Bakkt Shares Surge 162% on Trump Media Acquisition Rumors

The price of Bakkt shares, the cryptocurrency exchange owned by Intercontinental Exchange, surged more than 162% on Monday after the Financial Times reported that Donald Trump’s media company is in advanced talks to acquire this cryptocurrency exchange.

Bakkt Holdings rose by 162.5% to $29.71 on November 18, continuing to rise the next day to a price of $34.59. Trump Media and Technology Group, which operates the social media platform Truth Social, ended the day up 16.6%, but lost about 3.5% in after-market trading, according to Google Finance.

The Financial Times reported earlier on November 18, citing two people familiar with the negotiations, that Trump Media, in which the newly elected U.S. president holds a 53% majority stake, is in advanced talks to purchase all of Bakkt’s shares owned by Intercontinental Exchange.

Cryptocurrency markets have risen since Trump’s election victory earlier this month, with bitcoin increasing by about 30%. Trump’s campaign promised to end regulatory hostility towards the cryptocurrency industry and create a strategic reserve of bitcoin, among other pro-crypto promises.

If successful, the deal would represent another step for Trump in the cryptocurrency space. The future president has already licensed his image for several collections of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and has supported his family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.

A spokesperson for Intercontinental Exchange said there was no comment on the reported deal. Trump Media and Bakkt also did not immediately respond to media requests.

The valuation of the reported deal is unknown, but Bakkt is now valued at over $400 million after the surge in shares, despite the exchange struggling to achieve profitability.

The company stated it would shut down its cryptocurrency custody business, which never took off. FT reported that it would not be included in the deal with Trump Media.

Bakkt: Trump’s Vehicle for Strategic Bitcoin Reserves?

Trump is expected to face difficulties in launching a bitcoin reserve as it would require Congressional approval.

– Establishing a bitcoin reserve would be difficult without Congressional approval, and the easiest way to circumvent that would be through an SPV – wrote Izabella Kaminska on X, the founder of the finance-focused news outlet The Blind Spot.

A special purpose vehicle (SPV) or special purpose entity (SPE) is a company created to isolate risk from its parent company and undertake limited operations, which in this case could be the purchase of bitcoin.

Kaminska speculated that Trump could use Trump Media ‘as a mechanism’ to create a strategic bitcoin reserve without Congressional approval.

She explained that, in theory, Trump could instruct Trump Media to use Bakkt as an SPV to purchase bitcoin and establish a profit transfer agreement to donate the company’s capital gains to the U.S. government.

– If people still think this is crazy, I don’t believe they realize how much privatization will come in Trump’s administration – Kaminska said.