Cryptocurrency markets have received an incredible amount of bullish news over the past few months, yet the price has barely budged. We believe this is adding fuel to the eventual fire that will ignite under cryptocurrency prices. In this article, we cover the latest bullish news and present our case for much higher cryptocurrency prices in the months ahead.

NYSE Operator, ICE, Launches Bakkt Cryptocurrency Services

The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which owns and operates the New York Stock Exchange and more than a dozen markets and exchanges worldwide, officially announced its new cryptocurrency business in August. Bakkt’s first product will be a bitcoin futures contract. This contract is different from other bitcoin futures currently on the market because it has real deliverable bitcoin attached to it (by contrast, the CME and CBOE futures are synthetic, meaning there’s no actual bitcoin involved).

The new platform, Bakkt, will allow investors to buy, trade and store cryptocurrency on a federally regulated market. Bakkt will focus on bitcoin initially. And it’s scheduled to launch in November. It will primarily target institutional investors (large financial firms), but there will eventually some retail offerings as well. Bakkt it will also help merchants accept cryptocurrency as payment.

Here’s how Bakkt CEO Kelly Loeffler describes the project:

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.

Bakkt is designed to serve as a scalable on-ramp for institutional, merchant and consumer participation in digital assets by promoting greater efficiency, security and utility…

We are collaborating to build an open platform that helps unlock the transformative potential of digital assets across global markets and commerce.

They’ll now have a U.S.-regulated exchange, and they have a licensed warehouse, which is how commodities are stored, and that’s going to make it a lot easier for an ETF to come through. They have influential business partners such as Microsoft and Starbucks. While Bakkt is aiming to be a global network for trading and settling digital assets, its partners suggest that it might be looking to enter the retail sector as well.

Bakkt recently announced that Coinbase employee #5, Adam White, is  joining the company as Chief Operating Officer. Considering that Coinbase is one of the most successful companies in the cryptocurrency space, with a reported $8 billion valuation and over 25 million customers, this is a vote of confidence in the future of Bakkt.

The ultimate hope is that Bakkt could potentially facilitate cryptocurrency trading for Wall Street firms in a way that is just as easy as trading traditional stocks, bonds or commodities.