Bitpanda: the company that tells you its product is unregulated

There is a sentence on Bitpanda's stablecoin campaign page that no competitor in this comparison has been willing to write. Describing the product it is actively marketing, Bitpanda says it is "an unregulated product", that"ownership of the assets passes to Bitpanda for the term of the Earn transaction", and that it is "not a banking or deposit product; no deposit protection applies"and that "you are exposed to counterparty, insolvency, and de-pegging risks".

That is the whole risk of CeFi yield, stated in four clauses, by the company selling it. We have read the disclosure pages of every provider on this site. Nothing else comes close.

The rest of this review is mostly about what that honesty does and does not buy you. Bitpanda runs two entirely different products under one Earn banner — real proof-of-stake pass-through on one side and an unsecured loan to a Vienna company on the other — and the single most useful thing a reader can do is stop treating them as one thing.

Two products, two engines, one word

"Earn" is doing an enormous amount of work on Bitpanda's site, as it does everywhere. Underneath it sit two of the four engines that pay crypto yield, and they have almost nothing in common.

Staking is validator pass-through. Bitpanda stakes your proof-of-stake asset, the network issues rewards for securing it, and Bitpanda passes on what is left after commission. The money comes from token issuance, not from a borrower. If Bitpanda failed tomorrow, the staked asset would still exist on-chain; recovering it would be an insolvency problem, not a credit loss.

Stablecoin Earn is a loan to a company. You hand ownership of your USDC to Bitpanda GmbH, Bitpanda does something with it that it does not describe, and pays you a reward. If Bitpanda failed tomorrow you would be an unsecured creditor queuing behind everyone else. That is the structure that wiped out Celsius, Voyager and Genesis customers, and we cover it in detail on what happened to the CeFi lenders.

Rates and the conditions attached

Bitpanda publishes staking rates as bands rather than per-asset numbers, which is less precise than Kraken's per-asset table but more informative thanCoinbase's refusal to publish staking APYs publicly at all. The stablecoin row at the bottom of the table is a different animal, and we have put it there deliberately so the contrast is visible.

The stablecoin product, taken apart

The 7% headline on USDC and EURCV is the most carefully constructed number in this batch of reviews, and Bitpanda explains the construction itself. Three percentage points are a fixed Base Reward — that is the contractual rate, the part you can hold Bitpanda to. Four percentage points are a Bonus Reward, which Bitpanda grants voluntarily and at its sole discretion, and which may change in 14-day cycles.

In other words, more than half the advertised rate can be withdrawn by the issuer on a fortnightly review with no breach of contract. That is not hidden; it is on the page. But a reader scanning a comparison table and seeing "Bitpanda 7%" next to "Ledn 6.5%" is comparing a contractual 3% plus a promotional top-up against a rate funded by a disclosed loan book. Those are different instruments.

The ownership transfer is the second half of the structure and the more consequential one. Once ownership passes to Bitpanda for the term, the asset is Bitpanda's and you hold a claim. It is the same legal shape as the failed lenders of 2022, described accurately by a solvent, licensed company four years later. Whether that shape is acceptable is a judgement about counterparty quality, not about the disclosure, which is exemplary.

Fees and commission

Bitpanda deducts a commission before distributing staking rewards. It varies by asset, and the percentage is not published anywhere we could find. This is the one place where Bitpanda's documentation falls below its own standard: a survey of fourteen staking providers in September 2026 found only five disclosing a specific fee number, and Bitpanda was among the nine that did not.

The published bands are therefore net figures with an unknown gross behind them. You can infer the direction from the ATOM case above, but not the size. Providers that do publish a number include Lido at 10% of rewards, P2P.org at 5%, Binance at 10% on ETH, OKX at 15%, Kraken at 25% to 30% and Coinbase at around 35%. Commission ranges across the industry run from 0% to 50%, and at Ethereum's real yield levels a 35% take removes over half of the economic return. Not knowing which end of that range you are on is a real information gap.

Lock-up, withdrawal and redemption

Staking has no lock-in except for Ethereum, which is constrained by the network's own exit mechanics rather than by Bitpanda. The stablecoin product has a 14-day redemption lock, which is the longest fixed redemption delay among the EU apps we have reviewed —SwissBorg locks most strategies for 24 hours.

Rewards are credited weekly and automatically restaked, so they compound without any action. Minimums are genuinely small: a weekly reward worth at least EUR 0.01 and an asset holding of at least EUR 1.00. That combination — low minimum, weekly compounding, no lock on most assets — makes the staking side unusually accessible for small balances, and it is a fair reason a reader might choose Bitpanda over an exchange with higher thresholds.

Availability and who is excluded

Bitpanda is an EU-focused operator, and the MiCAR licence passports across 27 member states. The notable exclusion is domestic: Bitpanda states that Austrian residents were excluded from the stablecoin yield product until 2026, which is a striking footnote for a company headquartered at A-1020 Vienna and a reminder that a passport does not mean a uniform product.

Licensing, and the perimeter it draws

Bitpanda announced a MiCAR licence from Germany's BaFin on 27 January 2025, passportable across 27 EU member states. BaFin is a serious prudential regulator and this is a serious licence. It brings conduct rules, client-asset requirements, governance standards and supervision.

And then Bitpanda tells you, on its own campaign page, that the stablecoin Earn product is unregulated. Both statements are true, and the combination is the most instructive thing on this page. A MiCAR authorisation regulates the provision of crypto-asset services — custody, exchange, transfer, execution. Taking title to a customer's stablecoins and paying them a discretionary bonus is a lending arrangement that sits outside that perimeter. The licence you see on the homepage does not attach to the product you are buying.

This is not a Bitpanda peculiarity; it is how the perimeter works everywhere, and almost no other firm says so. It is the single most transferable lesson on this site: a licence covers specific activities, not a company, and the fact that a provider is regulated tells you nothing about whether your particular product is. We expand on it inregulation of crypto yield.

Custody, insurance and proof of reserves

Staked assets sit on-chain with validators. Stablecoins placed into Earn are not held for you at all — ownership passes to Bitpanda — so custody arrangements are beside the point for that product. There is no deposit protection, which Bitpanda states, and we found no proof-of-reserves attestation.

The risks specific to Bitpanda

Discretionary rate risk. A 7% headline resting on a 3% contract is a rate that can halve without anyone breaking a promise. Readers planning around the advertised figure should plan around 3%.

Unsecured creditor status. Ownership transfer means no segregation, no trust structure and no ring-fencing of the kind Ledn attempts with its special-purpose vehicles. In an insolvency you rank with the general creditors.

Unknown commission on the honest half of the business. The staking product is structurally sound and its price is invisible. That is a smaller problem than an undisclosed yield source, but it is the same category of problem.

De-pegging risk, which Bitpanda names. EURCV and USDC exposure is exposure to the issuer's reserves as well as to Bitpanda. Our stablecoin yield page covers what has actually happened to pegs under stress.

How Bitpanda compares with two alternatives on this site

Against SwissBorg

SwissBorg is the mirror image. It names the venue behind every strategy — Lido, Morpho, Maple, Kyros — and risk-rates each one, so you know where the money goes; it is vaguer about fees and about its own contractual position. Bitpanda tells you exactly what you have agreed to and nothing at all about where the money goes. A reader who wants to audit the yield source should prefer SwissBorg. A reader who wants to know their legal position should prefer Bitpanda. Both hold MiCA-family authorisations, and neither offers deposit protection.

Against Revolut

Revolut runs only the staking half of Bitpanda's business, and runs it cheaper: it states it passes on 100% of the rewards it receives on-chain and takes no cut, with third-party validators taking up to 3%. Against Bitpanda's undisclosed commission that is a decisive advantage on price. Revolut, though, publishes no per-asset APYs at all — its rates are visible only inside the app — and it has no stablecoin product. Bitpanda's asset list for staking is also broader, covering chains such as SCRT, CSPR, MINA and STRK that Revolut does not offer. The honest summary is that Revolut is cheaper and more opaque on rates, while Bitpanda is more expensive and more transparent about terms.

Our view

Bitpanda has done something genuinely unusual: it has written down, in its own marketing, the exact sentences that a critical review would otherwise have to extract. That deserves credit, and it should also be read as an instruction. The disclosure is there because the risk is there. A 3% contractual rate on an unsecured loan to a Vienna company, with a discretionary top-up, is a perfectly rational thing to buy — at the right size, with the right expectations, and with the 3.97% three-month Treasury bill in view as the alternative.

For the full comparison, including every provider's yield engine side by side, see our crypto earn platforms page.