Hedge fund manager Brian Kelly, while appearing on CNBC’s Fast Money, has called Intercontinental Exchange’s announcement about its new Bakkt platform as the “biggest news of the year.”
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), recently announced that with the help of technology partner Microsoft, it was planning to launch a new digital asset platform called Bakkt.
ICE also owns 23 exchanges worldwide apart from the NYSE along with many futures exchanges and clearing houses. Starbucks and Microsoft will be major partners of Bakkt and will begin accepting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bakkt is also planning on launching physically-settled Bitcoin futures by November 2018, which would be a mechanism for institutional investors worldwide to easily buy Bitcoin.
Kelly explained his “biggest news of the year” statement after rejecting that ETF would be approved by the SEC this year, suggesting that he’s not actually optimistic on them being approved in 2018, but the speculation surrounding them will maintain investor interest in Bitcoin regardless of the outcome.
He thinks that ICE’s move is better than Bitcoin futures due to its limitations, given that there are “a limited set of people that can trade it… And a lot of people use it for hedging.”
He recently stated that the last Bitcoin price boost following the CNBC announcement was here to stay, only to see the market drop again a week later. When asked if the ICE announcement might have more effect on prices and whether it would meet with success, he responded:
“Oh, yeah! Absolutely! I mean, they are talking about launching in November… They have been working on this in stealth mode for the last 14 months, they have already talked to regulators, they are ready to go.”
He put the lack of market response to “the biggest news of the year” down to time difference and that he expected there would be a response. Bitcoin at the time of writing is $7,473.89 (CMC). He suggested:
“Back in January, Bitcoin would have gone up 20% on this news. So, I think the bear market has just broken people’s spirit, frankly, and so people aren’t really looking for this… A lot of people I talked to today hadn’t seen the news–came out at 08:30 [UTC -04:00]–people hadn’t seen it till 2, 3 in the afternoon. So, the market is still digesting this, and remember most of Bitcoin trading happens in Asia; so, it was released at 08:30 this morning, that’s 09:30, 10:00 at night on a Friday night in Asia. [When] Asia wakes up, you might see this thing pop.”
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