Byte Me

Surprising exactly no one, big beast exchange ICE has joined its peers and entered the cryptocurrency market in earnest. More than eight months after competitors Cboe and CME launched cash-settled bitcoin futures contracts, this month ICE revealed Bakkt, a “global platform and ecosystem for digital assets”.

FCoin, a huge new cryptocurrency exchange by volume, is only two months old and was virtually unknown up until it brought the network of the second largest cryptocurrency in the world to a standstill and made a lot of people very angry.

When bitcoin futures were launched in December last year, there was excitement, fear and outrage all at once. Critics, including the Futures Industry Association, piled pressure on to US derivatives regulator the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, demanding better safeguards for such products. Cheerleaders may see the asset class as a great way to earn big in markets dogged by low yields but the doubters, of which Byte Me is one, may yet be proven right.

Cryptocurrencies had an incredible run last year, but for them to really hit the mainstream, their advocates should study the sort of old money institutions many of them oppose: central banks.

The minefield of what a cryptocurrency is might have been able to remain comfortably in the realms of the philosophical, if it were not for the relentlessly grounded and literal approach of the US Internal Revenue Service.

Welcome to ByteMe, GlobalCapital’s new column, providing an informed, critical and irreverent take on the newest and biggest issues in technology — specifically the bits of it involved in moving money around.