Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) is deepening its foray into the crypto ecosystem.
Garanti BBVA Kripto, a cryptocurrency custody platform operated by Garanti BBVA, Turkey’s fifth largest bank, which as of December 2023 was almost 86% owned by BBVA, will soon provide cryptocurrency trading services to the general public. Bit2Me, a crypto exchange founded in Spain in 2014, will be used as the bank’s trade execution center.
And now that the regulation of the Crypto Asset Markets (MiCA) is in full effect throughout the European Union, the partnership between BBVA and the cryptocurrency exchange is a strong sign that more things are brewing on the horizon, according to Abel Peña , head of Bit2Me. sales officer.
“I think in 2025 we will see many banks across Europe offering cryptocurrency spot trading to their users,” Peña told CoinDesk. “We are in very close contact with more than 50 financial institutions, with banks throughout Europe and internationally, and they will begin to launch their services in the first quarter of 2025.”
BBVA had $857 billion in assets in 2023, making it the 43rd largest bank in the world at the time and the second largest in Spain after Banco Santander. While Garanti BBVA Kripto has already advertised cryptocurrency trading services on its website since January 2024, the product was only offered as a pilot and was not available to the general public, according to Bit2Me.
BBVA began embracing the cryptocurrency industry in Türkiye because the regulatory environment allowed it to move ahead sooner, Peña said. Since MiCA finished rolling out on December 30, financial institutions like BBVA will now be able to gain approval from national regulators and offer exposure to bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), and other cryptocurrencies to their European clients.
“As soon as they get the green light, they will start,” Peña said. “This is due to the knowledge that many of them are already integrated with us,” he added, although he refused to reveal the names of the institutions.
But why is the banking sector suddenly so excited about cryptocurrencies? The regulatory certainty provided by MiCA played a role, Peña said, but US President-elect Donald Trump, who became a strong supporter of cryptocurrencies in the middle of his campaign and won big in November, was also a factor. Not to mention the various ideas circulating to get the US government to create a strategic reserve of bitcoins.
The tremendous success of US spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which have raised a record $35 billion in inflows in less than a year, certainly didn’t hurt either. “We are talking about an asset [bitcoin] to which many users and companies want to be exposed. This is something that banks can no longer deny,” said Peña.
BBVA is not the first European bank to dive into cryptocurrencies. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest multinational investment bank, is building an Ethereum rollup using ZKsync technology and has been working on cryptocurrency tokenization and custody services with Swiss startup Taurus since 2023, among other things. French financial services company Société Générale, for its part, has its own crypto arm, called SG-FORGE, which recently announced that it will implement its own euro stablecoin on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network.
