Bitpanda Custody

Company and ownership

Bitpanda Custody began as Trustology, a London company incorporated in October 2018 and run by founder Alex Batlin, a former blockchain lead at BNY Mellon and founding head of the UBS FinTech Innovation Lab. The FCA registered Trustology as a cryptoasset business under the Money Laundering Regulations on October 4, 2021. Bitpanda announced the acquisition in February 2022, and the company was renamed Bitpanda Custody Ltd on March 29, 2022.

Bitpanda was founded in Vienna in 2014 by Eric Demuth, Paul Klanschek and Christian Trummer, and its holding company is Bitpanda Group AG in Zürich. Batlin left the custody company's board on December 31, 2025; Markus Dorner and Sebastian Aigner are now its directors. Since March 4, 2026, custody has been one of six product lines in Bitpanda Enterprise, and custody.bitpanda.com redirects to the Enterprise site. Group CEO Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad plans to leave for Erste Group in the first quarter of 2027, and co-founder Christian Trummer became co-CEO in September 2026.

Custody model and security

Wallet seeds and custody keys are generated and used only inside FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware security modules, and keys never leave the HSM boundary. A Trust Co-Signing Service checks each transaction against preset rules before signing, and destination addresses must be pre-approved in an address book. Clients choose among four deployment models: multi-tenant SaaS, a dedicated single-tenant environment, online on-premises, or an offline air-gapped setup for deep cold storage. In the two non-custodial on-premises models, the client hosts the physical or private-cloud HSM environment.

Bitpanda lists an ISO 27001-certified security management system and a SOC 2 Type II audit for the custody platform. The service targets 99.75% uptime, with infrastructure monitored around the clock.

Regulation and enforcement

The Bitpanda entity that provides custody depends on the client's jurisdiction. In Dubai, Bitpanda Custody MENA FZCO holds VARA license VL/25/04/006 for custody services including custodial staking, issued April 25, 2025, and its permitted clients include retail investors. ESMA's interim MiCA register lists Bitpanda GmbH, authorized by Austria's FMA on April 9, 2025, and Bitpanda Asset Management GmbH, authorized by Germany's BaFin, with custody and administration of crypto-assets among their services. Malta's MFSA authorized BP23 CA Limited, which trades as Bitpanda, for custody as well. In the UK, Bitpanda Custody Ltd was registered with the FCA in 2021 as Trustology, and Bitpanda's enterprise site describes the business as FCA registered.

In August 2026, the FMA fined Bitpanda GmbH €70,000 under MiCAR because a crypto-asset white paper was submitted late and marketing ran before the paper was published. The decision is final and does not concern custody.

Products and integrations

Native support covers Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB Smart Chain and EVM layer 2 networks, and XDC is also supported. New chains go through a compliance-reviewed onboarding process. Institutions can stake through governed delegation to approved validators without sharing custody keys. An API and SDKs cover address creation, transactions, approvals and reporting, with webhooks for notifications, and Travel Rule automation and KYT screening run by default. A Token Management System handles token issuance.

Within Bitpanda Enterprise, custody sits beside investment-as-a-service, liquidity, payments, stablecoin and tokenization products. Partners named at the March 2026 launch included Société Générale, Deutsche Börse Group, selected Raiffeisen banks, RAKBANK and Onda Finance, with end users in the EU, UK, UAE and Latin America.