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Will Germany become a bitcoin country?



It's local and it's expensive to buy and hard to sell now



20.Dec.21 12:57 PM
By Shawn Highstraw
Photo Wiki

   357

Will Germany become a bitcoin country?
German banks seem to want to embrace bitcoin more and more. This weekend Andreas Streb of Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Bayern Mitte said that he wants to help customers buy bitcoin, but also to manage it himself. With your own wallet.

There was also an article in Bild about the plans of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. The main question of the article was simple: is Germany being dentistered?

The banking sector in Germany is fragmented and is not, as in the Netherlands, completely dominated by a few large banks. There are, but there is also room for local banks. Andrew Streb, and is a member of the board of directors of Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Bayern Mitte), not a national bank, a regional company. He talks in a profile about the great potential of bitcoin and thinks aloud about the services he can offer customers.

In order to provide services, the staff also need to know everything about bitcoin, which is why several consultants in his bank are trained to become bitcoin experts. Customers of Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Bayern should soon be able to buy bitcoins and store them securely in their own wallets, supervised by the bank's experts.

This bank focuses on one region in Germany, but is part of the umbrella association of the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken. If the initiative and Idea find their way to this level, 30 million customers will be able to come into contact with bitcoin.

However, as part of a pilot project at Sparkassen, a test is currently being carried out to determine whether customers of the savings banks should be able to safely store crypto assets in wallets in the future.

A spokesperson mitigates the high expectations by speaking of a limited circle of customers and explicitly denies that Sparkasse customers have access to digital currencies through their payment account. Currently, the range of wallets is being evaluated for a limited group of customers so that crypto assets can be stored securely. The beginning is there, and the link between, for example, saving bitcoin via DCA and Sparkasse's core business is very similar.

The Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe is interesting for the adoption of bitcoin, as 376 banks belong to this group, representing 50 million customers. The signal that is being sent out is important: large, conservative savings banks want something with crypto because their customers want it.

The size of the group gives weight and creates opportunities, but their composition also creates potential stumbling blocks for crypto projects. At the end, each of the 376 savings banks decides for themselves whether they want to take on a project of the Vereniging Spaarbanken en Giro, or not.

Germany will not become a bitcoin country overnight, but the interest of banks in cryptos is significant.



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