You can buy Bitcoin at ING, but not as a coin. What ends up in the bank’s Direkt-Depot are crypto ETNs: exchange-traded notes that track the price of a cryptocurrency. The bank lists around 50 of them in a promotional offer, from five issuers, as a one-off purchase or as a savings plan from one euro per instalment. You need no wallet for this and no private key. What you hold at the end is a security, not a cryptocurrency, and two things hang on that distinction that cost or save more money over the years than any order fee: the ongoing product costs and the question of whether the one-year holding period applies to you.

This article sorts out ING’s crypto investments: what is tradable, what trading costs, who really pays the zero-euro…