A Small Bank in Germany Is Now Nearly 30% Owned by Crypto Companies

Published on by Coindesk | Published on

Almost 30 percent of the equity in WEG Bank AG, a previously obscure German bank focused on the real estate industry, is now owned by companies in the cryptocurrency industry, CoinDesk has learned.

By purchasing 9.9 percent of the bank, blockchain startup Nimiq now joins TokenPay and the Litecoin Foundation as part owners of the Munich-area financial institution.

TokenPay became the first crypto company to acquire the bank's equity in 2018, with Litecoin Foundation director Charlie Lee joining the bank's board in a related move.

Then WEG Bank enlisted Nimiq to help develop infrastructure for external crypto-to-fiat conversions for banking clients.

"With Litecoin and Tokenpay as existing shareholders, new clients including Lisk, and other key prospective partnerships, we believe WEG Bank is on the way to reinventing itself as a bank of the future."

These days, few DEXs can connect to institutional bank accounts for professional usage, unlike centralized exchange options.

Meant to help facilitate the first DEX to WEG Bank AG transaction, the in-progress Nimiq system is scheduled for a limited launch by 2020.

That said, WEG Bank AG will remain a traditional bank, never directly touching cryptocurrency.

"For the past 12 months, we have been looking at various ways to expand our core banking activities into the blockchain community," WEG Bank AG CEO Matthias von Hauff said in a press statement about the effort in February.

For its part, Nimiq announced in a blog post that it would work with DEXs like Agora Trade to act as a "Middleman to transfer funds between crypto markets and the traditional banking system," charging a small percentage of transaction fees along the way.

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