Deutsche Börse and Commerzbank invest in digital art trading

The two financial firms are taking a stake in fintech 360X. Founder Carlo Kölzer and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange already know each other.

Deutsche Börse and Commerzbank are entering into a strategic partnership with fintech 360X. The Frankfurt Stock Exchange is putting ten million euros into the fintech and acquiring half of the shares. Commerzbank's investment is significantly less.

360X offers a digital marketplace for art and real estate. Through it, investors can buy shares in art assets and real estate via blockchain. The technology is called NFT (non-fungible tokens). This is intended to allow digital artworks, for example, to be traded in a tamper-proof manner. "With 360X, we are targeting a megatrend," says Carlo Kölzer, CEO and founder of 360X. "Digital assets are an exponential growth market. We are creating new ecosystems and offering investors innovative investment opportunities in assets to which they previously had no access in this form. This creates new value for the financial world."

Deutsche Börse is looking to tap into new asset classes with the investment. "In the future, we will see a broad tokenization and digitization of assets that are not tradable today," said Theodor Weimer, CEO of Deutsche Börse AG. "360X is the new innovative platform of serial marketplaces we want to build with partners."

Kölzer was an investment banker at Dresdner Bank. In 2000, he founded 360T, a foreign exchange trading platform. Six years ago, Kölzer and then majority owner Summit Partners sold the fintech to Deutsche Börse for €725 million.