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Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, risks delaying the launch of Bakkt, its bitcoin trading platform and custody platform, a second time that CoinDesk has learned.
The company established for the last time on January 24th as the launch date. However, the ICE has yet to receive the necessary approvals from the Commission for Commodities Trading in the United States (CFTC), and at the rate at which the agency is moving, it is unlikely that the approvals will be protected in time to reach this goal.
To be clear: this does not mean that the CFTC will ultimately not approve the plan. A person familiar with the internal functioning of the agency said that even the January 30th launch was still plausible, which means that the delay could only be a matter of days.
Specifically, the CFTC must grant an exemption for the Bakkt plan regarding the custody of bitcoins on behalf of its customers in its "warehouse", according to familiar sources with the regulatory discussions of the plan. CFTC regulations normally require clients' funds to be held by a bank, trust company or a future commission broker (FCM).
The agency staff finished examining Bakkt's exemption request and handed it to the commission on Friday, a source said. Now the commissioners must vote if they put the proposal for a public comment. After the 30-day comment period, the commissioners will probably take at least a couple of days to read the comments, so they will vote on the proposal itself.
But here's the deal: Monday and Tuesday are now federal public holidays. So, unless these government officials decide to work on their free days, the first that the commissioners will probably vote for a period of public commentary and then start the 30-day clock is Wednesday, December 26, the day after Christmas.
Already this would have pushed any final vote over the goal of launching Bakkt on January 24, even without taking into account the time needed to read the public comments. The possibility of an arrest of the US government threatens to delay the process further.
It is likely that the exchange will publish an updated launch date, but not until next week, according to another source.
This would be the second postponement. ICE had originally decided to launch the Bakkt in December, but last month claimed that the company's "volume of interest" and the "work needed to get all the pieces in place" required a delay .
Unlike bitcoin futures offered by CME Group and Cboe, Bakkt & # 39; s will be physically liquidated, which means actual bitcoins will change hands instead of cash when contracts expire.
Photo via Stan Higgins for CoinDesk. From left: Michael J. Casey, chairman of the CoinDesk advisory panel, interviews Baklik Kelly Loeffler CEO and ICE chief Jeffrey Sprecher at Consensus: Invest 2018.
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