The
highly-anticipated launch of the Bitcoin futures trading platform Bakkt, owned
by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), has begun user acceptance testing of
its daily and monthly Bitcoin futures contracts. Contrary to what many expected,
however, the BTC price reacted negatively, dropping by 5 percent following the
announcement.
Bakkt
Kicks Off User Acceptance Testing (UAT):
As Tech Tic
Technologies reported last month, Bakkt
was scheduled to begin user acceptance testing yesterday. Right on schedule,
the Bitcoin futures trading platform announced that it had kicked off UAT of
its daily and monthly Bitcoin futures contracts.
Supposedly,
participants from around the world are involved. The interesting thing about
Bakkt’s Bitcoin futures contracts is that they are physically settled. This
means that once each contract expires, instead of receiving the cash equivalent
of the underlying asset, the user will receive the asset itself. In this case,
that’s Bitcoin.
There are two types of contracts, differentiated
by the settlement period. The first type will be settled daily, while the
second one will allow users
to receive exposure for a longer time frame and will be settled monthly.
It’s also
worth noting that Bakkt is supposed to contribute $35 million into its
clearinghouse risk waterfall. Moreover, the physical delivery and secure
storage of Bitcoin will be carried out using an integrated custody service
which will be subject to regulatory approval.
Bitcoin
Price Plunges in Response:
Interestingly
enough, the highly-anticipated launch of Bakkt’s UAT didn’t trigger any
positive action in Bitcoin’s price. On the contrary, the cryptocurrency is down
about 5 percent in the past 24 hours.
This
continues a losing streak for Bitcoin, which has lost a total of 18 percent in
the past two weeks and 7.8 percent in the last week alone.
At the time
of this writing, BTC is trading at around $10,130 and possesses a total market
cap of around $179 billion.
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