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Bakkt CEO Kelly Loeffler appointed to US Senate, will depart Bakkt

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Kemp kicks Collins, backs Bakkt's Loeffler, Loeffler leaving Bakkt.

Bakkt Bitcoin trading platform CEO Kelly Loeffler will be departing as CEO, following her appointment to the Georgia senate.

That's the US state of Georgia, not the Eastern European Bitcoin mining powerhouse nation.

It's not yet clear who will be filling her shoes after she departs Bakkt, but CoinDesk speculates that former Coinbase executive Adam White could be the person for the job.

Bakkt began trading with low volumes, but it's picked up rapidly in the last couple of weeks and is now consistently trading at much higher volumes than before, although it's still dwarfed by the other big trading platforms such as BitMEX and Binance.

Uniquely, Bakkt is a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of New York Stock Exchange and many other major markets, which helps cement Bakkt as a tightly-regulated and highly legitimate Bitcoin trading platform. It's often attributed with bringing more credibility to Bitcoin and the digital asset markets as a whole.

"We are grateful to Kelly for her many contributions to Intercontinental Exchange spanning seventeen years and will miss her wisdom and counsel on the executive team and leadership of Bakkt," said ICE spokesman Josh King. "Intercontinental Exchange has a proud tradition of service to the community, and we applaud Kelly’s sense of duty to step forward to serve her country and represent the people of Georgia in the U.S. Senate."

In a statement, Loeffler reportedly said:

"I haven’t spent my life trying to get to Washington. But here's what folks are gonna find out about me: I'm a lifelong conservative. Pro-Second Amendment. Pro-military. Pro-wall. And pro-Trump. I make no apologies for my conservative values, and will proudly support President Trump’s conservative judges."

According to the AJC, outgoing governor Brian Kemp's choice of Loeffler may have been part of a twin effort to appeal to women, who have abandoned Georgia's Republican Party in large numbers in recent years, to try to get some of Loeffler's personal fortune in the GOP war chest for future campaigns.

Kemp's decision to appoint Loeffler has prompted some infighting in Georgia's Republican Party, because President Trump had previously urged Kemp to appoint Doug Collins instead.

Unconfirmed, and probably unreliable, reports say that if Collins is not appointed instead, Georgia's Republican Party may hard fork and re-launch the state as Georgia Cash.



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Disclosure: The author holds BNB, BTC at the time of writing.

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