BAKKT To The Future With a Digital Wallet

BAKKT To The Future With a Digital Wallet

By Philip Dudley

Bakkt. Dharma. Xapo. MetaMask.

That may sound like words of ancient Greek, but it’s nothing of the sort. Welcome to the new world of digital wallets, an app on our phones and laptops that is opening up a new frontier of the internet 3.0 revolution.

I’m well-versed in PayPal (PYPL) and Square (SQ) because I’ve been laser-focused on how they have and continue to disrupt traditional financial services. I’ll also admit that I’ve been a little late to the digital wallet party, but I now have my glass of punch and I’m definitely paying attention.

So what are these things anyway?

The simplest answer: they’re all the same, yet different.

Bakkt is a custody service that stores Bitcoin in cold storage. Dharma is an Ethereum wallet that connects your bank account to the world of DeFi (short for Decentralized Finance). Xapo is a hybrid digital wallet allowing its users to send, receive, store and spend traditional currencies and Bitcoin. MetaMask is an Ethereum wallet used to interact with decentralized applications on the Blockchain.

Xapo has a cool (no pun intended) story because it offers cold storage in underground vaults. Literally. The Swiss Xapo vault is located inside a decommissioned Swiss military bunker. James Bond has nothing on this Xapo crew.

In the end, this also is a generational story. I’ve had many conversations with folks of a certain age about digital wallets and such. One such gentleman has a habit of buying gold coins through the mail with cash. That’s right—the old greenback way. While there’s nothing wrong with buying gold through the mail with an envelope full of Benjamins, I would suggest a better way forward with DeFi and digital gold.

Two weeks ago I was reminded of how far we’ve come as a modern society.

Remember my long lost fictional friend Bushrod Rust? Well, while walking the dogs one morning, I stepped over a bronze coin in the road bed adjacent to the house. I initially thought it was a British pound, only to discover it was a Coronet Liberty Head Large Cent minted in Philadelphia in 1817.

The fascination is two-fold: How did it manage to survive 204 years? And how did it get there? We’ll never know, but I imagine it fell out of Bushrod’s pocket while he was distracted on horseback. On the other hand, if he had it stored in his Xapo wallet in a bunker in the Swiss Alps, it might still be there.

Philip Dudley is Managing Partner of Dudley Capital Management, LLC at 115 The Plains Road, Suite 250 in Middleburg. For more information he can be reached at 540-687-4600 (office), 202-441-7707 (cell) or philip@ dudleycapital.com

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