It's been a while since we visited ol Bakkt, lets see how they've been doing...
Bakkt launched late last year with very high expectations.
They are going to bridge the gap between the institutional investors and bitcoin.
They were backed by ICE and had numerous Wall Street connections.
This was going to be how bitcoin finally made its way onto the main stage.
Except they didn't...
After a very slow start, Bakkt started to see the volume and activity pick up with their bitcoin futures product over the following months.
The problem is that it really never went anywhere from there.
Here's a chart of their weekly USD volume totals:
(Source:
)https://twitter.com/BakktBot/status/1272227559317680128
- BakktBot
As you can see, things picked up initially but then basically leveled off.
It saw a high of $124 million in a week within the first couple months of trading. Since that time it has only breached that number a handful of times.
With the all time high happening in the first couple weeks of 2020 at $146 million dollar volume for the week.
Not where they hoped they would be...
All things considered, after almost a year of trading, I would say Bakkt has been a major letdown.
They haven't been the bridge between institutional money and bitcoin that many had hoped and the dollar volumes have continued to be relatively low.
Especially when you compare them to the CME which routinely does more dollar volume in a single day that Bakkt does in several weeks of trading.
What makes it even worse is that the CME as well as other derivatives exchanges have continued to see steady growth and record high volume totals and activity levels as of late, while Bakkt is failing to see much growth at all.
Bakkt was a major part of the reason BTC ran up to $14k back in June of last year, but has since been mostly a disappointment.
The silver lining is that they are still early and no on else has really been able to bring in institutions by the truckload either.
Grayscale is doing the best of anyone and they are only now just starting to really take off.
Plus Bakkt has struck some partnerships, like the one with Galaxy Digital Assets, that will help keep it relevant in the space..
Overall, I suspect if Bakkt doesn't figure out how to get some more volume and activity in its product, it may not be around a couple years from now.
Which would be a real shame considering what they went through to launch in the first place (over a year's worth of delays).
The silver lining in all of this is that a major bull market cures a lot of ails an history says we are at the very beginning stages of one.
Stay informed my friends.
-Doc