Bakkt, a cryptographic asset platform backed by the ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) which also owns the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), has raised its first round of financing led by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.
They managed to raise $ 182.5 million as their Series A financing round of experienced investors, including Boston Consulting Group, Digital CMT, Eagle Seven, Galaxy Digital, Goldfinch Partners, Alan Howard, Horizons Ventures, Intercontinental Exchange, Microsoft’s venture capital division , M12, Pantera Capital, PayU, the Fintech arm of Naspers and Protocol Ventures.
Li Ka-shing, 90, founded Horizons Ventures and is ranked as the 23rd richest man in the world according to Forbes. Horizons Ventures has a history of cryptographic investments in Bitpay in 2013 and Blockstream in 2016.
We are pleased to confirm that we have completed our first round of funding of $ 182.5 million https://t.co/Cc2EsoQMcT – Bakkt (@Bakkt) December 31, 2018
Although the launch of the Bakkt platform has been postponed to January due to regulatory hurdles, there is still a lot of publicity surrounding the launch. Bakkt is backed by the Intercontinental Exchange, which is one of the most trusted players in finance, but what makes Bakkt even more attractive is that it will deliver physically backed Bitcoin unlike its competitors CME and CBOE that only negotiate futures contracts.
ICE has also announced partnerships with two of the biggest names: Starbucks and Microsoft. Starbucks will work with Bakkt to allow users to use cryptocurrencies to buy coffee, which is a big problem since Starbucks has one of the most solid payment systems with millions of users.
According to Ejinsight;
“Bakkt also plans to take advantage of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform to build a global regulated ecosystem for digital assets that allows greater adoption of cryptocurrencies by merchants”
It will be interesting to see how the main players like Bakkt will drive the cryptocurrency ecosystem forward.
Photo by Simon Zhu on Unsplash
Also published on Medium.