Raiffeisenbank crypto trading: four coins, no securities account, no deposit protection

Raiffeisenbank Schwaben Mitte has switched on crypto trading in its banking app. If you hold an account there, you have been able for a few days to buy and sell four crypto assets directly through your bank, without opening a separate account at a crypto exchange. According to a report in the Augsburger Allgemeine on November 1, the bank from Krumbach is the seventh Bavarian cooperative bank to receive approval from BaFin, Germany's financial regulator, for crypto business.

In practice, Raiffeisenbank crypto means four things: a settlement account is required, a securities account is not, custody is handled by an external provider, and statutory deposit protection does not cover these assets. These are exactly the points missing from every local report on the launch, even though another bank joins each week. This article explains what applies at your own bank, how to tell whether it has switched on trading and where the limits of the offer lie.

meinKrypto: DZ Bank runs the platform, your bank has to switch it on

Behind the crypto trading of Germany's Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken is not an in-house development by each bank but a shared platform called meinKrypto. meinKrypto is DZ Bank's trading and custody solution for the cooperative financial group, built into the VR Banking app. According to Börsen-Zeitung, DZ Bank obtained authorisation under the EU's crypto regulation MiCAR from BaFin at the end of 2025 and made the offer public in January 2026.

The platform is explicitly intended for self-directed customers and is not part of the investment advice offered to retail clients. Technically, around 670 cooperative banks in Germany could offer crypto trading with it. In practice few do so far, and there is a regulatory reason for that.

Why the rollout runs bank by bank

Every Volksbank and every Raiffeisenbank is a separate credit institution with its own balance sheet and its own supervisory relationship. DZ Bank's licence covers running the platform, not automatically the offer at each individual bank. Each institution must file its own MiCAR notification for the crypto platform with BaFin before it switches on trading in the app. That is why there is no launch date for everyone, but a wave that has continued institution by institution since March 2026. A survey by the Genoverband association, cited by Börsen-Zeitung, found that slightly more than one in three banks plans to introduce the offer in the coming months.

For you, that means your own bank decides whether you can trade, not the banking group. We compiled which banks had already switched on trading on August 24, 2026 in our overview of crypto trading in the VR Banking app; the list has grown since. The reliable route remains the direct one: if a menu item for crypto assets appears in your VR Banking app, your bank is on board. If it is missing, your bank has not switched it on yet.

Four crypto assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Cardano

The selection is narrow and the same at every bank, because it comes from the platform. Four assets can be traded:

• Bitcoin (BTC) – the oldest and by far the largest cryptocurrency, designed as a scarce digital store of value with a fixed cap of 21 million units.
• Ethereum (ETH) – a programmable blockchain on which applications and tokens run; ETH is the unit used to pay for transactions.
• Litecoin (LTC) – an early fork of the Bitcoin software with shorter block times, historically positioned as a means of payment.
• Cardano (ADA) – a proof-of-stake blockchain whose development relies heavily on academic research and formal verification.

What is missing from this list matters as much as what is on it. There are no stablecoins, no smaller altcoins, no meme tokens and no staking function. If you want to hold Solana, XRP or a euro stablecoin, the bank's offer will not get you there. Incidentally, the Augsburger Allgemeine report spells Cardano as "Cordano"; it means the same blockchain that appears on the bank's product page.

A settlement account is required, a securities account is not

The technical hurdle is lower than many expect. A settlement account is the current account or payment account through which purchases and sales are settled. The bank's product page is clear on this: "A prerequisite for participating in crypto trading is a settlement account" – and just as briefly: "A securities account is not required."

That is a real difference from crypto ETPs and certificates, which run through a securities account. Here the money moves directly from the account into the crypto asset and back again when you sell. On top of that come personal requirements listed on the bank's page:

• Minimum age of 18 and main residence in Germany.
• An existing account with the bank, plus active use of the VR Banking app with VR-NetKey and an electronic mailbox.
• A valid identity card or passport must be on file. If the last identity check was more than 24 months ago, you will first need to verify your identity again, for example by video.
• Certain nationalities are excluded, including those of the US and its outlying territories as well as Russia and Belarus. This reflects sanctions and tax rules, not a decision by the individual bank.

BaFin approval: what the regulator checks and what it does not promise

Approval from BaFin sounds like a seal of quality for the investment. It means something else. The regulator checks whether a provider meets the organisational, staffing and financial requirements of the MiCAR regulation, meaning governance, custody, complaint procedures and disclosure duties. The regulator does not check whether Bitcoin or Cardano is a sensible investment, nor does it guarantee a price.

The bank itself puts exactly this distinction on its page: "No central bank or public authority guarantees the price of crypto assets." If you want to assess licensing and custody separately, our article of September 13, 2026 on the crypto licence of the Volksbanken sets out the steps. The key idea: the licence tells you something about the provider, nothing about the product.

Börse Stuttgart Digital Custody holds the assets, not the bank itself

Your cash sits with the bank; your crypto assets do not. The product page says: "The crypto assets are held in custody by Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody GmbH." Custody here means that a specialist provider holds the cryptographic keys that control the holdings. The Raiffeisenbank is the sales and settlement channel; the custodian is a third party.

That has two consequences you should know. First, you have no keys of your own and therefore no direct access to the blockchain; you have a claim against the custodian, handled through your bank. Second, the question of security shifts from the bank to the custodian: what matters is how assets are segregated, insured and audited there. Börse Stuttgart Digital holds its own licences for this business; the name on your bank statement is still that of your bank.

What round-the-clock trading means technically

According to the Augsburger Allgemeine, trading runs through Börse Stuttgart, seven days a week, with servers in Germany. The product page puts it more cautiously: trading is "generally possible around the clock", with the caveat that maintenance and outages can cause interruptions. That restriction is not a formality: on volatile weekends, whether you can trade is worth real money.

No statutory deposit protection for crypto assets

The most important sentence on the product page is the one local coverage usually leaves out: "Unlike traditional bank deposits, crypto assets are not covered by any state protection."

In the EU, statutory deposit protection covers balances of up to €100,000 per customer and institution – specifically deposits, meaning current, overnight and fixed-term accounts. Your settlement account is covered. The four crypto assets you buy with it are not, because they are not a deposit but an asset held in custody. Cooperative banks also belong to an institutional protection scheme run by their association; that too is aimed at the banking business and not at price losses on crypto assets.

The bottom line: if Bitcoin falls by a third, nobody makes up the difference. That applies at your local bank just as it does at a crypto exchange. The difference lies only in how the trade is processed, not in the price risk.

Costs: 0.78 percent plus the trading venue fee, about €1.25 on €100

According to the Augsburger Allgemeine report, which Coinkurier summarises, the bank charges 0.78 percent of the trade amount, plus the fee of the trading venue. A bank representative calculates there that a trade of €100 incurs total fees of around €1.25. There is no minimum order size, and according to the bank the crypto wallet itself is free of charge.

At around 1.25 percent per purchase, that is well above what large trading platforms charge for the same four assets, and well below what earlier bank offers charged. If you buy regularly, you should weigh both sides: the mark-up applies to every purchase, while the convenience of a familiar app only counts once. How licensed providers in Germany compare on price and regulation is shown in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

It always pays to check against the original: your bank's schedule of prices and services is the binding version, not the figure from a newspaper report. Fees change, and they can differ from bank to bank.

No investment advice: the bank executes, it does not recommend

The offer is deliberately advice-free. According to the report, the bank does not provide investment advice on crypto assets; that would have required a further BaFin authorisation that the bank did not apply for. Advice-free means there is no advice record, no suitability assessment and no liability for a recommendation, because none is given.

The stance becomes clear in a quote carried by the Augsburger Allgemeine. Board member Helmut Graf says there: "This is highly speculative. Crypto is by no means suitable for building wealth." This assessment comes from the provider itself, and it fits a detail from the same report: according to the bank, every customer who has opened a crypto account so far was under 30.

Demo mode and identity check before the first order

Getting started happens entirely on the smartphone. Asked whether trading also works in online banking on a computer, the bank answers briefly on its page: "No, trading is only possible in the VR Banking app." Before that, you can try it all without money: a demo mode in the app simulates purchases with a fictitious limit, though it only becomes visible once your bank has switched on trading.

The newspaper report describes how fast it goes after that: opening the crypto account is said to take seven clicks, and the first trade was possible in three minutes and 30 seconds. The time sink lies elsewhere, namely in identity verification. If the ID document your bank has on file is more than 24 months old, a fresh identity check comes before any order. That is the step best done early, before the market pushes you into it.

How to tell whether trading is switched on in your app

A dedicated menu item for crypto assets in the VR Banking app and a notice in the electronic mailbox are the two visible signals. Both appear without any press announcement, because each bank communicates its own launch. If you do not want to wait, ask at the branch or customer service about the status of the MiCAR notification; the answer is either a date or a clear no.

Limits compared with a crypto exchange: selection, keys, withdrawals

The bank offer is an entry point, not a full range. Three limits are foreseeable, and they concern exactly the points at which experienced holders move on.

The selection ends at four assets. There are no keys of your own, because custody lies with the service provider. And whether you can transfer holdings to your own wallet is not stated on the product page; that question belongs with customer service before your first purchase, because it decides whether you can move later or only sell. Anyone who wants to hold the keys themselves needs their own hardware anyway.

For comparison: the Sparkassen financial group launched its own route in October, technically separate from meinKrypto. We described how that launch is structured in our analysis of crypto trading at the Sparkasse. According to the Augsburger Allgemeine, 30 to 40 more banks are set to join each month there.

Tax: a one-year holding period, no automatic withholding tax

In Germany, crypto assets count as other assets. Gains from selling them fall under private disposal transactions under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. In practice this means that after a holding period of more than one year, the gain from the sale stays tax-free; within the year it is taxed at your personal income tax rate.

This creates a difference from a securities account that is often overlooked. With shares and ETFs, the bank withholds the flat-rate tax automatically. With crypto assets that does not happen, because they are not capital income. Recording purchase dates, holding periods and gains remains your job, even if you bought through your local bank. The statements from the app serve as your records; they do not replace a ready-made tax certificate like the one for shares.

Raiffeisenbank crypto: four assets and no state protection

Crypto trading at your own cooperative bank removes a hurdle that has kept many people from getting started: signing up with an unfamiliar provider. It removes none of the actual risks. The offer remains advice-free, the selection small, the mark-up noticeable, and the price is protected by nothing. Three steps make sense now:

1. Check activation and price at your own bank. Look for the menu item in the VR Banking app, check that your identity verification is up to date and read the schedule of prices and services. What it says applies. After that, it is worth looking at the alternatives in our comparison of crypto exchanges.
2. Decide consciously on custody. For small amounts, custody via the service provider is convenient. If you hold larger sums or want to control the keys yourself, you will find the options in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Keep records from the first purchase. Note the date, amount and price of every order so that the one-year period can be proven later. Tools for this are listed in our overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

The bank's product page is and remains the first port of call for the binding version: trading crypto assets at Raiffeisenbank Schwaben Mitte.

(As of November 2, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)