Crystal Kim
Bakkt Holdings Inc. shares slid as much as 21% after quarterly results left investors questioning how long the digital-asset marketplace will take to realize its much ballyhooed potential.
The slide comes even after the Alpharetta, Georgia-based company reported revenue of $39.4 million, an almost 40% jump from the year-earlier period. Investors on a conference call keyed on the firm’s 2022 outlook, asking whether Bakkt could meet months-old projections made in the midst of its merger with a blank-check company.
Bakkt, majority owned by New York Stock Exchange parent Intercontinental Exchange Inc., said it expects to double revenue at the high end of its guided range of $60 million to $80 million. The company is also earmarking $150 million to $170 million of cash to invest in its growth.
“We’re just getting started,” Bakkt Chief Gavin Michael said in an interview with Bloomberg, adding that the company was aggressively investing to grow into the crypto platform they “believe” they can be.
The stock had became a market darling after the SPAC deal. In a mid-May presentation, it projected 9 million active users by the end of its first year as a public company and total revenue of $889 million.
Michael said the company had assumed an earlier closing date for the SPAC transaction when those projections were made, and that it would be using “transacting accounts” metric instead of the “active users” metric shown in the presentation. Because Bakkt services institutions and retail clients, “transacting accounts” would more broadly capture activity on their platform, Michael said, rather than “active users” which measures activity on their app.
