Bakkt acquired Digital Asset Custody Company and partners with BNY Mellon on key storage
Pending bitcoin futures exchange Bakkt has acquired the Digital Asset Custody Company (DACC), secured insurance for assets it will hold in cold storage and revealed a partnership with BNY Mellon.
Adam White, the former Coinbase executive turned Bakkt COO, wrote in a blog post Monday that it acquired DACC to continue developing a secure digital asset storage solution. DACC’s team “share [Bakkt’s] security-first mindset,” he wrote, while also bringing experience in building its own secure and scalable custody solutions.
White hinted that the acquisition may also help Bakkt add cryptocurrencies beyond bitcoin sometime after launch, writing:
“As we look to scale and support custody of additional digital assets, DACC’s native support of 13 blockchains and 100+ assets will serve as an important accelerator, and we’re pleased to welcome Matthew Johnson, Adam Healy, and the entire...
The Intercontinental Exchange
The Intercontinental Exchange, the parent corporation of the New York Stock Exchange, has announced a new platform, Bakkt, which will list a physically settled one day bitcoin futures product.
ICE will serve as the custodian for all assets stored on the Bakkt platform, in the expectation that institutional investors (pension funds, endowments, insurers) will be less hesitant, given this unimpeachable custodianship, to place a bet on an asset class of which they otherwise might still be wary.
This could be a very big step in the mainstreaming of Bitcoin. Bakkt will “seek to develop open technology to connect existing market and merchant infrastructure to the blockchain.”
Kelly Loeffler, the CEO of Bakkt, has been the chief communications officer of ICE for 18 years, and before that -- at the turn of the millennium -- she was an equity research associate at William Blair.