For years, traditional finance has peered warily at the crypto world — intrigued by its potential, repelled by its chaos. Now the boundaries are blurring.
Crypto Finance, part of Deutsche Börse Group, has begun offering staking services for institutional clients in Europe. That may sound like a niche technical upgrade. In reality, it is a small but symbolic move in the convergence of regulated finance and decentralised technology.
The Swiss-German group, already licensed under Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR), will now let clients who custody their digital assets with Crypto Finance (Deutschland) GmbH stake their holdings of Ethereum and Solana.
Staking — locking tokens to secure proof-of-stake blockchains in return for rewards — has long been a core mechanism of the crypto economy. But for institutions, it has also been fraught with regulatory uncertainty, operational risk, and custody complications.
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Makying staking respectable
By embedding staking within a regulated custodian, Crypto Finance is offering a bridge between these two worlds. Clients can now both hold and deploy their assets without moving them into unregulated or opaque staking pools. “Our new staking service is part of our commitment to provide best-in-class custodial solutions,” said Eric Viohl, managing director of the German entity. In plain English: this is how to make crypto yield respectable.
The company’s partnership with Figment, a Canadian staking-infrastructure provider with about $18 billion of assets under stake, lends technological credibility. Figment operates validators across multiple blockchains and has become the institutional market leader in staking Ethereum and Solana.
The tie-up fuses Crypto Finance’s custody platform with Figment’s staking architecture, promising “institutional-grade protocol staking” — a phrase once confined to crypto conferences but now creeping into boardrooms.
Safe monetisation of coins
The business logic is straightforward. Crypto Finance earns fees by offering staking as a service; clients gain passive yield in the range of 3-6 per cent depending on network conditions. In a world of low crypto trading volumes and rising institutional interest in yield-bearing assets, that makes economic sense. More subtly, it signals that Deutsche Börse’s crypto subsidiary is no longer content to merely store coins — it wants to monetise them safely within a regulatory perimeter.
Yet this new frontier comes with caveats. Staking is not risk-free. Validators can be penalised (“slashed”) for technical failures or malicious activity, reducing returns. Regulatory treatment remains patchy across jurisdictions. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has cracked down on similar offerings, arguing they can resemble investment contracts. Europe’s MiCAR framework is clearer, but compliance costs are high and margins thin.
Still, the strategic logic is hard to ignore. Institutions — from asset managers to family offices — increasingly demand regulated access to crypto income streams. Coinbase, Anchorage, and others already provide staking services under local rules. Crypto Finance’s move ensures that continental Europe now has a home-grown, BaFin-regulated alternative backed by one of the region’s major exchange operators.
For Deutsche Börse, this is another incremental step in its quiet but persistent digital-asset push. The group already offers crypto custody and ETP infrastructure via its Swiss arm. Adding staking suggests a longer-term ambition: to become Europe’s default institutional gateway to blockchain-based finance.
Our verdict? The yields on offer may be modest, but the signal is powerful. Regulated staking marks crypto’s graduation from speculative playground to income-generating asset class. If Deutsche Börse can keep its validators upright and its compliance teams awake, the returns could prove more enduring than the latest crypto rally.
