Hey, I'm not sure about stating that Lykke is actually buying back its shares, that's a common practice in Wall Street though but I can't confirm that. Of course Lykke being the only one offering LKK is also the only market maker but if there were no buyers the price wouldn't move. There has been a big increase in users coming on board lately and the communities at Slack, Reddit and Telegram are very active.

Having a fully regulated global platform where you could trade any type of assets is very exciting in my opinion, I can't name a lot of projects similar to Lykke especially ones offering actual equity in the company and not just tokens or software/platform licenses as I like to call them . Equity is very different since a lot of other stuff come into play and I would say makes the projects more easy to estimate a value, that's why I think it has been a more stable investment so far, there's less speculation.

I would say Bitshares or Waves are similar somewhat, even ShapeShift, the problem always boils down to fiat ramps and usability which are to me huge questions marks in these projects. With the addition of Ethereum you could trade and buy ETH, BTC, FX and CFDs, ETFs, in the future with your credit card or bank account, fast and easy from the app.

Not even Poloniex has a proper fiat gateway and you saw the issues with Bitfinex and USDT.