Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) is deepening its foray 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 was almost 86% owned by BBVA — will soon be providing 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 signal of more things are brewing on the horizon, according to Abel Peña, Bit2Me’s chief sales officer.
“I believe in 2025 we are going to see so many banks across Europe offering crypto spot trading to their users,” Peña told CoinDesk. “We are in very close contact with more than 50 financial institutions, with banks all across Europe and internationally, and they will start launching their services in the first quarter of 2025.”
BBVA held $857 billion in assets in 2023, making it the 43rd largest bank in the world at the time, and the second biggest in Spain after Banco Santander. While Garanti BBVA Kripto has already been advertising crypto trading services on its website since January 2024, the product was only offered as a pilot and wasn’t available for the general public, according to Bit2Me.
BBVA began embracing the crypto industry in Turkey because the regulatory environment allowed it to move earlier, Peña said. Since MiCA finished rolling out on Dec. 30, financial institutions such as 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 have the green light, they will start,” Peña said. “This is from the knowledge that many of them are already integrated with us,” he added, though he declined to disclose the names of the institutions.
But why is the banking sector suddenly so enthusiastic about crypto? The regulatory certainty provided by MiCA played a part, Peña said, but U.S. President-elect Donald Trump — who became a vocal crypto supporter in the middle of his campaign, and won big in November — was also a factor. Not to mention the various ideas floating around to get the U.S. government to create a strategic bitcoin reserve.
The tremendous success of the U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which have raked in a record $35 billion in inflows in less than a year, certainly didn’t hurt either. “We’re talking about an asset [bitcoin] that many users and companies want to gain exposure to. This is something that banks cannot deny anymore,” Peña said.
BBVA isn’t the first European bank to dip its toes into crypto. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest multinational investment bank, is building a rollup on Ethereum using ZKsync technology and has been working on 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 deploy its own euro stablecoin to the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network.
