Berlin-based Bitwala, which offers a crypto banking service with a built-in bitcoin wallet, debit card, and trading options, raises €13M Series A
Daniel Palmer / CoinDesk :
Context & Ripple Effects
Bitwala's €13M Series A lands in a Berlin fintech cluster that has been raising steadily: banking-platform solarisBank pulled in a €56.6M Series B the year before, and the city keeps producing venture-backed financial infrastructure. What distinguishes Bitwala is the bundle — a regulated bank account fused with a bitcoin wallet, debit card, and trading in one product.
The raise also follows a bruising episode: Bitwala had to suspend its debit card service after Visa Europe terminated processor WaveCrest's membership, cutting off the card rails many European crypto startups relied on. Fresh capital is what lets it rebuild that leg of the product rather than retreat to wallet-and-trading only.
First-order effects
- Bitwala gains the runway to scale its all-in-one crypto banking app and re-establish the debit card functionality suspended in the WaveCrest fallout, directly serving customers who want fiat and bitcoin under one login.
Second-order effects
- Trading-focused rivals such as Vienna's Bitpanda — which went on to raise $170M at a $1.2B valuation — face a competitor whose pitch is banking integration, not just exchange fees, pushing the category toward bundled fiat-plus-crypto accounts.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds across the corpus: six years later, Deblock raised a €30M Series A on essentially the same thesis of linking a bank account to a self-owned crypto wallet, suggesting the Bitwala model became the durable template for European crypto-fiat apps.
The trend: European consumer fintech is converging regulated banking and self-custodied crypto into single apps, with Berlin startups repeatedly supplying the infrastructure and capital rounds marking each stage of that convergence.