The entity
Bakkt, Inc. is a Delaware corporation whose Class A common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BKKT, with its head office in Atlanta. Its 2025 annual report says it was founded in 2018. Its own filings describe its platform as "born out of our former parent company, Intercontinental Exchange, Inc." ICE built it, and Bakkt's public listing came later and by a different route.
That route was a blank cheque company. VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings was incorporated in the Cayman Islands on 31 July 2020, raised $200.0 million gross in an initial public offering that closed on 25 September 2020, and completed its business combination with Bakkt on 15 October 2021, at which point it took the Bakkt name. The registrant filed as Bakkt Holdings, Inc. until January 2026 and as Bakkt, Inc. since.
What it built for Bitcoin
The Bitcoin-specific piece is a custodian and a contract, and they were designed as one thing. Bakkt Trust Company LLC is a limited purpose trust company chartered under the New York Banking Law and supervised by the New York State Department of Financial Services. It was marketed as the Bakkt Warehouse. In September 2019, Bakkt Trust, ICE Futures U.S. and ICE Clear US brought to market what Bakkt's filings call end-to-end regulated, physically delivered bitcoin futures and options.
Physical delivery is the whole point of the design, and it is what separates this from the cash-settled contract listed at CME in December 2017. A cash-settled future pays out dollars against a reference rate and no coin ever moves. A physically delivered future ends with actual bitcoin moving into a regulated custodian's control on behalf of the buyer. That required a qualified custodian that a US institution's rules would accept, which is why the trust company had to exist before the contract could.
Where it went
Bakkt sold the custodian. On 17 March 2025 it agreed to sell all of the equity of Bakkt Trust to Intercontinental Exchange Holdings for $1.5 million in cash plus assumption of Bakkt Trust's regulatory capital requirement, about $3.0 million at signing.
The company that remains is a payments and trading infrastructure business organised around Bakkt Markets, Bakkt Agent and Bakkt Global. Its 2025 annual report states that its regulated subsidiary holds 46 active state money transmitter licences and a New York virtual currency business licence, and that customer digital assets are now held mainly with third-party custodians, with about 5 percent self-custodied as of 31 December 2025.