Today Börse Stuttgart, the second largest stock exchange in Germany, announced that existing investors SBI and Axel Springer increased their backing of Börse Stuttgart Digital, its cryptocurrency unit. The German exchange was perhaps the first stock exchange to launch cryptocurrency services, with both retail and institutional offerings, including digital asset custody.
In 2019 it announced a retail-focused digital asset joint venture with Axel Springer and finanzen.net, the Boerse Stuttgart Digital Exchange (BSDEX). Later that year, Japan’s SBI Group made an investment in BSDEX and Boerse Stuttgart Digital Ventures.
Now the stock exchange is bundling its entire retail and institutional crypto business into Boerse Stuttgart Digital, with Axel Springer and Singapore-based SBI Digital Asset Holdings investing in that entity.
“The market is in need of trusted, regulated and professional infrastructure to truly deliver on the promise of digital assets,” said Fernando Vazquez Cao, CEO of SBI Digital Asset Holdings. “Boerse Stuttgart Group was a natural choice of European partners in this journey to transform the financial sector with innovative and reliable technology and processes.”
Meanwhile, SBI has numerous digital asset interests around the globe. It acquired crypto market maker B2C2 and has a joint venture with Switzerland’s SIX Digital Exchange in Singapore. It has a collaboration with Standard Chartered that includes digital assets, which might involve the bank’s UK subsidiaries Zodia Custody and Zodia Markets. Additionally, SBI recently announced a deal with the CBOE, which owns the crypto spot market Eris X. Some of these activities are crypto-focused. Others combine tokenized securities platforms, an area where SBI has several additional interests.
