In brief
- Bakkt shares jumped 18% on news of DTR acquisition, peaking above $20—the highest since November.
- Co-CEO Akshay Naheta will become sole CEO; the company will rebrand to Bakkt, Inc. later this month.
- Deal follows major client losses in 2025 when Bank of America and Webull ended agreements.
Digital asset platform Bakkt Holdings saw its share price jump earlier today after the company announced that it’s acquiring a global stablecoin payments infrastructure firm in an equity-based transaction.
The deal to acquire Distributed Technologies Research is still pending SEC and Bakkt shareholder approval.
Bakkt, which has its shares trading on the NYSE under the BKKT ticker, peaked above $20 on Monday—the highest it’s been since November. The stock retraced slightly ahead of the New York session close, finishing at a price of $19.21, but it’s still sitting 18% higher than it was at the opening bell.
The move to acquire Distributed Technologies Research materially accelerates the company’s strategy around programmable money, global settlement, and next-generation financial infrastructure, Bakkt said in a press release shared with Decrypt. The deal will also see Akshay Naheta, who’s served as the firm’s co-CEO since March 2025, become the combined company’s sole CEO.
“This transaction represents the culmination of a single, cohesive strategy,” Naheta said in a press release. “Bringing DTR fully into Bakkt completes the transformation of the company into a unified global financial infrastructure platform, combining Bakkt’s market presence and regulatory framework with DTR’s technology.”
The acquisition also means that Bakkt Holdings will now be known Bakkt, Inc. starting later this month. The company said it has scheduled an Investor Day on March 17 at the New York Stock Exchange.
Bakkt is still majority owned by Intercontinental Exchange, which sometimes goes by ICE. It’s the same company that owns the New York Stock Exchange.
When Naheta took over as co-CEO last year, the company had just inked a deal to integrate DTR’s stablecoin technology into its platform.
But the company had also just announced some troubling news: In March 2025, two of its largest clients—Bank of America and Webull—gave notice that they would not renew their commercial agreements with the firm. And according to the firm’s SEC filing, Webull represented 74% of its crypto services revenue at the time.
The sudden disappearance of almost all the company’s crypto services revenue spurred an investor lawsuit.
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