Bakkt has introduced that it’s going to acquire loyalty program provider Bridge2 Solutions in a transfer that would open up a trillion-dollar marketplace for the fledgling crypto trade, in accordance with the CEO of its mother or father firm, the Intercontinental Change (ICE).
Bridge2 is a loyalty rewards platform for retailers and monetary establishments with a mixed whole of $60 billion price of reward factors, according to Fortune. Bakkt intends to leverage Bridge2’s present service provider relationships to construct out its personal client app. Bridge2 additionally operates a pilot undertaking known as Loyalty Pay, which, when built-in with Bakkt, will permit retailers to hyperlink fee processes on to the Bakkt app, due to this fact eradicating a 2.5% interchange price charged by banks.
Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of Bakkt’s mother or father firm ICE, mentioned throughout its earnings name on Thursday, “the subsequent large hurdle for the corporate will likely be getting that app into client fingers and we will likely be client adoption greater than income or expense. Fortuitously, that firm just isn’t a giant drain on us … we now have numerous monetary flexibility now from the corporate given it has a income stream each from buying and selling and from operation of all these rewards packages.”
Bakkt intends to launch the app within the first half of 2020.
The announcement comes as Bakkt prepares to enter the second section of development, one that’s aimed toward increasing client adoption, following a vastly underwhelming first few months of operation. Final week, it was reported that the trade noticed precisely zero Bitcoin choices traded; previous to that, the final exercise reported was on January 17 when 20 choices modified fingers.
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Bakkt’s bodily settled futures contracts, which had been launched in December, had been additionally met with underwhelming volumes within the early days—a incontrovertible fact that was instantly unfavorably compared with the fiat-settled BTC futures on closest rival the Chicago Mercantile Change (CME), which first went to market in December 2017.
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