Kelly Loeffler (left) is the CEO of Bakkt.
What is Bakkt?
Just something that could propel Cryptocurrency into the Mainstream even more.
You could even say: NYSE owner takes on Bitcoin
Widely reported August 3rd, 2018, it’s been announced the owner of the New York Stock Exchange is launching a company known as Bakkt that will offer a federally regulated market for digital assets like cryptocurrencies. This is a serious play on the regulated future of crypto. The ICE (Intercontinental Exchange)’s Bakkt is teaming up with several companies, including BCG, Starbucks, and Microsoft, to create a platform that allows the crypto assets to be bought, sold, stored and spent. (BCG stands for Boston Consulting Group).
Bakkt is designed to enable consumers and institutions to seamlessly buy, sell, store and spend digital assets. Formed with the purpose of bringing trust, efficiency, and commerce to digital assets, Bakkt seeks to develop open technology to connect the existing market and merchant infrastructure to the blockchain. Essentially then, Bakkt wants to be a Global Regulated Ecosystem for Digital Assets.
That it’s partnering with the likes of Microsoft and Starbucks should give it some added credibility.
Can Bakkt bring trust and utility to digital assets? Though on LinkedIn, this is one of the first cryptocurrency-related stories they are bringing us that’s actually positive (likely because the parent company Microsoft is in on the deal). In the skewed media of today, it’s not easy to find objective news without its own slant.
Everyone from Korean mega-corporations to the Chinese central bank is thinking hard about how to adopt blockchain. It’s only natural that the ICE would try to “own” the space. Bakkt wants to develop open technology to connect the existing market and merchant infrastructure to the blockchain, but it won’t be alone in the space. Alibaba and Paypal have a lot of blockchain patents, but this represents a “regulated crypto” wave. Fortune A regulated physical Bitcoin futures warehouse will go live later this year, in November.
Bakkt wants to leverage Microsoft cloud solutions to create an open and regulated global ecosystem for digital assets. That could bode well for Azure who are losing some thunder to IBM and their private blockchain experiment and Amazon’s AWS blockchain-as-a-service tools in the blockchain space of late.
Crypto credit cards and paying for drinks at Starbucks with BTC, anything and everything is now possible here. 2018 is the dawning of a new era for Bitcoin, the regulated crypto movement. Bakkt will work with companies that include BCG, Starbucks, Microsoft, and others to create an open ecosystem that supports growing needs in the ~$270 billion digital asset marketplace.
This is the ICE getting directly involved in the future of cryptocurrencies. The Bakkt ecosystem is expected to include federally regulated markets and warehousing along with merchant and consumer applications.
This bodes well for Bitcoin’s price heading into 2019.