Bitcoin reached the bottom. $3,600 to which the cryptocurrency fell on the next to the last weekend of November, has coincided with the massive Black Friday sales in stores, a general fall in the market, bitcoin cash fork, and other significant and less important events formed a psychological threshold beyond which there is nowhere to fall. Miners are beginning to turn off their equipment since earning bitcoin below this price level is no longer profitable. But you can't return the ASIC to the store, so the rates are beginning to return back to normal.
What is happening now is good. It doesn’t take a genius to make money in a growing market, and the crypto market is rather stupid. Aside from the magical ‘institutional investors’ — a significant part of the funds that are currently in the market is the money of private investors, who a year ago made a bet on a miracle and a possibility of sudden enrichment. Miracles are hard to come by these days so the market is cleaning out the fools by itself.
Throughout the summer, the treasured letters ETF rattled in the news. With the advent of this financial instrument, there were hopes for growth: the appearance of the traditional solutions for old money should have attracted the big bucks. But the expectations were not fulfilled. SEC’s decision was constantly postponed, there were no specifics and any hope for it was delayed until March 2019, which is a very long time for our rapidly changing world. Everyone has forgotten about the ETFs now.
In reality, large funds have arrived a long time ago and at all stages, from storage to the transfer of cryptocurrencies, services have appeared that are not inferior in reliability to the classical solutions. State supervision and regulations have followed. There were the XBT futures at the Chicago Stock Exchange, allowing for a quite legitimate way to invest in cryptocurrency. Everything seems to be in place, but the market is not growing. Well, this is just temporary.
We are not waiting, but preparing instead. The next key date for bitcoin is January 23. It is on this date that the cryptocurrency is expected to enter a real exchange. All that has been happening before are just experiments. Even the aforementioned CBOE futures — an experiment that even allows investing in bitcoin, though just for fun as you still get the money in dollars. A new player must do everything like an adult.
Bakkt, which has a name derived from the word ‘backed’, is the product of these real stockbrokers. The initiator of the ICE Group is an intercontinental stock exchange, the main asset of which is the New York Stock Exchange, familiar even to those who know little about the stock market. Little nyse in other words? For strategic partnerships, there are Microsoft, which is fighting with IBM for a place under the solar blockchain, the Boston Consulting Group, which not a single major project can live without, and for example Starbucks. The addition of the famous coffee house to the mix forced the latter to make excuses: no, we will not be selling coffee for crypto. But we will help with the exchange.
Bakkt also has rather a lot of money. The amounts to be invested are not being disclosed, but a number of large funds were included in the project. Yes, and the parent company — ICE — is more than good with money: the owner of the stock exchanges is itself a joint stock company whose shares are sold on their own stock exchanges. Bakkt certainly has a lot of backing.
People write about Bakkt as if it is a new exchange or a platform, but this is not entirely true. Bakkt is a real bitcoin on the stock exchange, everything that happened before is like a make-believe. Bakkt is bitcoin futures with physical delivery of cryptocurrency. This means that buyers have the opportunity to get bitcoins in their wallet. The procedure familiar to cryptocurrency exchanges promises to deliver a miracle to the traditional market.
Despite having it around for a few years, bitcoin is still a difficult thing for institutional investors who are used to working in regulated markets with understandable entities. And here is a cryptocurrency, which is neither a good, nor the money, or potentially the digital gold. To bring this to the adult market is an extraordinary task which Bakkt is attempting to solve. Secure storage of cryptocurrency, auditing, fair trade at the largest platform, and finally — the delivery of an asset. Big business needs guarantees and Bakkt does give them.
The launch of Bakkt will not guarantee the stability of the rate or its growth, but it will demonstrate to others around an important fact: bitcoin can be anywhere and anything. A payment instrument for which you can buy a car, as a commodity that can be purchased at a tobacco shop on the streets of Paris, as an asset on the stock market, the price of which is discussed daily in the pages of the financial press.
The cryptocurrency market is not tied to the news, but lives by expectations. Two years ago there were hopes that projects that raised money through ICOs would turn the world upside down, no one thought that this would happen in the way which affected the value of all assets. A year ago, we waited for the lightning network, thinking that the speed of transactions would lead to the adaptation of cryptocurrency, then we waited for the laws, then the ETF, now for the real futures instruments.
It’s just dumb to start panicking and talking about the beginning of an end. The whole world is just beginning to understand how to live with this all, the tools both technological and financial are only just emerging. Right before our eyes, on the one hand, the legal industry based on new technologies is developing, and on the other — an independent financial decentralized market is taking shape. All this allows us to conclude: until the last of us reaches the moon, the prices will not cease to grow. Not advertising, but hope is the main engine of progress. And we have plenty of it.