Germany’s Sparkassen Just Opened the Bitcoin Floodgates – Public Savings Banks Enter Crypto Trading

Move over, fintech startups—Germany’s 200-year-old Sparkassen network is diving headfirst into Bitcoin. The public savings banks, long seen as the stodgy uncles of European finance, are now rolling out crypto trading to their 50 million customers. Talk about a late arrival to the party.

No more shuffling funds to shady offshore exchanges. Sparkassen clients will soon buy and sell Bitcoin directly through their familiar online banking portals. The banks insist they’re ‘modernizing,’ but let’s be real—this is about stopping the bleeding as younger Germans flock to neo-banks and DeFi protocols.

Will this legitimize crypto or just prove traditional finance always co-opts disruptive tech? Either way, the irony’s delicious: state-backed institutions now peddling the asset class they spent years warning would ‘undermine monetary stability.’ The Frankfurt old boys must be spinning in their leather chairs.