ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher said that the launch of Bakkt’s bitcoin futures could come “in the very near future”.
The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) owns both Bakkt and the New York Stock Exchange. Bakkt’s operational tests began last week.
Jeffrey Sprecher made these statements during a quarterly earnings call, saying:
“[Bakkt] working to develop a regulated ecosystem that services the evolving needs of [participants] around the world. […] Subject to final regulatory approvals, we plan to launch our physically settled bitcoin futures in the very near future”.
In fact, although operational testing has already begun, the company is still awaiting final approval from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), where it is based. Once this approval is obtained, Bakkt should be able to launch its new bitcoin futures.
Meanwhile, however, a real mystery has arisen about LedgerX’s similar bitcoin futures contracts.
Yesterday, it was officially announced that LedgerX had obtained the approval of the CFTC to launch its futures on physical bitcoins, to the point that it was even assumed that they could arrive on the American market before Bakkt.
However, Coindesk reports that they received an official denial from the CFTC. In a statement received on Thursday by the editorial staff, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission states:
“[LedgerX has] not yet been approved by the Commission”.
The fact is that LedgerX had already announced that it had launched the first bitcoin futures contracts in the US, but according to these recent statements this would not be true.
Paul Chou, CEO of LedgerX, had explicitly stated that clients could trade their bitcoin futures using their recently launched Omni platform, but the trading list does not seem to include them: there are only call and put options and Day-ahead swaps, which are other types of derivatives.
The company started offering bitcoin derivatives in 2017, in particular to institutional customers, but in order to also offer futures, it needs the CFTC designated contract markets (DCM) license, whose actual issuance is now a mystery.
