French multinational bank BNP Paribas is expanding its investment offering with six crypto-linked exchange-traded notes (ETNs), giving retail clients in France regulated exposure to Bitcoin and Ether. The ETNs, indexed to the prices of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), will be available from Monday through standard securities accounts. The products are open to individual investors, entrepreneurs, private banking clients and users of the bank’s digital platform, Hello bank!, with a possible later rollout to wealth management clients outside France.
ETNs let investors track digital asset performance without directly holding the cryptocurrencies. They carry the bank’s credit risk (if the bank fails, investors could lose money), have no tracking error and may offer tax advantages compared with direct crypto purchases.
This move extends BNP Paribas’s broader digital-asset initiatives. In 2024 the bank arranged and placed Slovenia’s first digital sovereign bond, the EU’s first blockchain-based government bond issuance. In September last year BNP Paribas and HSBC joined the Canton Foundation, which governs the Canton Network for institutional finance and real-world asset tokenization. BNP Paribas also participated in backing Digital Asset’s $135 million funding round; Digital Asset is the developer behind Canton. More recently, BNP Paribas Asset Management launched a tokenized share class of a money market fund on the Ethereum blockchain, building on a prior private-blockchain issuance in Luxembourg.
Crypto ETN adoption is growing across Europe. ING Germany has added new crypto products from Bitwise and VanEck, and crypto ETNs returned to the UK retail market in October 2025 after the Financial Conduct Authority reversed a 2021 ban.
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