accounts.
Three, or rather four, factors are interesting here. Germans and their German-speaking neighbors (Austria and Switzerland) are known to have a very strong cash culture, making it still the number one form of payment. Cash accounts for almost 70% of the transactions made in Germany.
That being said, Germany has been very skeptical when it comes to modern forms of transactions—with a lot of people not even using their debit or credit card on a daily basis and beyond that hardly doing any form of online banking.
In the United States, it’s the other way around, with Cash only being used for approximately 15% of daily transactions and debit or credit cards accounting for 70%.
But here comes the paradox. At the same time, Germans are known to be very organized and extremely strict when it comes to rules and regulations. That’s why it isn’t a surprise that full crypto legalization has already happened, moving Germany (as a member of the European Union) far ahead of the U.S. with its legal framework. You can say that individuals in Germany can buy, sell, trade and use crypto under a clear law, which as of right now can not be stated about American individuals. The U.S. landscape remains chaotic with not a single unified national crypto law.
And as already touched, a broader but, nonetheless, important factor: Frankfurt, Germany is the financial capital of the European Union with the third largest Stock Exchange (after London and Amsterdam).
The European Union, represented by the EU-Parliament, started applying the legal framework named MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) in early Summer 2023, making the first stablecoins applicable in early 2024 and then fully going into effect as a unified law at the end of December 2024.
In 2025, two influential banks started directly integrating crypto exchange in their regular day-to-day services. “The Santander Group,” which is headquartered in Spain but has hundreds of physical branches in Germany, and is a trusted financial institution among citizens, started its crypto service in September 2025 on their online banking platform “Openbank”. Bank customers could now buy, sell and hold Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Polygon and Cardano alongside their other investments. The service came with a 1.49% fee on asset sales and purchases.
The “DZ Bank,” which literally means “German Central Cooperative Bank,” also got their MiCA license in 2025 and started a test phase with a couple of local banking groups operating under their umbrella. The project was a success and is now (latest update: January ‘26) rolled out among institutional customers, meaning cooperative banks.
With that being said, the DZ Bank is more functioning as a central institution for other banks, you could also say “the bank of banks”: It is not typically a retail bank with individual customers opening day-to-day checking accounts, but instead focuses on institutional customers.
So, having the ING bank as a typical German retail bank integrating the new crypto access into its day-to-day banking operations is largely different. It lowers the barrier for crypto investments for literally ‘everyone’, integrating digital assets into a familiar banking structure.
“Free access” also means that there are no third parties involved and that no fees for exchanges/ transactions apply.
So, other banking groups already had crypto-services integrated, but these either came through third parties, had fees applied, or were still in a test phase.
More banks will follow the trend: The “Sparkassen-Group,” which can be seen as the No. 1 bank of the working class, has already announced a similar service starting this year.
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