ICE’s Bakkt Platform Announces Its First Physically Settled Bitcoin Futures Contract

25. Sep 2018 Posted by Akolkar B on News

In early August 2018, NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced the launch of Bakkt platform in collaboration with other industry giants. The Bakkt platform aims to be a global marketplace making it easy for users to buy, sell, hold and spend their digital asset holdings.

In one of the major announcements, the Bakkt team announced about its first Bitcoin futures contracts through its Twitter account. The team noted: “Our first contracts will be physically delivered Bitcoin futures contracts versus fiat currencies, including USD, GBP and EUR. For example, buying one USD/BTC futures contract will result in daily delivery of one Bitcoin into the customer’s account.”

Note that as early stated by ICE, the Bakkt platform will introduce Bitcoin futures contract by November 2018. Note that these are physically settled Bitcoin futures contracts with the actual delivery of Bitcoin tokens.

Given the fact that the Bakkt platform is supported by financial giant like ICE and other big industry players like BCG, Microsoft, and Starbucks, it is expected to receive a huge support from regulators. Moreover, analysts predict that the arrival of the Bakkt platform will pave the way for more institutional cryptocurrency products in the market. Moreover, Bakkt is also expected to solve the major issue of custody solutions for large institutional investors.

CNBC crypto analyst Brain Kelly also said that the arrival of Bakkt platform will prove to be beneficial for the crypto industry, and will also increases the chances of the arrival of Bitcoin-backed ETF.

Kelly said: “This is huge news. I think the market is completely underappreciated. So let us talk about why [Bakkt] is the biggest news of the year for Bitcoin. It paves the way for a Bitcoin ETF. Last week I stood here and said you know what, I don’t think the Bitcoin ETF will get approved. And guess what? The Winkelvoss ETF got rejected. Why? Because there was not a US regulated exchange and there wasn’t US regulated custody.”