For months we didn’t hear a peep out of Bakkt, and now the NYSE owner-backed exchange won’t hush and it’s music to the ears of the crypto community. Bakkt for a year now has been viewed as a future catalyst for bitcoin adoption on Wall Street given its regulated nature and physically settled BTC contracts. That theory has been tested as the launch of the exchange has faced hurdles, but now it’s clear the wheels are in motion.
Today Bakkt revealed that one of the most important pieces of the puzzle is in place. They are days away from securely custodying BTC for clients as they ready the launch of “Bakkt bitcoin Daily and Monthly Futures when they launch on Sept. 23” in conjunction with the ICE. If all goes as planned, patient institutional capital is about to be unlocked and at long last make its way into the crypto markets.
Bakkt a ‘Huge Catalyst for Bitcoin
While the bitcoin bulls have largely been in control this year, the BTC price is well off its highs of 2019 of approximately $13,000. As traders such as Mike Novogratz predicted, it’s been range-bound for months and for the most part has been hovering at the lower end of that range. But the summer doldrums might have something to do with it. Even in the stock market, trading volumes are low. So investors could just be waiting until the season changes until they come back or enter crypto for the first time. Bakkt is giving them the perfect reason and timing to do so. If it plays out anything like the maiden launch of bitcoin futures on the CME and Cboe, which don’t even offer direct BTC exposure via physical settlement, Bakkt could be a real game-changer.
Fundstrat Quant Strategist Sam Doctor recently stated that “Bakkt could be a huge catalyst for institutional participation in the crypto market.”
And that was before equities cratered.
Now more than ever big investors are looking for a place to park their capital, and bitcoin is offering returns that are like no other asset class in the world. Just ask cryptocurrency and blockchain investment fund Pantera Capital, which just today pointed out:
“If you can find an asset that has a 235% eight-year-compound annual growth rate and basically zero correlation with anything else, you should own some. That’s the simplest way to describe why blockchain should be in a portfolio.”
They added:
“The one asset class not correlated to the others is blockchain (for the obvious reason that very few institutions own it).”
Indeed, institutions have yet to really participate, as crypto remains a retail-fueled market – for now. But that could all be about to change starting next week when Bakkt starts storing bitcoin for big investors. The clock is ticking.
