Deutsche Börse Group (DBG) and Kraken announced on Thursday that they are combining forces, signaling a clear acceleration of institutional cryptocurrency adoption in the Eurozone.

“This partnership is the clearest signal yet that institutional adoption is accelerating, and that Europe intends to compete on equal footing with Wall Street as this transformation moves from millions to billions,” Gurpreet Oberoi, Kraken Head of Institutional, told Coindesk.

“Institutions across Europe aren’t just experimenting with digital assets anymore, they’re building real strategies, and they need infrastructure that matches the scale of their ambitions,” Oberoi added, noting that the partnership is "powerful validation of that shift."

By combining Kraken’s proven crypto-native expertise and U.S. market access with the trust and systemic importance of DBG’s regulated derivatives clearing, Eurex, and custody arm, Clearstream, which has more than $23 trillion in assets under custody, are building a comprehensive, full-stack bridge designed to capture institutional flow, the companies said in the press release.

U.S. vs Europe

Following the Trump Administration’s GENIUS Act, which provided the first comprehensive federal framework for stablecoins, Wall Street has moved at an unprecedented pace. Corporate giants like BlackRock, Bank of America, JPMorgan and Fidelity have been quick to provide their institutional clients with exposure to crypto. Several of them have issued BTC exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which have recently become a top revenue source for some.

While Europe isn't far behind, DBG — generally seen as the single largest and most essential financial market infrastructure conglomerate in the Eurozone — is among financial institutions in the region that are working to match their U.S. counterparts.

In September, the group signed a memorandum of understanding with Circle Internet Group to bring regulated stablecoins into Europe’s financial market infrastructure. More recently, on Nov. 18, Deutsche Börse Group and Societe Generale-FORGE signed an agreement to bring regulated euro and dollar stablecoins into the systems that support some of Europe’s largest financial markets.

The new partnership between DBG and Kraken serves as a structural declaration that Europe's financial core is committed to directly challenging U.S. dominance in the emerging digital capital markets, according to the press release.

The race for institutional crypto adoption is underway, but it’s not a recent phenomenon and is not exclusive to Wall Street and Europe either. The institutional acceptance of crypto around the world is accelerating significantly, developing hand in hand with better-defined regulation, BlockFills CEO Nick Hammer said in an interview with CoinDesk.