Happy birthday, Lykke!
Four years in the crypto space — is it a lot or a little?
To many of us, these years have passed in a blink of an eye, but if we think a little, so many things have happened since Richard Olsen’s vision of a disruptive and research-driven exchange platform had finally taken a tangible form.
Ask yourself as you look back at 2015 if your life changed a lot? Four years is more or less the average time it takes a researcher to finish his / her PhD thesis. We use this comparison for a reason: many of our readers would know that Lykke’s mission, services and products are based on research and come from a culture of innovation.
But what if we told you that Lykke is actually 6 years old? That would be more similar to raising a child up to the first year of school! Or doing your PhD after a Master’s. As a matter of fact, Lykke was formally established in 2013 and remained inactive for almost two years studying the emergent blockchain technology and preparing the regulatory strategy.
It was in 2015 that what we now know as ‘Lykke’ started off. It was formed as a movement of like-minded people who saw their mission as creating the conditions for a more just and equal financial system in which users can transact directly with peers. The core idea was to make this exchange free from demotivators, such as fees or technical difficulties.
In 2016, Lykke conducted the first in its kind public offering of corporate assets on the blockchain. In 2017, we tested and launched an innovative Bitcoin off-chain settlement algorithm. When the crypto world was only testing the analogue known as the Lightning Network, we were already transitioning to a centralized mode. After all, the platform is only the means, not the end.
These developments were only milestones on the path to Lykke’s mission – to democratize finance by offering to regular people those instruments that until now had only been accessible to professional traders and bankers. In our vision, we do not believe making these instruments physically accessible is enough, but rather users need a simple platform with fair conditions and no hidden small print.
Some of us still remember having to use paper mail or a fixed phone to communicate but this seems so long ago. Today without access to the necessary information immediately, we easily become frustrated. However, at the same time we put up with many inefficiencies in the financial system, such as waiting until the end of the year to earn interest or waiting several days for money transfer to settle.
Arguably, this obsolete financial system will not last for much longer as technology boldly steps into finance by offering solutions to these and many other problems. Simultaneously, the regulatory environment, is advancing to embrace the emerging technologies under a comprehensive legal framework. These are the dimensions in which Lykke is operating.
In 2018, Lykke launched LyCI, our first Crypto Index, which tracks the Top 25 blockchain projects by market cap and its declinations LyCI Smart Contract and LyCI Pay. Holders invest in the blockchain market as a whole without the hassle of keeping track of its rapid changes or balancing manually multiple single assets.
This was the first real step towards creating truly new generation financial products and services leveraging blockchain technology.
Our research and development does not stop here…
We’re happy to kick off another year celebrating it together with you and by shortly releasing our further new innovative products that take us all one step closer to what we call finance reinvented!
