Lykke 2019 summed up
The world has just welcomed the New Year, a new decade has started with toasts about how “cute” 2020 looks and the most optimistic propositions for the new year. In most countries, however, the holiday season finishes this week, with the gifts or coal already given, depending on the tradition and the past year.
One of those nice holiday traditions is to “declare” the coming year a year of something in particular, not just make single propositions. If we look back at the past year, though, we can surely declare it a “year of hard work” at Lykke.
Perhaps, not all that we were doing last year has immediate visible results, but we did make a number of huge steps in reaching our long-term goals!
After releasing in 2018 the first Lykke Crypto Index, we expanded our crypto index offering by adding Smart LyCI and Pay LyCI indexes and the corresponding utility tokens. The development of crypto index tokens was our focus during the whole year at Lykke. In fact, in October, acknowledging the trend on the crypto market, Lykke launched the best selling crypto index token Short LyCI (ticker BEAR) designed specifically for bear markets.
What was the most important news of the year, curiously, did not become news at all. We decided not to announce that in March 2019, Lykke submitted a complete, high-quality application to FINMA. Getting an OTF license will give way to a whole range of products and services interesting to both professional investors and the mass market. There will be a new web and mobile based investment application for the regulated trading venue. It will not replace the existing one and will offer different investment opportunities from the existing app. For regulatory compliance reasons, all users of the new app will need to go through a new onboarding process in order to pass KYC with our Swiss entity and access the regulated trading venue. The new 2020 year will be the year when we will reveal more information about the brand new products and services that we have been consistently working on in the last few months.
Pursuing our long-term goals, we also successfully underwent PwC’s critical review of our application, team, policies, and procedures, technology, etc, in May of 2019. The past 2019 was not a year of expansion — few listings and a stable user base — but certainly it was a year of improving the quality and building the infrastructure. Some of the internal system improvements have resulted in new products that are useful not only internally, but for our clients as well, like the Lykke Market Data Service, launched in November 2019.
Last year marked another important trend in Lykke development. Forming new entities and building strategic partnerships contribute to creating a network built to address a truly versatile audience. A new entity formed under the Lykke brand — Lykke business — ramped up quickly via strategic partnerships established in the Middle East and Asia. Among the partnerships, there are Raiffeisen Bank and Emaar.
Lykke Corp itself engaged in important partnerships. At the end of the past year, we partnered with Bitcoin Suisse, Seba and Sygnum to support the OpenVASP initiative. In the constantly evolving blockchain and cryptocurrency space, our pillars have always been regulation compliance and building a legal framework as a main ingredient necessary for mass adoption. The past 2019 year was not an exception and we will continue working in this direction, together with our partners and affiliate entities, into 2020 as well.
