Bakkt Makes Its First Prominent Acquisition Anticipating Long-Awaited Approval by the CFTC
While Bakkt is still waiting for the approval by the CFTC to launch its planned Bitcoin futures platform, it announced its first acquisition.
By Julia SakovichUpdated
3 mins readPhoto: Commodity Futures Trading Commission / Flickr
This year, Bakkt, the digital assets platform backed by the New York Stock Exchange, has already managed to make headlines after raising $182 million from 12 high profile partners and investors for its further expansion. And now once again Bakkt is in the focus of the community’s attention as it is getting ready to complete its first acquisition.
Bakkt’s First Acquisition
According to the company’s announcement, it is going to acquire some of the assets belonging to Rosenthal Collins Group (RCG), which represents itself an independent market for futures.
It is said that the decision to conduct this acquisition is compliant with Bakkt’s plans to win the leading position in the industry and to create “the first integrated, institutional grade exchange-traded markets and custody solution for physical delivery of digital assets”.
In the official statement, the company’s CEO Kelly Loeffler, claimed:
“In parallel, we’re building a secure, scalable platform for transacting with digital assets so that our regulated ecosystem serves consumers, merchants and institutions.”
Regulatory Issues
While Bakkt is still waiting for the approval of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to launch its Bitcoin Futures (as CoinSpeaker has already reported it is likely to be launched in February), the acquisition will help the company to enhance its expertise across risk management and treasury operations.
Moreover, it is believed that the acquirement of assets at RCG will contribute to Bakkt’s regulatory requirements, including anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) policies.
Loeffler added:
“This acquisition underlines the fact we’re not standing still as we await regulatory approval by the CFTC for the launch of regulated trading in our crypto markets. Our mission requires significant investment in technology to establish an innovative platform, as well as financial market expertise to deliver the most trusted fintech ecosystem for digital assets.”
It is planned that the transaction will be closed next month.
Background Information
Rosenthal Collins Group was founded in 1923 and is an independent futures commission merchant. In December, it was revealed that its customer accounts would be sold to leading commodity broker Marex Spectron.
As for the Bakkt, let us remind that it was announced by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) a little bit less than half a year ago, in August 2018.
The company views its mission in helping digital assets to achieve mainstream adoption via providing the most efficient way to carry out transactions between consumers and merchants.
The team standing behind Bakkt strongly believes that distributed ledger technology (DLT) is exactly the most appropriate one to achieve this goal in the context of the already existing merchant infrastructure.
Nevertheless, cryptocurrencies, as well as DLT, are still in the process of their active development and Bakkt is making its contribution to the expansion of their usage through creation of a global transparent platform for crypto assets.
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