I'll laugh pretty hard if all the Bakkt hype leads to nothing. Didn't they raise like $200M in seed investment just a couple months ago? That's a lot of money to see evaporate into thin air.
Bakkt raised just over $180 million IIRC. A large chunk of this capital came from crypto related funds that got rekt during the bear market, and even now things aren't looking good for them with their capital sitting in Bakkt.
The interesting part is that ICE has enough capital to fund Bakkt itself, but they apparently didn't have enough faith in this project to fund it themselves, so they raised capital from external sources. Convenient way to hedge risk, isn't it?
So, what's the holdup? LedgerX got CFTC approval for custody and physically settled derivatives almost two years ago.
LedgerX isn't a serious player within crypto and never has been. I'm sure it was granted an approval because of how the CFTC didn't think Bitcoin would ever grow out to the phenomenon that it is today.
Bakkt is in a league of its own and has mass appeal, and I don't think the CFTC is keen on allowing Bitcoin to gain even more ground than it already has. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but people need to wake up for once.
One of the most trustworthy entities in the financial world can't get a simple product approved, that says enough.
