Belgium's KBC Group announced that starting the week of February 16, its Bolero App will open Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) trading, covering approximately 4 million retail customers.
KBC is one of the first banks authorized to offer crypto services after the EU's MiCA regulations came into effect. For global capital markets, this decision means that traditional financial institutions are repatriating funds flowing to native exchanges in a regulated manner and reassessing their risk appetite.
The "buy but not withdraw" structure reduces compliance costs.
KBC employs a fully custodied closed-loop system, preventing users from withdrawing purchased crypto assets to on-chain wallets or transferring on-chain tokens to bank wallets. All Euro funds originate from KYC-verified accounts. This effectively creates a "crypto sandbox" within the bank, with transaction records remaining at the ledger level rather than the public blockchain, significantly reducing the risks of money laundering and capital outflow.
For customers, what they are actually buying is a "Bitcoin certificate", not an on-chain UTXO.
Considering investor structure
According to data released by KBC on the Bolero platform, 60% of users are under 40 years old; in Belgium, as many as 45% of the 30 to 39 age group already hold cryptocurrency.
Young investors' preferences are clearly shifting, and it is reasonable to encourage banks to launch crypto products to prevent capital outflow.
KBC Chief Innovation Officer Erik Luts outlined his vision:
We want to make innovation concrete and accessible, while keeping it within a regulated environment.
The implication is that instead of having customers transfer funds to Binance, it's better to collect transaction fees directly through their own app.
Execution mode locks the underlying assets
To comply with MiCA regulations, KBC adopts an "execution-only model," where the bank does not provide investment advice, users must pass a risk assessment to activate the feature, and any future losses are borne by the user.
Currently, only BTC and ETH are available, indicating that banks prefer assets with higher market capitalization and liquidity, and are not yet touching Altcoin with greater volatility.
While KBC's strategy goes against the spirit of decentralization, it may bring incremental liquidity to the crypto market. Once more European banks replicate the same model, funds will continue to flow into mainstream crypto assets through regulated channels, driving up overall trading volume.
