Five-year-old crypto tax-software vendor Libra recently rebranded itself as Lukka, after 15th Century Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli who help popularize double-entry accounting.
“We wanted to give a little attention to our focus on data,” Jake Benson, CEO of Lukka, told Markets Media. “Libra was often associated with just tax or software. I wanted to give a refresh and have people think of us as more than a tax or software company, but a software and data company for the crypto world.”
As part of the corporate refresh, Lukka formally launched its Lukka Reference Data offering, which it had been testing with certain clients since 2018.
The new data offering tracks and normalizes data regarding more than 2,700 crypto assets from various crypto exchanges and blockchains.
The offering initially was an extensive catalog of listings, but the vendor has since included the daily changes that occur to the listings.
“Many exchanges list and de-list different pairs frequently,” said Benson.
Although the number of securities tokens and stable coins that Lukka supports has risen over the past year or so, their growth has not matched the 2017 boom in initial coin offerings.
Of the new securities offerings, he noted that there is a growing market for real estate tokens, which provide investors with fractionalized ownership of real estate assets.
“A lot of new liquidity is available for physical property,” said Benson. “I’m excited to see an uptick there. It’ not overwhelming, but it is there.”
Lukka regularly updates its reference data offering with new crypto assets, which it identifies via its middle and back office platform.
“If the system doesn’t recognize the asset, there is an automatic process to add it into a queue for review, which happens frequently,” he said.
Once in the queue, the vendor manually reviews the new ticker.
“For the benefit of the doubt, we include everything, but everything gets reviewed,” added Benson. “A ticker might be familiar to us, but it might be a new asset.”
