ICE’s Bakkt Platform Delays the Launch of Bitcoin Futures to End of January 2019
Bakkt, a cryptocurrency futures platform and retail payments system is delaying its launch to the end of January 2019. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) - the parent company of Bakkt made the announcement on Tuesday, November 20.
The ICE announcement reads that the “new listing timeframe will provide additional time for customer and clearing member onboarding prior to the start of trading and warehousing of the new contract.”
Later, Bakkt CEO Kelly Loeffler released an update on Medium talking about the future business plans of the platform. Kelly also talked about the progress made so far with a plan to add more features to the platform until its newly scheduled launch date of January 24. 2019. In her blog post, the Bakkt CEO notes that this delay is basically to ensure that the platform is operationally sound during launch.
The blog post notes: “Given 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. As is often true with product launches, there are new processes, risks and mitigants to test and re-test, and in the case of crypto, a new asset class to which these resources are being applied. So it makes sense to adjust our timeline as we work with the industry toward launch”.
Just last month, Bakkt announced that it would launch its Bitcoin Futures Contract by the 12th of December. However, it then said that the release would be subject to the regulatory approval. It looks like the Bakkt developers are working to ensure that there are no regulatory hurdles during launch, and hence could be the reason behind this delay.
Back in September, Bakkt announced for the first time about its physically-settled Bitcoin Futures contracts. At that time Bakkt noted: “Our first contracts will be physically delivered Bitcoin futures contracts versus fiat currencies, including USD, GBP and EUR. For example, buying one USD/BTC futures contract will result in daily delivery of one Bitcoin into the customer’s account.”
In the blog post, CEO Kelly Loeffler also notes that the company is working on building an institutional-grade cryptocurrency warehouse. She says: “we … believe this is a significant step in building confidence in this asset class. These products represent a critical shift in the evolution of crypto markets toward more accessible, useful, and regulated instruments.”
For this, Bakkt is closely working with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) who will review the “Bakkt™ Bitcoin Daily Futures contract and the Bakkt Warehouse”.