Bakkt, once Wall Street’s hot crypto play, has cooled

livemint.com:

A cryptocurrency venture launched with fanfare by the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange is fighting to get back on track after a stock-market beatdown.

Shares of Bakkt Holdings Inc. are down 80% since October.

Bakkt is set to report results Thursday for its first quarter as a stand-alone public company. The numbers will shed light on how much progress Bakkt has made toward fulfilling its ambitious targets for revenue and user growth. It laid out the targets in January 2021, when NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange Inc. unveiled plans to take Bakkt public by merging it with a special-purpose acquisition company.

Bakkt has changed its business model several times since its creation in 2018 and has had four chief executives in as many years. It initially focused on running a platform for trading bitcoin futures. It now focuses on providing technology to banks, credit-card issuers and companies with customer-loyalty programs, such as hotel and restaurant chains. Bakkt’s technology lets such companies integrate crypto, points and gift cards in various ways.

For instance, banks can use Bakkt to let their customers invest in bitcoin and ether. Guests at hotel chains can use Bakkt to swap points for cash or crypto. Bakkt can also be used to make payments using digital currencies.

Skeptics question whether Bakkt has a path to profitability. The company has said it expects to post a pretax loss of $150 million to $155 million for the fourth quarter of 2021, largely due to noncash accounting charges. That came after a $28.8 million loss in the third quarter.

“Bakkt is losing tens of millions of dollars a quarter, and I don’t know how they’ll ever make money," said David Trainer, chief executive of independent