By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 20th, 2024
Bakkt has announced that next year it will release an app to help consumers and merchants handle business transactions with digital assets.
Bakkt is currently looking to help its retail community to trade cryptocurrencies as seamlessly as possible. The platform has decided to do this with the launch of a consumer-focused app that will help these customers easily use this app for proper business interactions with several merchants, using digital assets. Starbucks that has already a history of cooperation with Bakkt will be the first merchant on the platform.
According to an official Bakkt blog post, Chief Product Officer Mike Blandina has suggested that the app will be beneficial to customers as they can easily transact with digital assets, and will also be great for the merchants as their customer base would be widened.
“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.”
The Bakkt exec also notes that this development is extremely important especially for the growth of the sector, because “small shifts can lead to wholesale change in an industry.” Therefore, Bakkt is very interested in pushing for the increased efficiency of these technologies which will be confirmed by integrating these several digital wallets as well as the opportunities that abound with regard to the ease with which transactions can be easily processed and payments accepted. It is hoped that the platform will put people at ease if they can use it, without worrying about how it works but just that it’s efficient.
“It is often said that digital assets will be successful when customers don’t have to think about the technology underlying them,” reads the post.
Blandina has also hinted that the new app will include support for a considerable number of digital assets and users will also be able to hold as well as trade all of the supported assets:
“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, interact, trade or transfer their assets.
To say the Bakkt platform had a bit of a rough start would be putting it a little too nicely. The platform was touted for a long time before its official launch, as the main ingredient that will ensure Bitcoin climbs back up to its former glory. However, it didn’t at all happen that way and it was written off by many people as a failure. Regardless, Bakkt now seems to be gaining good enough traction and has set a few new all-time highs with the current one being 1,179 contracts, according to Blandina.
Back in 2018 when Bakkt was announced by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), it was also revealed that a partnership with Starbucks was formed with the coffee giant further owning significant equity on the futures platform. Now, Blandina has added that Starbucks will be the first launch partner when the app eventually goes live next year.