Bank stablecoin for 3.3 million users: “crypto assets are generally not protected”

When your bank issues a stablecoin, your money no longer sits in an account. It sits in a token. That changes everything for the statutory deposit guarantee, because the guarantee does not cover that balance. On its consumer page on deposit protection, German regulator BaFin puts it plainly: crypto assets are “generally not protected”. What you get instead is a redemption claim against the issuer. Since October 23, 2026, that is no longer a theoretical question. On that day a major bank placed its own stablecoin inside a payment app with millions of users.