Bakkt Launches Testing Phase Of Its Physical Bitcoin Futures Contracts

• Bakkt is launching the testing phase of its Bitcoin futures contracts
• The goal is to offer physically-backed futures contracts to crypto investors

A testing phase of Bakkt, the platform created by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), is going to be launched today. This comes almost after a year since releasing and announcing its plans to offer physically-backed Bitcoin (BTC) futures contract to larger investors.

Bakkt Gets Ready To Test Its Bitcoin Futures Contracts

After failed attempts and delayed dates to launch its Bitcoin futures contracts to the market, Bakkt is going to be testing today this new solution for larger investors. Back in May this year, Bakkt announced that it was going to start testing the Bitcoin futures contracts in July. A few weeks later, they provided a specific launch date, July 22nd.

According to the company, they will be testing a monthly and a daily contract that the firm wants to offer to traders through the ICE Futures U.S. and that will be cleared through ICE Clear U.S. At the moment, there is no information about what the firm wants to achieve with this testing. Clearly, they want to check whether the systems respond as expected, that the processes were implemented correctly and they will also try to find bugs and other issues that would be fixed before the launching of the official network.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has been offering bitcoin futures contracts since December 2017 alongside the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) that decided to shut down its operations a few months ago.

Bakkt is not the only company trying to launch physically-backed Bitcoin futures contracts in the United States. For example, LedgerX and ErisX have also received approvals from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) a few weeks ago to offer their own products. However, none of these companies has released a timeline for their products.

The cryptocurrency market is getting more mature as time passes and new and respected companies are entering the market to offer services to larger investors that do not trust the current infrastructure in the crypto space.

@Bakkt may be a "moonshot bet" but the market structure problems we're solving are real. User testing starts July 22nd – learn more here:https://t.co/AwJ6OgBdn5

— Adam White (@WhiteAdamL) June 13, 2019

Bakkt has also acquired Digital Asset Custody Company (DACC) that provides crypto custody solutions for institutional investors. This is something very important because regulators claimed that the market did not have the necessary custody services for it to continue expanding.

Individuals in the cryptocurrency market are trying to understand which is the impact that the testing period will bring to the market and the price of Bitcoin. Currently, each Bitcoin can be purchased for $10367 according to data provided by CoinMarketCap. It also has a market capitalization of $185 billion.