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Crypto exchanges in Germany compared: euro prices on live order books, MiCA and BaFin licences, Sparplan options and custody.
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By Alpha Finance Editorial Team
Data maintained by Vince Dioquino
Every fee, licence and clause behind a score links to the page we read it on, the German one wherever a platform has it. We go back over the platforms' pages, ESMA's MiCA register and BaFin's notices every quarter, and sooner when a fee, a licence or a set of terms changes.
How we score → Editorial policy Report an errorBuying crypto in Germany has become simpler and stricter at once. Since July 2026 every platform serving German residents needs a licence under the EU's MiCA rules, and the choice runs from your savings bank's app to neobrokers and Europe's big exchanges. What differs is who stands behind your contract: a German company supervised by BaFin, or one licensed in Dublin, Malta or Amsterdam and passported in.
Price is the next trap. Most bank and broker apps quote one price with their margin built in, so a small per-order fee can hide a spread you never see, while an exchange's order book shows every bid and offer. Check, too, whether coins can leave for a wallet you control and whether the app runs the monthly savings plans (Sparpläne) many Germans use. Keep every purchase date: coins held over a year can be sold tax-free today.
All ten hold a MiCA licence covering Germany, as ESMA's register shows, and four answer to BaFin directly. The score rewards a low euro price, a German or EU licence, published reserves and easy SEPA banking rather than trading volume, so this order differs from our worldwide ranking. The arrow beside any fee or clause opens the page we read it on.
The top score, then the platforms that lead the ten on price, market depth and coin count, each with the figure from its own row.
BitvavoIts best mark is cost to buy, 9.6 of 10, second only to OKX.9.0 out of 10
OKX€1,000 of Bitcoin cost €2.23 over the market price, the least of the four we could price.7.5 out of 10
Kraken€5.8M of Bitcoin near the market price, the most of the ten.7.3 out of 10
Bitpanda650 coins for German accounts.6.0 out of 104 of 10 supervised by BaFin6 passported from elsewhere in the EUEuro prices read 15 Oct 2026
| # | Exchange | Score | Feestaker / maker | EUR deposits | Proof of reserveslatest published | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bitvavo#13 worldwide | 9.0 | 0.25% / 0.15%BTC/EUR | SEPA freeCard 1% | Audited Merkle | Visit |
| 2 |  Bybit EUBybit #5 worldwide | 8.5 | 0.25% / 0.25%BTC/EUR, one rate since 5 Oct 2026 | SEPA freeCard free | Audited Merkle | Visit |
| 3 | OKX#1 worldwide | 7.5 | 0.20% / 0.10%BTC/EUR, spot-only account | SEPA Instant freeNo card deposits | Merkle + zk | Visit |
| 4 | Kraken#6 worldwide | 7.3 | 0.80% / 0.40%Kraken Pro (BTC/EUR) | SEPA Instant freeCard 3.75% | Audited Merkle | Visit |
| 5 |  Coinbase#4 worldwide | 6.8 | Not publishedShown after sign-in | SEPA freeCard fee not published | Audited accountsNo per-user proof | Visit |
| 6 |  Trade RepublicNot on worldwide list | 6.7 | €1 a trade + spreadApp; no public price | SEPA freeCard 1% | None | Visit |
| 7 |  SparkasseNot on worldwide list | 6.2 | €0.99 a trade + spreadApp Sparkasse; DekaBank quote | Sparkasse account, freeNo card deposits | None | Visit |
| 8 |  BisonNot on worldwide list | 6.1 | 1.25% avg spread (BTC)App; no fee, spread only | SEPA Instant freeCard 2.49% | None | Visit |
| 9 | BitpandaNot on worldwide list | 6.0 | 0.25% / 0.25%Fusion; Bitpanda is the counterparty | SEPA Instant freeCard free | None | Visit |
| 10 |  Crypto.com#14 worldwide | 5.0 | 0.80% + spreadApp; no EUR order book | SEPA freeCard 3.99% | Out of dateLast Dec 2022 | Visit |
Score: six checks, a quarter of the weight on licensing, combined into one mark out of 10 for German residents. The best raw result is scaled to 9.0 and the others in proportion, and after that a fine from an EU regulator in the last two years holds a platform to 7.5. Rest the pointer on a score to see how it was made. Fees: each platform's published charge per order for a new customer. Spreads hidden inside an app's price are counted in the cost check instead. No platform pays for its place, and the ranking can't account for your own circumstances, so treat it as general information. How the site earns money is set out in our affiliate disclosure.
On a €1,000 Bitcoin purchase, OKX came closest to the market at €2.23 over it, fee included, and Kraken Pro added the most, €8.00. Our yardstick, €72,171, is the median of the mid-prices on the five live BTC/EUR books.
Extra you pay to buy €1,000 of BitcoinFee plus what you pay above the median of five BTC/EUR mid-prices
OKX0.22%€2.23Order bookBitvavo0.25%€2.50Order bookBybit EU0.34%€3.38Order bookKraken Pro0.80%€8.00Order bookNo bar for Coinbase, Trade Republic, Sparkasse, Bison, Bitpanda and Crypto.com: none shows a euro price outside its app. So none gains by hiding its price, we give them Kraken Pro's cost from the chart, or their published charge if that is bigger.
For the apps, the published charges are all a buyer can compare. Trade Republic takes €1 an order and the Sparkassen's DekaBank €0.99, each on top of a spread neither publishes. Bison charges no fee but builds an average 1.25% spread into Bitcoin's price, Bitpanda's broker app adds 0.99% and Crypto.com 0.8% plus a spread.
Within 0.5% of the market, Kraken offered €5.8M of Bitcoin and OKX just €910k. Even so, a €50,000 order filled within 0.02% of the best offer on both.
We matched every platform to the company named in the terms Germans accept, found that company in ESMA's MiCA register, and read its German or EEA fee pages, complaints rules and custody clauses. The facts under each verdict name the licensing regulator and the last stop for a complaint.
Best for buyers who want a cheap euro order book at 0.25% taker, recurring buys and staking on over 65 coins. Its complaints have no ombudsman to go to.
Good for
Incidents in the last five years
Dutch media reported that managers and owners could freely view customer data until spring 2024.
A cloud provider fault locked every customer out for about five hours during a bitcoin rally.
EUR 280M Bitvavo had lent to Genesis froze; withdrawals stayed open, the founders put money in, and customers were repaid.
and 1 earlier
Best for buyers who want a deep euro book with free card and Apple Pay top-ups and recurring buys. Its Earn products are lending, not staking, and its euro withdrawal fee isn't published.
Good for
Best for price-conscious buyers: the cheapest Bitcoin we priced, at 0.20% taker on its BTC/EUR book. Two EU fines in 2025 hold its score to 7.5, and disputes go to arbitration in Malta.
Good for
Incidents in the last five years
Best for active traders who want the deepest BTC/EUR book here, 488 coins and an OTC desk for large orders. Its 0.80% entry taker fee is the highest of the five order books.
Good for
Incidents in the last five years
Disclosed an extortion attempt after support staff viewed limited data on about 2,000 client accounts. Kraken says there was no breach of its systems and no client funds were at risk.
Ordered by Australia's Federal Court to pay A$8M after ASIC action over its margin product.
The Dutch central bank put an order subject to penalty on Payward International Markets (Kraken) for serving the Netherlands without registration. It owed €4M in penalties.
and 2 more
Best for buyers who want a listed company's audited accounts behind their coins, with savings plans and staking. German accounts moved from a BaFin-supervised company to Luxembourg in October 2025.
Good for
Incidents in the last five years
Fined EUR 21.5M by the Central Bank of Ireland for transaction-monitoring failures.
Bribed overseas support contractors stole personal data of 69,461 customers.
The Dutch central bank fined Coinbase Europe €3.3M for serving the Netherlands without registration from 2020 to 2022.
BaFin ordered Coinbase Germany GmbH, which served German customers until October 2025, to put its business organisation in order (final 27 Oct 2022). No fine.
and 2 more
Not on worldwide list
Best for Germans who want crypto beside their shares and current account at a BaFin-supervised bank, with transfers out and staking. Each trade costs €1 plus a spread it doesn't publish.
Good for
Incidents in the last five years
NoneNo hacks, fines or market failures in the last five years.
Not on worldwide list
Best for Sparkasse customers who want Bitcoin or Ether in the banking app they already use, at €0.99 a trade. Only five coins, no wallet of your own and a spread it doesn't publish.
Good for
Incidents in the last five years
NoneNo hacks, fines or market failures in the last five years.
Not on worldwide list
Best for buyers who want an app from the Stuttgart stock exchange group, coins held in trust and free transfers in and out. Bitcoin's price carries an average 1.25% spread.
Good for
Incidents in the last five years
NoneNo hacks, fines or market failures in the last five years.
Most coins · Not on worldwide list
Best for Germans who want the widest coin list from a BaFin-licensed Berlin company, ideally on Fusion at 0.25%. The everyday broker app charges 0.99% on Bitcoin.
Good for
Best for app users who want 400+ coins with recurring buys and staking in one place. Buys cost 0.8% plus an unpublished spread, and card top-ups 3.99%.
Good for
Incidents in the last five years
The Dutch central bank fined Foris DAX MT EUR 2.85M for serving Dutch users while unregistered.
An employee was phished and some users' personal data was exposed; it became public only through Bloomberg in September 2025.
Attackers bypassed 2FA and drained 483 accounts of about US$34M; Crypto.com reimbursed the affected users.
and 1 more
Six checks, weighted and marked by the rules in the table below, produce Germany's order. Before marking them we looked up every company in ESMA's register, read its fee schedule and terms, and captured all five euro order books in one snapshot on 15 Oct 2026.
| Check | Weight | How it is marked |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to buy | 20% | We took the median mid-price of the five public BTC/EUR books on 15 Oct 2026 as the market, then priced €1,000 of Bitcoin at each platform's cheapest published way to buy, with its fee added. Ten marks go to 0.2% or less, then 0.8 comes off for each further 0.1%. Trade Republic, Bitpanda, Bison, Sparkasse and Crypto.com show no public euro price, so they are scored at the chart's dearest cost, or at their own published charge or spread if that is steeper. |
| MiCA licence and BaFin | 25% | A MiCA licence that covers Germany, whether BaFin granted it or another EU regulator passported it in, earns 5. BaFin supervising the company you sign with adds 2, because German law, German arbitration boards and BaFin itself then stand behind the contract. Five years without an EU regulator's action adds 3, halved by an order or warning and lost to a fine. |
| Security and reserves | 20% | This uses the worldwide list's rules. Reserves give up to 4: Kraken, Bitvavo, OKX and Bybit EU get 4 for a balance proof checked by an auditor or zero-knowledge maths, and Coinbase and Bitvavo for SEC-audited accounts. An unchecked proof or a reserves-only audit gives 3, an accountant's attestation 2 and nothing published 0, which is where the four German platforms sit. Customer insurance, like the cover on Bison's custody, adds 1, rising to 2 when the amount insured is published. Five years of record give the last 4, less 3 for a hack or failure that left customers out of pocket (1 if all were repaid) and less 1 for each data breach, regulator's action or market failure, with market failures costing 2 at most. |
| Liquidity | 10% | On each public BTC/EUR book in the 15 Oct 2026 snapshot we add up the euros of Bitcoin offered within 0.5% of the market price. €10,000 or less earns nothing and €10 million the full 10, with about 3.3 marks for each tenfold step between. Trade Republic, Bitpanda, Bison, Sparkasse and Crypto.com quote prices only inside their apps, so their liquidity mark is 0. |
| EUR deposits and withdrawals | 15% | Paying in by free bank transfer, or straight from your own current account, scores 4, and a charge or an unpublished fee drops that to 1. One more way in, such as a card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal, adds 1, and euros kept where statutory deposit protection reaches add 1. Paying euros out to your own bank free of charge adds 2, as does a clean two-year record with banks and payment firms. |
| Product | 10% | A list of 30 coins earns 1, 100 earn 2 and 300 earn 3, and the ten here range from five to more than 650. A public BTC/EUR book adds 2. Savings plans, staking, withdrawals to a wallet you control, company accounts and an OTC desk add 1 each. |
Two ceilings can cut a total. A platform without a MiCA licence covering Germany would stop at 4.0, though all ten hold one. A fine from an EU regulator within two years stops a score at 7.5, which holds OKX there after its 2025 fines in Malta and the Netherlands. Coinbase and Bitpanda were fined too, but their totals already sit below 7.5. A third ceiling, 6.0 after a hack in the past year with customers unpaid, applies to none.
We opened every register entry, price list and contract cited here on 15 Oct 2026. The next full re-check is due by mid-January 2027, earlier if the plan to scrap the one-year tax exemption turns into a bill.
Every licensed platform verifies your identity before you can buy, and most accept euros only from an account in your own name.
Yes. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) applies, supervised here under the Crypto Markets Supervision Act (KMAG). Old German licences lapsed at the end of 2025 under § 50 KMAG, and BaFin says the EU-wide grace period ended on 1 July 2026 with no extension.
A licence from any EU regulator reaches Germany once it is passported, so six of the ten answer to supervisors in Dublin, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Valletta or Vienna. ESMA's register lists 100 firms with BaFin as their home regulator, and 53 of them are cooperative banks, mostly Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken.
Not every familiar name made it. BaFin refused futurum bank, which runs Bitcoin.de, a licence on 6 October 2026, and Binance and Bitget don't appear on ESMA's register at all.
Start with the platform, since MiCA requires every licensed firm to run a free complaints procedure. Beyond that, the German companies and the passported ones send you to different places. Trade Republic and Bitpanda's Berlin company point to the Bundesbank's arbitration board, and Bison to the federal Universalschlichtungsstelle in Kehl.
The passported exchanges send you abroad: Kraken to Ireland's ombudsman, OKX and Crypto.com to Malta's Arbiter for Financial Services, Coinbase to Luxembourg's CSSF. DekaBank, Bitvavo and Bybit EU name no arbitration body at all, which leaves the courts as the last step.
Coins don't get the protection euros in a German bank account have. Statutory deposit protection pays up to €100,000 per customer and bank, and asked whether it covers crypto, BaFin answers "in der Regel nicht": as a rule, no.
MiCA protects coins another way. A licensed firm must keep customers' coins apart from its own, and is liable if it loses them through its own failings, which the German terms we read repay at the coins' market value at the time. Bison's custodian holds coins in trust (Treuhand), while Trade Republic pools every customer's coins in one wallet per coin.
Bitcoin.de shows how a failed licence plays out. Its bank says it keeps customers' assets safe until they move to another regulated custodian, and that every customer claim stands, but trading has been largely suspended since 12 June 2026.
| Platform | What its terms say |
|---|---|
| Trade Republic | All customers' coins pooled per coin. A lost coin repaid at its market value. |
| Bison | Held in trust (Treuhand) by Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody, which owes you the coins' market value if it loses them. |
| Sparkasse | German law. Outside intent and gross negligence, liability stops at foreseeable damage. |
| Bitpanda | Austrian law for a Berlin contract. A lost coin repaid at its market value. |
| Kraken | Its total liability stops at what your account holds. Irish courts decide. |
| OKX | A claim over one trade is capped at that trade's value. Arbitration in Malta. |
Trade Republic, Bison, DekaBank and Bitpanda publish no proof of reserves, so nobody outside can confirm every customer's coins are there. Of the passported exchanges, Bitvavo, Bybit, OKX and Kraken let you look up your own balance in a published proof, and Coinbase relies on its parent's SEC-audited accounts.
Not investment advice
This page is general information. Nothing on it is a recommendation to buy, sell or trade any crypto asset or to use any platform. Crypto prices can fall sharply. See our affiliate disclosure for how the site is funded.
Both of Germany's big banking groups now sell crypto in their own apps. Customers of participating Sparkassen buy five coins through DekaBank in the App Sparkasse, and the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken use DZ BANK's meinKrypto, licensed by BaFin at the end of December 2025.
meinKrypto started with Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin and Cardano, held by Boerse Stuttgart Digital, and each cooperative bank decides for itself whether to offer it, so ask your own Volksbank. Neither banking app lets coins go to a wallet you control.
Paying an exchange from a German account is quick. Every euro-area bank can send and receive instant transfers since 9 October 2025. Card top-ups cost more: 1% at Trade Republic and Bitvavo, 2.49% at Bison and 3.99% at Crypto.com.
Hold a coin for more than a year and you can sell it tax-free. § 23 of the Income Tax Act taxes the sale of "other assets" only when it falls within a year of buying, and the tax authorities count crypto among them.
Within the year, the profit counts as income and is taxed at your own income tax rate. Total gains from such sales stay tax-free if they come to less than €1,000 in a calendar year, but at €1,000 or more the whole gain is taxed, not just the part above it.
From the 2026 tax year platforms collect your transaction data under the Crypto Tax Transparency Act, Germany's version of the EU's DAC8 rules, and send it to the Federal Central Tax Office by 31 July of the next year, the first time on 31 July 2027.
The one-year rule may not last. A finance ministry draft would tax crypto gains at the 25% flat rate on capital income and drop the holding period. It is still being agreed between ministries, according to the Bundestag, which rejected a separate bill to end the rule on 8 October 2026, by 445 votes to 132. A petition to keep it has 44,439 signatures.
If you'd rather not hold coins at all, Deutsche Börse's Xetra lists crypto ETNs from 16 providers, tracking 24 cryptocurrencies and 23 baskets. You buy them like shares through any broker, so the broker's fees and the product's yearly charge replace a crypto platform's.
Coins in a wallet you control, such as a hardware wallet, stay yours whatever happens to the platform. Most of the ten let coins out: Bison charges nothing to send them, and Trade Republic has allowed transfers to outside wallets since November 2025.
The Sparkassen's offer is the exception. DekaBank delivers coins only to an address where another licensed provider holds them for you, which rules out a hardware wallet or any wallet you run yourself.
BaFin treats unlicensed crypto services as illegal, and it acts on them. In August 2024 it seized 13 crypto ATMs at 35 locations, with almost a quarter of a million euros in cash, because they ran without its permission.
If you've paid, call your bank at once to try to recall the transfer, then report it at any police station or through your state's online police station (Onlinewache), keeping screenshots and transaction records.
On our scores it is Bitvavo, at 9.0 out of 10: a 0.25% taker fee on a public BTC/EUR book, and euros moved by SEPA at no charge. For other needs, OKX is the cheapest to buy, Kraken has the deepest Bitcoin market and Bitpanda lists the most coins.
In our snapshot it was OKX's BTC/EUR order book with a spot-only account. Bank and broker apps charge €0.99 to €1 an order but add a spread they don't publish, so you can't check their full cost before you buy.
Yes. Since July 2026 every platform serving German residents needs a licence under the EU's MiCA rules, from BaFin or from another EU regulator that passports it into Germany. Deposit protection still doesn't cover coins.
Not if you've held the coins for over a year. Sell sooner and the gain is taxed at your personal rate, unless your gains from private sales total less than €1,000 in the year. A finance ministry draft would end the one-year rule, but it isn't law.
If your Sparkasse takes part, yes. You open a crypto account in the App Sparkasse and DekaBank holds the coins: Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana and Polygon, at €0.99 an order plus a spread. Coins can move only to another licensed provider.
Binance has no MiCA licence in any EU country, so ESMA's register doesn't list it. BaFin refused a licence to futurum bank, the bank behind Bitcoin.de, on 6 October 2026, and trading there has largely stopped since June. Bitget's terms bar German residents.
