Where German Crypto Investors Actually Keep Their Coins: Exchanges Dominate, Banks Barely Register

Germany's annual crypto survey, run by BearingPoint since 2016, asked for the first time this year where investors actually keep their digital assets rather than just where they trade. The answer, published in the 2026 edition, is that custody habits look almost identical to trading habits: centralised platforms dominate, self-custody is a minority pursuit, and traditional banks are all but invisible.

Trade Republic leads the custody ranking with a 15% share, ahead of Coinbase on 14% and Binance on 11%. Bitpanda follows with 8% and Bison with 7%. A cluster of providers ties on 4% each: MetaMask, Bitvavo, Ledger, Kraken and eToro. Trust Wallet closes out the top ten with 3%.

The fieldwork was carried out between 18 and 22 June 2026 by YouGov on a sociodemographically representative panel of 2,031 German adults. Of those, 161 participants, roughly 8%, said they know and use cryptocurrencies. The custody question yielded 136 usable responses, a small base that the authors, Dr. Robert Bosch, Head of Financial Services at BearingPoint, and Ralph Bärligea, a Business Advisor at BearingPoint covering blockchain and payments regulation, treat as indicative rather than definitive.

Trading and storage converge

Eight of the ten platforms that appear in the trading ranking also appear in the custody ranking, underlining that most German crypto users do not separate where they buy from where they store. Only two genuine self-custody tools, MetaMask and Ledger, make the top ten, suggesting that despite years of industry messaging around wallet ownership, the bulk of holders are content leaving assets with a platform.

Bosch and Bärligea also point to a language and jurisdiction pattern. German-speaking custody providers account for 30% of top-ten nominations. If Ledger is counted alongside them on the basis that hardware wallets are often kept within Germany even though the device itself is developed and manufactured in France, that share rises to 34%.

Banks stay on the sidelines

The only traditional financial institution to feature in the top ten is Börse Stuttgart, through its Bison app. Germany's savings banks, the Sparkassen, and the cooperative banks, the Volksbanken, both have crypto offerings planned but neither yet registers among investors' actual custody choices.

The authors set this against the established securities market, where German equities are predominantly held through Clearstream, a single, well-established custodian at the centre of the settlement system. Crypto custody in Germany currently shows no equivalent, sitting instead across a wider and more fragmented set of exchanges, brokers and wallets.