Bullet through the church: bitcoin futures van Bakkt launches on September 23

Bakkt has announced that it will open its doors to institutional clients on 23 September. Finally good news and a hard deadline after a long series of delays.

Last hurdle taken

Bakkt already started testing contracts for bitcoin futures last July, but there was still one threshold. Namely a license from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). But for the sake of convenience, everyone assumed that the license would work out well, since Bakkt’s parent company is Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). ICE is a very large player with all the puppets in the right places, they also own the New York Stock Exchange, for example.

We have some news https://t.co/ykUvQ31cGz

– Bakkt (@Bakkt) August 16, 2019

With this license Bakkt can build a digital warehouse to safely store bitcoins, they call this the Bakkt Warehouse. For the record, Bakkt has also decided to request approval from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Kelly Loeffler van Bakkt:

Our contracts have already received the green light from the CFTC through the self-certification process and the testing of user acceptance has begun. With approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services to establish Bakkt Trust Company, a qualified depositary, Bakkt Warehouse will store bitcoin for physical futures

Third quarter

We already mentioned last month that Bakkt is preparing for a launch in the third quarter of 2019. This launch involves two types of contracts: a daily and a monthly futures contract.

Originally Bakkt was supposed to launch on December 12, 2018, this was subsequently postponed to January 2019. And this deadline was not met either. All the while there were enough memes about institutional money and now we can finally see the effect of real institutional money in the bitcoin market.

Bakkt raised 182.5 million dollars last year to be able to offer their services to financial institutions. And after another financing round, the value of Bakkt is estimated at 740 million dollars. These are undeniable amounts for the bitcoin market.

Bakkt is just the beginning

Incidentally, Bakkt is not the only one who wants to launch physically supplied bitcoin futures. Last month the false news was spread out of nowhere that LedgerX could already provide the same service and was therefore earlier than Bakkt. LedgerX corrected this later because they had not yet received approval from the regulators.

There are even more hijackers on the coast: ErisX and SeedCX also want to offer their own bitcoin futures. It seems that Fidelity Digital Assets also submitted a request to NYDFS for a Trust license last month. They also want to launch in New York.