The Intercontinental Exchange’s cryptocurrency venture Bakkt, which launched daily physically-settled bitcoin futures contracts earlier this year, has announced it’ll launch a crypto ‘consumer app’ next year.
According to a blog post published by Bakkt’s chief product officer Mike Blandina, the cryptocurrency consumer app will be launched in the first half of 2020, and will let consumers use crypto to buy goods from merchants.
The blog post reads:
We’ll be launching a consumer app to make it easy for consumers to discover and unlock the value of digital assets, as well as ways in which they can transact or track them. Merchants gain access to a broader set of customers with expanded spending power.
In the post Blandina hinted the app may not only support bitcoin, but other digital assets as well. He wrote a key feature of Bakkt’s model is designed to “support a superset of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies as seamlessly as investors transact in stocks in a retail brokerage account.”
He added Bakkt’s vision includes providing its customers a platform to manage a digital asset portfolio, whether these assets are going to be stored, traded, or transacted using that platform.
When Bakkt was first announced back in August of 2018, the Intercontinental Exchange noted it was partnering with Starbucks and other companies to provide its customers a retail experience. Blandina’s blog post noted Starbucks will be Bakkt’s first partner when the app goes live.
In the post Bakkt’s chief product officer also noted he has a strong conviction that by improving integration and efficiency in cryptocurrency wallets, and by improving transactions processing and payments acceptance, there are “meaningful opportunities for merchants and consumers to seamlessly interact using digital assets in ways that have not been previously considered.”
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