ICE Bakkt To Acquire A Digital Asset Custody Company

The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)-lead institutional crypto trading platform Bakkt recently acquired a crypto custodian service. The news about the ICE Bakkt acquisition were announced on April 29 on the company blog, showing that Bakkt announced a number of new measures in an effort to stimulate regulatory feedback.

The ICE Bakkt acquisition is in the latest cryptocurrency news for including the purchase of a Digital Asset Custody Company (DACC). While this DACC’s native support including 13 blockchains and 100+ assets is meant to “serve as an important accelerator” – the entire team behind DACC will also be joining Bakkt as the former Coinbase exec and new Bakkt COO named Adam White wrote in the post published on Monday.

The ICE Bakkt purchase was revealed in the post, where White also commented the filing of the application with the New York Department Of Financial Services which will allow it to operate as a trust company – and help the firm serve as a Qualified Custodian for digital assets.

Bakkt revealed that the company is planning to launch physically-delivered Bitcoin (BTC) futures and its contracts are set to be traded on ICE Futures US (IFUS) as well as cleared on ICE Clear US (ICUS) which is a federally regulated exchange and clearinghouse that is under regulation by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

The ICE Bakkt news went viral on many best cryptocurrency news sites. Before that, on April 18, Bloomberg reported that ICE was considering the acquisition of a BitLicense in order to launchBTC futures trading, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The ICE Bakkt CEO, Kelly Loeffler, claimed that the firm is not changing its strategy but instead, clarifying its role within the industry according to Fortune reports. As she told Fortune:

“There is no pivot. From the ground up what ICE has been building for two years is the safest version of a custody solution for digital assets.”

The ICE Bakkt combines ICE which is an operator of 23 major global exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Bakkt which is a popular crypto exchange. The joint acquisition in August 2018 also came with an announcement that ICE will launch the Microsoft cloud-powered “open and regulated, global ecosystem for digital assets” which went viral in the altcoin news section.

However, the delay of the launch was then set for January 2019 and in early February, the ICE CEO declared that Bakkt is expected to launch at some point in 2019.