The highly anticipated Bakkt Bitcoin [BTC] Futures get a new launch date. In a medium post by the Bakkt CEO Kelly Loeffler, the Bakkt BTC futures that had been scheduled to launch on December 12th, 2018 will be pushed to January 24th, 2019. According to Loeffler, the new launch date was to allow for better preparation and regulatory clearance.
She wrote that, “[g]iven the volume of interest in Bakkt and work required to get all of the pieces in place, we will now be targeting January 24, 2019, for our launch to ensure that our participants are ready to trade on Day 1.”
Additionally, Loeffler explained that “the new listing timeframe will provide additional time for the customer and clearing member onboarding prior to the start of trading and warehousing of the new contract.”
The Bakkt futures trading platform is proposing to allow investors to trade physically-settled bitcoin futures. What this means is that once the futures contract expires, the investor receives Bitcoin for their contracts as opposed to fiat equivalent as has been the case with most futures platform thus far. In the Medium announcement, Loeffler alluded to the possibility of the expanding Bakkt’s product lineup.
In the blog post, she wrote that “we are taking opportunities in our start-up phase to expand our offering. We’ll share more about some of these new features in the coming weeks but as a start, I’m pleased to announce that we have insurance for bitcoin in cold storage and are in the process of securing insurance for the warm wallet within the Bakkt Warehouse architecture.”
The Bakkt trading platform is a new offering being proposed by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). Some of the developments from the team will be announced in the coming weeks according to the announcement. To justify the pushing of the launch date, Loeffler added that her company is focused on building an institutional-grade cryptocurrency warehouse. According to her, “this is a significant step in building confidence in this asset class.”
