Owner of New York Stock Exchange Would Allow Potential Investors to Trade Bitcoin

Georgia-based Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), a company operating 23 regulated exchanges and marketplaces, and the owner of the New York Stock Exchange has been creating an online platform to allow investors to buy and hold Bitcoin. ICE first appeared in the digital currencies market through a cryptocurrency data feed in March.

ICE has organised talks with other financial institutions about the project being developed and it has been asking not to be identified due to confidentiality of the conversations otherwise the project could be aborted prematurely.

In December 2017, Wall Street firms started giving clients futures from Cboe Global Markets and CME Group, but the financial sector has been timid from trading bitcoin. The reason is that virtual currencies can be hacked and stolen and this problem has happened very many times on most cryptocurrency firms. So traditional Wall Street firms will have to find out how to reserve such assets safely in order to facilitate and boom investment.

Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs disclosed that it was operating on a cryptocurrency trading desk earlier in May. Very many trading firms have been dealing with cryptocurrency including Chicago-based HFTs like  Jump Trading and DRW

Potential investors may be given swaps by Intercontinental Exchange that would end with the consumer owning bitcoin the following day. These contracts would set the trading under the control of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Jeffrey Sprecher, ICE Chief Executive Officer promised to reject offering contracts based on digital currencies, in last month's interview:

"There is a trend here we can't ignore in my mind, so I don't discount it."

The undertaking will have a bigger advantage over existing cryptocurrency exchanges firms that lack the mature market structure of equities exchanges such as Nasdaq and the NYSE.

Goldman Sachs Group has been tirelessly working on enlarging contract types available to different investors as it arranges to open a bitcoin trading business. The bank will presumably buy and sell bitcoin futures in a principal, market-making capacity and will make non-deliverable forward products.

In April, Nasdaq partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Gemini and is soon launching a futures cryptocurrency market. Adena Friedman, CEO Nasdaq said the firm could in future launch a crypto exchange.