Mike Blandina, Chief Product Officer of Bakkt elaborated on the decision to unveil a consumer app. Blandina said “We’ll be launching a consumer app to make it easy for consumers to discover and unlock the value of digital assets, as well as ways in which they can transact or track them. Merchants gain access to a broader set of customers with expanded spending power.”
Additionally, Bakkt platform’s monthly Bitcoin futures will act as a benchmark for Bakkt. The futures exchange will be owned and administered by the owners of the New York Stock Exchange.
The platform is anticipated to support cryptos other than BTC in the future. Blandina hinted the possibility in his statement. “A key feature of the model we’ve designed is to support a superset of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies as seamlessly as investors transact in stocks in a retail brokerage account. Our vision is to provide a consumer platform for managing a digital asset portfolio, whether they wish to store, transact, trade or transfer their assets.”
Notably, options contracts are offered by some unregulated exchanges such as Deribit of Netherlands. However, it is the first time such an option is offered by one of the largest traditional exchanges in the world. Crypto enthusiasts and major think tanks anticipate a surge in volumes and overall liquidity in the crypto markets through this offering on the NYSE.
The research director at Bitwise Asset Management, Matt Hougan, in an interview with Decrypt, stated “Options (obviously) allow investors and traders to do different things, and will facilitate new and important approaches to investing (covered call strategies, for instance).”
Hougan further stated that European-style options contracts will be offered at Bakkt. This implies that the contracts can be exercised only the date of expiry. Hougan elaborated the reason behind this by saying “My guess is that they wanted to align the expiration of the options contracts with the expiration of their monthly futures.”
The Bakkt platform will be first tested by Starbucks sometime in early 2020.