- Bakkt hires Mike Blandina, a PayPal and Google veteran as Chief Product Officer
- Mike Blandina has 25 years of experience in the payments and fintech industry
- Bakkt is still awaiting regulator’s approval for a bitcoin futures contract
Bakkt, a bitcoin trading and custody platform founded in 2018 by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE ) announced on April 11, 2019 that it has engaged the services of Mike Blandina, a former director of engineering for Google Wallet at Google, to function as Chief Product Officer (CPO), in a bid to meet its goal of converging a trusted digital assets ecosystem with payments use cases.
Bakkt Hires Mike Blandina as Chief Product Officer
Per the blog post, Bakkt has hired Mike Blandina, a technology veteran with 25 years of experience in payments ranging from engineering, product, strategy, and operations, as the company’s CPO.
Blandina has reportedly served as the director of engineering for Google Wallet at Google, a search engine giant, head of payments and credit engineering at PayPal, an online payments system, and Chief technology officer (CTO) at OneMarket, a retail technology network.
The former CTO of Blackhawk Network, a gift card, and digital payment company has established a good number of successful tech startups. He began his career writing software in the United States Army and has served as a member of the Money2020 advisory board.
Mike Blandina’s Level of Expertise to Promote Bakkt’s Effort
That being the case, Mike Blandina is believed to have a high level of experience when it comes to the payments, and fintech industry which will help to promote Bakkt’s effort to create a trusted ecosystem for virtual currencies with payments use cases.
According to the bitcoin futures exchange, these are the two elements that can give bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies real-life applications.
It will also build an innovative platform for securing and transacting cryptocurrencies.
It further outlined that one of its most important aspects, is human and not technological and as such, to build an innovative company means assembling a team of “trailblazers and doers” who can work tirelessly to execute and deliver on Bakkt’s vision for digital currencies.
Bakkt Hires Reputable Members of the Fintech Industry
It’s worth noting that Bakkt has been building its team with highly reputed members of the fintech industry such as Balaji Devarasetty, a former senior leader of technology at WorldPay, a payment processing company.
Devarasetty currently serves as Bakkt’s vice president of information technology.
The same can be said about Adam White, former head of institution products at Coinbase who is now working as Bakkt’s Chief Operating Officer and head of institutional custody and traded products.
Specifically, Bakkt has hinted that it is still awaiting the approval of U.S financial regulators before commencing operations.
According to Bakkt:
“As we work through regulatory approvals, we are mindful that the infrastructure we are building has the potential to create more opportunities for digital assets to grow in relevance and trust — by being more secure, investible and useful.”
In related news, Blockchain Reporter informed on March 23, 2019, that the U.S. CFTC is not entirely confident about Bakkt’s bitcoin custody offering which as a result, has brought about a delay in its approval.
