XRP ETF, Solana ETF, Ethereum ETF: What You Can Actually Buy in Germany

In the United States you have been able to buy a spot ETF on XRP for a while now, one on Solana and one on Ethereum. In Germany you cannot. Type the ticker from a US headline into your broker's search box and you get either no results at all or a note telling you that the instrument is closed to retail clients. That is not your broker's doing and it is not a mistake at your end. It comes down to two European rulebooks that work independently of one another.

The good news is that for almost every cryptocurrency with a US spot ETF there is an exchange-traded security in Germany that does economically much the same job. It simply carries a different name, it is built differently in legal terms, and it brings a risk an ETF does not. This article works through the chain in order: why the US ETF is blocked, what you can buy instead, where the difference hurts, and when buying the coins outright on an exchange serves you better than holding a security in your brokerage account.

Why your broker does not list the US spot XRP ETF

The reason is called the PRIIPs Regulation. Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 on key information documents for packaged retail investment products requires the manufacturer of any such product to draw up a standardised key information document before the product may be sold to retail investors in the European Economic Area.

The key information document, usually shortened to KID, is a short and strictly formatted document in the local language that sets out the costs, the risk rating and the possible performance scenarios of an investment product according to one common template.

US fund houses do not produce this document for their domestic ETFs. The effort does not pay off for them, because European retail distribution is not their market. Without a key information document, a broker supervised in the EU may not sell the security to a retail client. So it hides the instrument or blocks the order.

One point matters for your understanding: this is a regulatory block, not a tax one. It affects practically every ETF launched in the United States, from the broad equity index to the commodity fund, and crypto is only one special case among them. Anyone who reads online that US ETFs are "banned" in Germany is cutting a corner. What is banned is distribution to retail investors without the prescribed document.

ETF, ETP, ETN and ETC: what separates the four acronyms

The four abbreviations get mixed up in everyday use, and that confusion costs readers money. Here is the clean distinction.

ETF stands for exchange traded fund, a fund traded on an exchange. The assets of a fund are ring-fenced in legal terms: they belong to the investors and are untouched by the insolvency of the fund company.

ETP stands for exchange traded product and is the umbrella term for all exchange-traded index products, ETFs included.

ETN stands for exchange traded note and denotes an exchange-traded bearer debt security. In legal terms that is a debt the issuer owes you, not a share in a fund.

ETC stands for exchange traded commodity. The construction matches the ETN, but the security tracks a commodity, classically gold.

Every single-crypto security traded in Europe is an ETN, or an ETP built along ETC lines. It is not a fund. When an advertisement, a newsletter or a forum post talks about a "Bitcoin ETF on Xetra", either the label is wrong or the product is a basket construction holding several underlyings.

The UCITS 5/10/40 rule rules out the single-asset ETF in Europe

The second reason sits in fund law. A European ETF aimed at retail investors is as a rule a UCITS fund. UCITS stands for "undertakings for collective investment in transferable securities" and describes a fund that may be distributed across the EU provided it observes strict diversification requirements.

The best known of those requirements is the 5/10/40 rule: no more than 10 percent of fund assets may sit with a single issuer, and all positions above 5 percent together may not exceed 40 percent. A fund made up 100 percent of one single asset can never meet that requirement.

That is why Europe has no Bitcoin UCITS ETF, and for the same reason no pure gold ETF either. In the United States the diversification requirements for this product class are looser, and a fund with a single underlying is permitted there. So the rule is not meant as hostility towards crypto; it simply hits crypto particularly hard.

For you one simple rule of thumb follows. Anything you can buy in Germany in a brokerage account as a single bet on Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP or Solana is a debt security. If you want to hold the coins themselves, you buy them on a crypto exchange and keep them in your own wallet.

How to spot a physically backed crypto ETN

Physical backing means that the issuer actually buys the matching quantity of the cryptocurrency for every security it issues and deposits it with a custodian. The counterpart is synthetic backing, where a swap agreement with a counterparty merely replicates the price.

Three entries reveal the construction, and all three appear in the product factsheet or the key information document:

• Type of backing. Look for the wording "physically backed" or "100 percent collateralised". If it says "synthetic" or "swap-based", you are also carrying the risk of a further counterparty.
• Custodian. Reputable issuers name the custodian and the form of custody. If the entry is missing altogether, treat that as a warning sign.
• Trustee or security trustee. With most European crypto ETPs an independent trustee holds the deposited coins and may realise them for the benefit of investors in an insolvency.

Backing is no legal substitute for ring-fenced fund assets; it does not turn your security into a fund unit. What it does is something else: in the worst case a pool of assets is ready for investors to claim against. We worked through exactly that difference, with the concrete checks to run, in our article on issuer risk in crypto ETNs.

Issuer risk: what happens to your ETN if the issuer fails

Issuer risk is the risk that the party issuing a debt security becomes insolvent and can no longer meet its obligation towards you. With a fund unit that risk does not exist, because fund assets are held separately from the assets of the company.

With a crypto ETN it very much does exist. Backing softens it; it does not remove it. In an insolvency, the quality of the trust construction decides whether the deposited coins are distributed to investors promptly or whether they first fall into the insolvency estate and proceedings rule on them. That can take years, and the price keeps moving through that time without you being able to act.

In practice that means spreading larger amounts across several issuers instead of bundling everything with one house. Someone putting 20,000 euros into a Bitcoin security has a different problem from someone with a 500 euro monthly savings plan. And anyone unwilling to carry issuer risk at all has no way around buying the coins directly.

Which crypto ETPs can you actually buy on Xetra?

The European market is broader than many readers assume. Securities on Bitcoin and Ethereum have been available from several providers for years. For XRP, market overviews indicate that several issuers have by now listed products on German and Swiss exchanges, among them 21Shares, WisdomTree, CoinShares, VanEck and Virtune. For Solana there are both plain price trackers and versions that collect staking income.

Which of these securities you can actually trade is decided by your brokerage provider. Some brokers carry the full product range, others only a selection, and others again exclude crypto ETPs for new clients. You will find an overview of providers and their product ranges in our broker comparison.

Never rely on the product name alone when you buy. Several providers use similar labels, and individual issuers run two securities on the same underlying with different expense ratios. The ISIN is the only unambiguous identifier. Copy it from the issuer's factsheet into your account's search box and then compare the name that comes back.

Staking versions are separate products

On Ethereum and Solana several issuers offer securities that collect the staking income of the deposited holdings. Staking means locking up coins to secure a network, for which the protocol pays an ongoing reward. That income can stay inside the security and lift its value, or it can be distributed, and the two carry different tax consequences.

Tax: why the delivery claim decides the one-year holding period

This is where the most important practical difference between the product versions sits, and many investors do not know it.

Crypto assets held privately fall under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act in Germany, which covers private disposal transactions. Hold for longer than a year and you pay no tax on the gain. Sell within a year and the gain is taxed at your personal income tax rate, with an annual exemption threshold of 1,000 euros covering all private disposal transactions together. Once that threshold is passed, the entire gain becomes taxable, not only the part above it.

A conventional security is treated under section 20 instead: flat-rate withholding tax of 25 percent, plus the solidarity surcharge and church tax where applicable, regardless of how long you have held it.

Which of the two worlds applies to your crypto ETP depends, on the reading of issuers and several tax firms, on the delivery claim: the right documented in the prospectus to demand the surrender of the deposited coins instead of a payout in euros. Where that claim is documented and the security is physically backed, they treat the investment like directly held crypto assets with the one-year period. Where the delivery claim is absent, the flat-rate withholding tax stands.

The basis for this classification is set out in the German Finance Ministry circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of certain crypto assets of March 6, 2025, file reference IV C 1 – S 2256/00042/064/043, which replaced the version of May 10, 2022. What binds your specific case in the end is your tax office. Where larger amounts are involved, tax advice is cheaper than a correction after the fact.

FIFO applies to your brokerage account too

FIFO stands for "first in, first out" and means that on a sale the units bought first count as the ones sold first. With a monthly savings plan that means each instalment has its own clock, and a partial sale always takes the oldest units. Lose track of the individual tranches and your figures go wrong. A portfolio tracker that carries purchase dates and deadlines along saves real work here. We compared which tools do that job in our review of crypto tax tools.

One note on the timing. A German Finance Ministry draft bill became known in September 2026 that would remove the one-year holding period for crypto assets acquired from January 1, 2027 and subject gains to the flat-rate withholding tax instead. Holdings bought up to December 31, 2026 would stay in the old system under the draft. This is a draft and not law in force. We wrote up what it provides for in detail and which cut-off dates it names in our article on grandfathering for the crypto holding period.

Costs: TER, spread and trading hours against buying direct

Three cost blocks determine what a crypto ETP really costs you over a year.

The first is the TER, the total expense ratio: the annual percentage the issuer takes out of the security, which feeds into the price pro rata every day. Market overviews put the range for Bitcoin securities at roughly 0.15 to 1 percent a year, and for securities on smaller cryptocurrencies at around 1.5 to 2.5 percent. The premium is explained by the smaller market volume and the higher custody costs.

The second is the spread, the gap between the bid and the offer in the order book. On liquid Bitcoin securities during a trading day with normal volume it barely registers. On thinly traded securities on smaller coins, and outside core trading hours, it becomes the real cost factor.

The third is your broker's order fees, which come as a flat charge, a percentage or a tiered scale depending on the house.

On top of that sits a point that is not a fee and still costs money: trading hours. An exchange-traded security can only be traded while the exchange is open. The crypto market runs around the clock, weekends included. If the price drops 12 percent on a Saturday evening, as an ETP holder you cannot react until Monday, while the buyer of real coins can trade at any time. In calm phases nobody notices. In hectic ones it decides the outcome.

ETP or coin on an exchange: which route suits you

There is no route that is better across the board, but two profiles with different strengths.

The security in your brokerage account suits you if you want your investments bundled in one place, if the tax statement from your custodian bank takes work off your hands, if you would rather not manage your own keys, or if you want to buy automatically through a savings plan and your broker offers that for crypto ETPs.

Buying directly on a crypto exchange suits you if you want to avoid issuer risk, if you need to be able to trade around the clock, if you actually want to use the coins or move them to your own wallet, if ongoing management fees bother you, or if you want to buy cryptocurrencies for which no listed security exists in Europe at all.

Many readers run both tracks: the core holding on an exchange with their own custody, a smaller position in the brokerage account because it fits the familiar asset overview there. That is a fair approach, but it demands clean records, because different tax rules can apply to the two parts.

Three mistakes that cost the most money when buying

The ticker from the US headline. American ticker symbols do not carry over to European securities. Type a symbol from a news story into the search box and at best you land on no results, at worst on a completely different instrument such as a leveraged certificate. Search by ISIN.

Overlooking the currency. Many crypto ETPs are quoted in euros, some in US dollars, a few in Swiss francs. If your security is quoted in dollars and you buy in euros, you carry currency risk on top of the price risk of the cryptocurrency. On a security with a high expense ratio the currency effect over a year can turn out larger than the fee.

Confusing distributing and accumulating. With staking securities it makes a difference whether the income stays in the price or is paid out. A distribution is a tax-relevant inflow in the year it happens, even if you keep holding the security. Fail to plan for that and you have a tax bill without the matching cash.

Buying a crypto ETF in Germany: what to take away

1. Stop searching for the US ETF and search for the European ETP. For Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Solana there are securities listed on German exchanges. Whether your brokerage provider carries them is a five-minute question; if it does not, the broker comparison helps you pick a house that does.
2. Check three lines in the factsheet before you buy, then keep your purchase data: backing, delivery claim, expense ratio. The first two decide default risk and tax treatment, the third the running costs. To keep the one-year period traceable per tranche, pick one of the tools from our review of crypto tax tools.
3. Decide deliberately between the brokerage account and your own custody instead of leaving it to chance. If you want to hold the coins yourself and trade at any hour, the route runs through a trading platform; the comparison of the best crypto exchanges shows which providers are worth considering.

(As of September 14, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)