blockmanity.com
Bakkt, a crypto-asset platform backed by the ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) who also owns the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has raised its first round of funding led by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.
They managed to raise $182.5 million as their Series A funding round from seasoned investors, including Boston Consulting Group, CMT Digital, Eagle Seven, Galaxy Digital, Goldfinch Partners, Alan Howard, Horizons Ventures, Intercontinental Exchange, Microsoft’s venture capital arm, M12, Pantera Capital, PayU, the Fintech arm of Naspers, and Protocol Ventures.
90-year-old Li Ka-shing founded Horizons Ventures and is ranked the 23rd richest man in the world as per Forbes. Horizons Ventures have a history of crypto-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 significant amount of hype around 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 appealing is that it will deliver physically backed Bitcoin unlike its competitors CME and CBOE who only deal in futures contracts.
ICE has also announced partnerships with two of the big names: Starbucks and Microsoft.
Starbucks will work with Bakkt to enable users to use Cryptocurrencies to buy coffee which is a big deal as Starbucks has one of the most robust payment systems with Millions of users.
According to Ejinsight “Bakkt also plans to leverage Microsoft’s cloud computing platform to build a global regulated ecosystem for digital assets that would allow wider adoption of cryptocurrencies by merchants”
It will be interesting to see how major players like Bakkt will push the Crypto ecosystem forward.