Bakkt cleared to launch! Intercontinental Exchange’s dream child Bakkt cleared to launch – this will realize an ambitious plan nearly a year and a half in the making.
Bakkt announced Friday that they were clear to launch. The approval clears the way to begin offering its highly, HIGHLY anticipated physically settled bitcoin futures contracts. Bakkt announced that they plan to launch on September 23rd.
In a blog post Friday, Bakkt CEO Kelly Loefler wrote, “Our contracts have already received the green light from the CFTC through the self-certification process and user acceptance testing has begun.”
“With approval by the New York State Department of Financial Services to create Bakkt Trust Company, a qualified custodian, the Bakkt Warehouse will custody bitcoin for physically delivered futures,” she said. “This offers customers unprecedented regulatory clarity and security alongside a regulated, globally accessible exchange in a market underserved by institutional-grade infrastructure.”
She went on to add:
“Uniquely, Bakkt bitcoin futures contracts will not rely upon unregulated spot markets for settlement prices, thus serving as a transparent price discovery mechanism for the benchmark price for bitcoin. The importance of this differentiator is only amplified by reports of significant manipulative spot market activity, and other concerns such as inconsistent anti-money-laundering policies and weak compliance controls.”
This is what our own Kurt Wuckert Jr has to say about Bakkt.
“What can be said about BAKKT that hasn’t been said already? Are they pushing to rival Lightning Network as the most drawn out, partially broken promise in the BTC universe?
At this point, we have been promised a BAKKT launch date at least five times over the last year or so, and I’m starting to think that not only is it the most poorly named financial instrument around, but it’s also the hardest to define!
What is BAKKT? Well, since BTC has been redesigned not to *do* anything in particular, the main appeal of the currency is that, at some vague point in the future, bankers will be forced to buy it for some reason – driving up the price.
And BAKKT is just that: a consummate stride of banking insiders coming up with one more way to do nothing with BTC on chain while seeing if nearly a year of PR hints will make “number go up.”
So here we are: it’s like an ETF or something, except it’s managed by ICE, and therefore the crypto media can passively mention the New York Stock Exchange without blatantly lying about what’s going on in the BTC bubble.
But maybe it’ll actually happen this time though! And then the BTC fan boys can cheer about how they are so rebellious and anti-establishment while also drooling over what the financial titans of New York City will do to make them rich for having the foresight to be a bit higher on the pyramid than the average, first world middle class investor.”
What do you think? We’ve talked about Bakkt before. Let us know on our Facebook page!
