Baby Got Bakkt

We’ve written before about the New York Stock Exchange’s dalliances with cryptocurrency. Earlier this year, Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which owns the NYSE, acquired a crypto custodian service called Digital Asset Custody Company. It also applied for its cryptocurrency subsidiary — known as Bakkt — to become a registered trust with the state of New York, with designs on becoming a marketplace for digital assets.

Well, the early returns for Bakkt are lukewarm at best. As reported by Coindesk, a mere 623 monthly Bitcoin futures contracts changed hands in the first week since the contracts began trading on Bakkt on September 23. By comparison, about 4,099 Bitcoin futures contracts traded on one day alone during that same week at Chicago-based exchange operator CME, whose market opened in 2017. We’ll see if Bakkt, and the NYSE, can gain some traction in the crypto-trading marketplace.