Mike Blandina, a former engineering executive for Google Wallet by Google and Paypal joins the Bakkt executive team as Chief Product Officer. In a blogpost for Medium, the CEO of Bakkt, Kelly Loeffler made the announcement

Towards the end, I’m pleased to share the news that Mike Blandina has joined as Chief Product Officer. As our CPO, Mike will lead our efforts to converge a trusted ecosystem for digital assets with payment use cases, two elements of Bakkt that help bring a real world application to bitcoin and other crptocurrencies.

The announcement comes after essential recruits such as Adam White, the former executive of Coinbase and Balaji Devarasetty from Worldpay as the VP of Tech have officially become associated with Bakkt. According to Kelly Loeffler in anticipation of the ‘Race Day’, Bakkt is assembling ‘a team of trailblazers and doers- those who want to deliver on the shared vision for digital assets, and who work tirelessly to execute and deliver.’

With over 25 years of experience in payments across product, engineering, strategy and operations, Mike Blandina’s is the right person for the job and his career portfolio includes a wide range of companies and start-ups such as Paypal, One Market (IPO), Google, TxVia, Blackhawk Network, Money 20/20 to name a few.

Regulatory Approvals causing delay in the Launch of the Bakkt platform

Earlier this year, the NYSC- Intercontinental Exchange backed Bakkt revealed to CNN that it would be filling in key positions in the company including Director of Blockchain Engineering, Director of Security Engineering, Senior full-stack Engineer, Mobile Developer, Software Development Engineer in-test, Director of Finance, Institutional Sales, and senior Java Engineer. Although the bitcoin future exchange has made a couple of announcements relating to executive hiring, the launch date seems to be mired in ‘regulatory approvals’.

According to Kelly Loeffer, CEO of Bakkt, they are working closely with Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)