Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) is deepening its entry into the crypto ecosystem.
Garanti BBVA Kripto, a crypto custody platform operated by Garanti BBVA — Turkey’s fifth largest bank, which as of December 2023 is almost 86% owned by BBVA — will soon provide crypto trading services to the general public. Bit2Me, a crypto exchange founded in Spain in 2014, will be used as the bank’s trading execution center.
And now that the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation is in full effect across the European Union, the partnership between BBVA and the crypto exchange is a strong sign of more things to come, according to Abel Peña, the head of Bit2Me. sales officer.
“I believe in 2025 we will see a lot of banks across Europe offering crypto spot trading to their users,” Peña told CoinDesk. “We are in close contact with more than 50 financial institutions, including banks across Europe and internationally, and they will start launching 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 been advertising crypto trading services on its website since January 2024, the product is only offered as a pilot and is not available for the general public, according to Bit2Me.
BBVA started to embrace the crypto industry in Turkey because the regulatory environment allowed it to move earlier, Peña said. Since MiCA was finally launched on December 30, financial institutions like BBVA will now be able to secure approval from domestic regulators and offer exposure to bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies to their European customers.
“As soon as they get the green light, they start,” Peña said. “This is from the knowledge that many of them have already been integrated with us,” he added, though he refused to reveal the names of the institutions.
But why is the banking sector suddenly so enthusiastic about crypto? The regulatory certainty provided by MiCA plays a part, Peña said, but so does US President-elect Donald Trump – who has been a vocal supporter of crypto in the middle of his campaign, and won big in November – is also a factor. Not to mention the various ideas floating around to get the US government to create a strategic bitcoin reserve.
The massive success of US spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which have racked up a record $35 billion in inflows in less than a year, certainly hasn’t hurt either. “We are talking about an asset (bitcoin) that many users and companies want to be exposed to. This is something that banks cannot deny anymore,” said Peña.
BBVA is not the first European bank to dip its toes into crypto. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest multinational investment bank, is building a rollup on Ethereum using ZKsync technology and is working in crypto custody and tokenization services with Swiss start-up 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 it will put its own euro stablecoin on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network.
