The owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announces to list a physically-settled bitcoin futures contracts and form a new company. The mission of this new company is to make bitcoin a mainstream financial asset.
ICE revealed this Friday that the new platform Bakkt is developed in partnership with renowned brands such as Strarbucks, BCG, and Microsoft. Bakkt will integrate with clearinghouse and the ICE’s U.S. futures market to list a physically-settled one-day bitcoin futures product. This product is complete with physical warehousing and is managed in-house by ICE. The product is scheduled to be launched in November. At the moment it is pending for regulatory approval.
Since Intercontinental Exchange is one of the biggest names in finance, it will act as the custodian for all the assets stored on the Bakkt platform. Hence, institutional investors such as endowments, pensions, and insurance companies may now be less hesitant to take a bet on this burgeoning asset class.
CEO Bakkt, Kelly Loeffler said that the firm is collaborating to build an open platform that can help unlock the transformative potential of digital assets globally. The Bakkt platform is intended to be a full-fledged platform that helps digital assets evolve into a mainstream financial asset class.
Taking Bitcoin Mainstream
The Bakkt platform is exploring ways of increasing bitcoin’s utility as a payment instrument. As mentioned in the CCN report, Starbucks will play an active role in providing consumers with the ability to seamlessly convert their holdings into USD so that they can utilize them to pay for items purchased at Starbucks locations.
While ICE can certainly take bitcoin mainstream, it feels that the reality will probably not bear a resemblance to the crypto-anarchist vision that’s harbored by many cryptocurrency adopters.
The bitcoin price witnessed a moderate hike in the hours following this announcement. It rose as high as $7,503 on Bitfinex after dropping as far as $7,282 earlier in the day.
The post ICE Announces To Launch Physically-Settled Bitcoin Futures Contracts appeared first on OWLT Market.
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