In recent news, cryptocurrencies have gotten the short straw. In Japan, the crypto exchange lost more than $60 million to hackers and the Japanese exchange, Coincheck, lost almost half a billion dollars. More than that, many other exchanges around the world have seen their platforms coming under the barrage of hackers. Despite that fact, experts think that cryptocurrencies could be on the turnaround soon.
Intercontinental Exchange, the leading operator of global exchanges, is bringing that good news to the market. The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced the formation of Bakkt, which is a company that has the potential to create a more sustainable future Bitcoin investment and adoption around the world. ICE, through Bakkt, plans to do so by creating the largest global platform for institutional investors to exchange digital assets. The biggest pro, the platform would be fully regulated in the United States.
In their announcement on Tuesday, ICE said that the Bakkt platform will be a regulated ecosystem that will offer futures against at least three fiat currencies. In a post on Twitter, ICE wrote that “Our first contracts will be physically delivered Bitcoin futures contracts versus fiat currencies, including USD, GBP, and EUR.”
Cryptocurrencies experts predict that Bakkt would be able to address many of the concerns with Bitcoin currently. As Bakkt is a comprehensive cryptocurrency solution, it would provide much more than a platform but could alleviate five key issues currently disabling Bitcoin. Bakkt would work as a surveillance mechanism to police to help detect cryptocurrency fraud and market manipulation in a federally regulated market. It would provide both custodianship and scalability. The scalability would be achieved by expanding the capacity of Bitcoin, thus allowing the cryptocurrency to handle a massive volume of transactions. Currently, the speed is at no more than 10 transactions per second. In addition, Bakkt provides a way for money managers to offer Bitcoin mutual funds, pension funds, and other assets in a highly-regulated environment. Finally, Bakkt would provide added convenience for investors to transact using Bitcoins to pay for goods and services.
If Bakkt gets the approval of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), it could be the next big platform. In the past, ICE has done an impressive job of creating and optimizing financial exchanges. ICE has managed to bolster ICE Futures US, ICE Futures Europe, and Arca, the world’s largest marketplace for ETFs. In addition, ICE trades more than 1.5 billion shares a day on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and plays a large part in the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT), which is the world leader in almost all categories of futures for soft agricultural commodities like sugar and coffee.
Bakkt could be the next big thing for Bitcoin and blockchain technology, which could be the next big thing to impact the economy and change the world. According to Harvard Business School Professors Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani, blockchain technology, “has the potential to become the system of record for all transactions. If that happens, the economy will once again undergo a radical shift, as new blockchain-based sources of influence and control emerge.”
