Bakkt Announces The launch of Its Crypto Consumer App In H1 2020
On Monday, October 28, ICE’s Bakkt platform announced its plans to launch a crypto consumer app in a bid to help retail customers seamlessly transact virtual digital currencies.
Mike Blandina, Bakkt’s chief product officer wrote in a blog post that the company plans to launch the digital app for seamless spending of digital assets at different merchant locations. With this, Bakkt clearly aims at getting digital currencies in the mainstream trade and commerce space.
In the latest blog post, Blandia wrote: “We’ll be launching a consumer app to make it easy for consumers to discover and unlock the value of digital assets, as well as ways in which they can transact or track them. Merchants gain access to a broader set of customers with expanded spending power”.
He also hinted that the consumer app will be supporting several other cryptocurrencies in addition to Bitcoin. He said: “A key feature of the model we’ve designed is to support a superset of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies as seamlessly as investors transact in stocks in a retail brokerage account. Our vision is to provide a consumer platform for managing a digital asset portfolio, whether they wish to store, transact, trade or transfer their assets.”
When ICE announced its Bakkt platform last year in August 2018, it already spoke of getting cryptocurrencies in the mainstream while also launching different cryptocurrency derivative products. In September 2019, Bakkt launched its Bitcoin Futures contracts and recently, it also announced the Bitcoin options launch in December 2019.
Bakkt has already collaborated with Starbucks which will be the company’s launch partner for its consumer app.
Blandina said: “I have strong conviction that by driving more integration and efficiency across digital wallets, transaction processing and payment acceptance, there are meaningful opportunities for merchants and consumers to seamlessly interact using digital assets in ways that have not been previously considered. It is often said that digital assets will be successful when consumers don’t have to think about the technology underlying them.”