Warren Buffett recently made headlines by comparing Bitcoin to rat poison and predicting that cryptocurrencies will “come to bad endings.” The Google search string “warren buffett bitcoin rat poison” returns nearly 1 million hits.

Meanwhile, Jeff Sprecher’s announcement of his new cryptocurrency venture, Bakkt, went virtually unnoticed outside of the crypto-fanatic world. (A Google search of “sprecher bakkt” returns less than 15,000 hits). Given Buffett’s near legendary status in the investment community, this lopsided attention is not overly surprising.

But if Sprecher’s venture works, he will easily surpass Buffett’s position in the Wall Street pantheon.

Buffet has a problem with Bitcoin as an investment because he dislikes investing in assets that do not literally produce value. He told CNBC:

[Bitcoin] itself is creating nothing. When you're buying nonproductive assets, all you're counting on is the next person is going to pay you more because they're even more excited about another next person coming along."

Leaving aside whether rat-poison-producing companies produce anything of value, perhaps Buffett is onto something. Far be it from me to suggest that Warren Buffett change his investment strategies.

Still, his point is practically irrelevant to the underlying use value of cryptocurrency. Appealing to value-investors did not spur the development of Bitcoin. He’s missing – or perhaps doesn’t care – about two larger points.

First, cryptocurrencies now function as a money substitute and a payments system, even though they have yet to reach widespread acceptance relative to national currencies. The second point, and it’s related to the first, is that cryptocurrencies have the potential to drastically reduce transaction costs relative to existing payment systems.

These two points are why Sprecher and his partner, Kelly Loeffler, are on the brink of bringing cryptocurrency to Main Street.

First, an introduction is in order.

Sprecher is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. He is a “disrupter par excellence” and “stands alone as the leading force in modernizing the world’s exchanges in recent years from open-outcry pits into super-efficient electronic marketplaces.”

In layman’s terms, he saved the New York Stock Exchange.

Loeffler has worked in various roles at ICE since 2002, and she recently ran point on ICE’s digital assets group. She is now going to serve as the CEO of Bakkt, the new venture that aims to bring cryptocurrency into the mainstream. To achieve this vision, ICE is partnering with, among others, Microsoft and Starbucks. According to Loeffler:

Bakkt is designed to serve as a scalable on-ramp for institutional, merchant, and consumer participation in digital assets by promoting greater efficiency, security, and utility."

The first part of Loeffler’s sentence bears highlighting: Bakkt aims to serve (1) institutional investors; (2) merchants; and, (3) consumers.

Not to slight Microsoft’s role, but the fact that Starbucks, with its massive retail presence, has been a leading player in mobile payments instantly gets the ball rolling with merchants and consumers. While it may be less obvious, it is no less significant to this venture that merchants and institutional investors are also tied together.

The importance of this connection between institutional investors and merchants cannot be overstated. This connection is the very reason that ICE’s role is so critical.

ICE can offer the crypto world something that it currently lacks, something that many crypto enthusiasts steadfastly reject: a trusted third party. But if crypto purists take a deep breath, they’ll see that Bakkt could be the third party that indirectly helps to maintain consumers’ ability to use Bitcoin as a decentralized currency—the way Bitcoin was originally envisioned.

The key is that ICE “operates two of the largest commodities futures exchanges on the planet—ICE Futures U.S., and ICE Futures Europe.” These federally regulated exchanges provide clearing services that effectively eliminate credit risk for the buyers and sellers and that legitimize the transactions for institutional players. (The name Bakkt is a play on words, as in backed by a stalwart institution, or backed by other assets.)

This arrangement is critical because no sane hedge-fund manager, no matter how much he wants or needs a gamble in his portfolio, is going to buy cryptocurrency without being able to ensure he’s not buying it from a terrorist.

Why does this matter for gaining Bitcoin’s acceptance as a currency?

Because a retailer like Starbucks will not accept cryptocurrency as payment from millions of customers unless it can be sure it will be able to do something with all those digital tokens. And institutional investors live to buy large quantities of assets, provided they can do so legally and as safely as they possibly can conduct such transactions.

So ICE provides the perfect match.

Bakkt plans to provide a trading platform for Bitcoin using the “one-day futures” contract, a contract typically reserved for illiquid assets. This move will allow trades to settle in one day, the same as in the cash market. In other words, investors and merchants can get in or out of their positions as quickly as they need to, thus mitigating the risk of price volatility. In industry terms, Bakkt will provide the necessary infrastructure for regular institutional trading.

Once Bakkt has tons of digital tokens stored in its “warehouse,” institutional investors can trade all day without having to report transactions to the blockchain. But while all of this is going on in the background, retail customers can simply buy Bitcoin as they always have, and then use those bitcoins to buy a cup of coffee.

The institutional players are relying directly on the third party; the consumers are relying directly on the decentralized network.

It is difficult to overstate how transformative this gambit could become. Every year, U.S. consumers use credit and debit cards to buy trillions of dollars in goods and services with their national currency. That currency depreciates a bit every year (sometimes more than a tiny bit), and various intermediaries collect roughly 3 percent in fees on those transactions.

Cryptocurrencies provide a clear advantage via lower transaction fees, and offer the potential advantage of a more sound currency whose value does not constantly depreciate.

One major impediment to realizing this potential is that, compared to national currencies, merchants do not accept cryptocurrencies on a wide scale.

Bakkt could change that situation. It could be the venture that really does transform Bitcoin – or some other cryptocurrency – into full-fledged money.

Many people may have missed it, but last week’s official unveiling of Bakkt is a much bigger story than Warren Buffett’s rodent problem.