The international regulatory environment for cryptocurrency is improving, and the company is eyeing a retail expansion on the continent, Bakkt chief product officer Dan O’Prey said. On the whole, O’Prey saw positive long-term trends.
Speaking to Cointelegraph’s U.S. News Editor, Sam Bourgi, at Bitcoin 2023, O’Prey described Bakkt as prioritizing its role as a “B2B2C” company for the past two years. As such, it has seen “a significant portion of the major institutional interest” focused on Bitcoin (BTC), in spite of the aftermath of the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. He said:
“We saw last year a lot of fallout and issues with companies, practices and coins in this space that I think have dragged Bitcoin down with it, even though those had nothing to do with Bitcoin.”
Bitcoin has benefited from the lack of regulatory clarity in the United States relative to other cryptocurrencies, as its status as a commodity has been established by regulators. Nonetheless, lack of regulatory clarity in the U.S. for cryptocurrencies in general has been “definitely the…