Lance Parker: My Background & Getting To Where We Are Now

In this video I just wanted to talk through my background. I'm often asked about it. There's probably questions about what is the technology that Lockbox, ConnectX, and the BankEx ecosystem and platform is going to use. We're going to talk about a little bit of technology today. In talking with one of the community members, they said, 'Lance, you should really give the story behind the story of the journey you've gone through to get to where we are now, having the idea for BankEx and the ecosystem and platform and this private network.' I think this video should also help handle any of the issues with the standard crypto response that everything is a scam.

I'm a former pilot. I studied at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. Then I decided I didn't know if I wanted to spend that much time sitting in a seat, even though I do now. The only exciting part for flight was taking off and landing; everything else was pretty boring. So I switched to an economics degree at George Mason University. That's really what I enjoyed learning about, that and business. While I was in college, I had a vending machine company that pretty much put me through college. What I learned from that experience is the idea of leverage, not only time plus money, because I would have the product in the vending machine that I would sell for 10 times more, and I didn't have to do anything but go around once a month and collect quarters. I had one machine that did $800 a month. I don't know if you know how heavy quarters are, but $20 and 25 cents in quarters is one pound. Only someone that's operated a bunch of quarters would know how much they weigh.

I was attracted to technology through a friend I went to high school with, because of the economics. People were coding software and they would sell it over and over again. That's when I got into technology sales for enterprise applications. Along this process, I'm a multiple patent holder. I've gone through the patent process quite a bit. One of the patents has been prosecuted successfully. Who did that for us was an attorney named Frank Washco. He'll end up being our general counsel for BankEx and the family of companies. As I mentioned, I sold seven-figure software enterprise applications to the CXO level. I was a top salesperson at Computer Associates and MicroStrategy. I sold the first MicroStrategy seven-figure deal in North America to JD Power here in Southern California. I bring that up because it was very strategic for MicroStrategy and set them on a path with some of the technology. Michael Saylor, who people have gotten to know now because of his entrance into cryptocurrency, announced me to the whole company and how strategic this was. I used to work for Michael Saylor early in my career.

I always wanted to start my own company. The first one I started was a mobile security company called iTag. That won a CTIA technology award. CTIA is the second largest consumer products show after CES in Vegas. That application had 50,000 users. That was a process too. I had some friends that wanted to invest. One friend in particular, who was a large investor, after I had signed on with the developers and put a deposit, decided he wanted to go do something else. I ended up actually borrowing to start that company. You run into different things as you're starting companies. Things don't always go as planned, and you adjust and keep going forward.

Part of that process after iTag was that I was part of a technology accelerator during that era when everybody was doing technology accelerators and VC firms were tied to them. It's a good way to get funding. I did a technology accelerator twice called Founders Institute. The person that runs that is Adeo Ressi. He is best friends and college roommates with Elon Musk. It was Adeo Ressi who suggested to Elon Musk that he should start to innovate in space and start SpaceX, I believe it was 17 or 18 years ago. When I did Founders Institute here in Los Angeles, there were 3,500 applicants and they chose 45. During the three-month process, it was incredibly intense. It was all you did for 80 hours a week. Half of the people didn't make it through. I ended up graduating at the top of the class in 2013. Then I was invited back in 2015 to their advanced accelerator of the Founders Institute in San Francisco, which was a much shorter program for two weeks. I graduated at the top of my class there in 2015. Both of those were pretty intense and I learned a lot. I've probably had a couple hundred mentors. You can get whiplash from one person saying this and another saying that. At some point, after you've taken in all the information, you still have to go with your gut and what you feel is the best way to operate the company or with an idea you have.

The second company I did was a concept of a mobile advertising company where I wanted to show ads for things that you were most likely to purchase in stores around you. I thought mobile advertising was going to be a huge area. One of my mentors in that company was Alex Muse, the original founder of ShopSavvy. He was an adviser to the company. What I tried to do was actually purchase ShopSavvy several years ago. The business plan I had was that we wanted to start with a mobile application that had a bunch of mobile data that we would then be able to advertise. ShopSavvy was a perfect application because you would go into a store, scan the barcode, and it would tell you where it was cheaper around you or on the internet. What happened with that one is I started working with the former CFO of 99 Cents Only Stores. We hit it off and started talking about how we could put this together. We had capital committed and the whole plan was set. We had conversations with the current CEO and were working to try to put this together. What happened in that case was Alex Muse's early investor was Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook that was kicked out. Alex had given blocking rights to him as a lead investor, so he could basically stop anything the board wanted to do. We were blocked from trying to buy that company. The lesson learned from that is don't give blocking rights to investors if you want to sell your company.

The idea for ConnectX, this private network to store cryptocurrency wallets, or what we call the device Lockbox, was in 2010, before I started doing all of this stuff. This vision of what I've wanted to do has been in the works for quite some time. It started with a conversation on a road trip about what we thought computers would be in the future and how everything would work. I started looking at space and the innovations happening where satellites were getting smaller and less expensive, and more access was available to people who wanted to launch these smaller satellites. A bunch of things came together. I originally started it as a secure computer that you always have, an access device to link to the cloud. Then when I met my chief inventor and co-founder in ConnectX, you'll see through his technology that it really lent itself to something great with big data. Then it was in an interview with Cryptocurrency News when I was talking about all of this that the writer of the story said, 'Why won't you store cryptocurrency wallets in this network?' That's when it all started really coming together, this idea of how the world is going to be in the future where a private key is everything. It's not just your wallet, it's your identity, financial documents, all the things we talk about.

I met my chief inventor and co-founder through a friend who had a friend over one time. We started talking about what I was doing and she said, 'You should talk to this one friend I have.' Then from that point, he said, 'I went on a blind date with this person, you should talk to him because it sounds like you're working with somebody.' Then he introduced me to my chief inventor and co-founder. It was like six degrees of separation, almost felt like a destiny type of thing for me to meet him. He has been working on this for 20 years. He has several iterations. He's probably the most talented scientist I've ever worked with. I think he's the equivalent of Nikola Tesla, that's just my opinion. As we progress, I'm going to bring him on Zoom meetings and things as we start to push through the ecosystem and platform we're building with BankEx.

The precursor technology of some of the things we're going to talk about in the technology discussion was actually a way to encode geometric shapes in the GSM network, or the cell phone network, where it was hidden in the communication channel, sort of this ghost network. It was proven and commercialized in Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia, I believe. The application for this was that it was used to send transaction data from the ATM machines of banking institutions back to the bank. When you withdrew or deposited money in an ATM, this network was used very securely over the cell phone network to hide that transaction information. This was never hacked. It was licensed out there to multiple banking institutions.

I'll walk through and show you some graphical representation of how all of this works, and give you some of the thought process. Let me stop my video and share my stream. We'll call this Lockbox. ConnectX and Lockbox are interchangeable. If you're on our webinars, you've seen this. The way transmission technology works today, if you look at AM or FM radio, everybody knows amplitude modulation or frequency modulation. With binary, zeros or ones represent each character. In amplitude modulation, the height of the wave distinguishes between a zero or one. The frequency, or the number of waves in a given time period, distinguishes between a zero and one. That's graphically represented in this diagram. What our technology does is it encodes a geometric shape onto one wave. That geometric shape can equal the word 'a', or the word 'apple', or the entire sentence 'the apple fell from the tree'. This is more of a representation, not a deep dive of how the technology works, but I want people to get the concept of how unique this is and how different the technology we're bringing is to the cryptocurrency market. You can see very quickly that this is a huge leap forward in data density and why I was interested in this for big data.

When you look at the geometric shape concept, we can create a near infinite amount of geometric shapes. When you compare that to a zero or a one, a hacker would look at zeros and ones. If it isn't a zero, then it's a one. But with our technology, it's very difficult to figure out what we're sending and what dictionary or symbol we apply to what it equals. What does this symbol equal, A or B? It just makes this much more difficult. As far as current internet devices, talking about that data density issue, with frequency or amplitude modulation, if you were sending the sentence 'the apple fell from the tree', everyone else is sending it over 232 radio waves, where we have one radio wave with that symbol. That is the difference. To talk about how we arrived at not only would this be in a private ground network owned by ConnectX, but then we would start to deploy this technology on satellites. The reason why is that is the most cost-effective way to deploy a worldwide network, sort of this overlay network for the cryptocurrency community.

You look at the market and what's happening. There's a company called Othernet that has a device called a lantern, and they have satellites sending web pages, videos, and books to remote areas. You basically link your phone to it and you're able to download. Until Starlink is fully deployed, I thought this was an interesting take on how you could use satellites for delivery. What I think is also interesting, a lot of people don't know, is one of the largest and most profitable banks in Indonesia, called Bank Rakyat if I'm pronouncing it correctly, deployed the BRIsat, which was the first ever bank-owned satellite for digital banking. They use this satellite for all secure communications within their banking system. The idea that satellites and financial applications don't coexist has already been done before in Indonesia with the BRIsat satellite system. I think a lot of people have heard of Blockstream, who are sending the blockchain to remote areas, further pushing that to areas that may not have internet access where they can have a copy of the ledger.

I'll show you some of the different advancements in satellites. Because these satellites are getting much smaller, their capabilities are just getting so far advanced than what they used to be, and their costs are dramatically dropping. This is called a CubeSat, a 10-centimeter cube. College students are launching these for three or four hundred thousand dollars, and they'll do a number of different missions. Our spacecraft manufacturing partner, Tyvak (T-Y-V-A-K), has developed the operating system where these spacecraft can do a number of things. They can track another satellite and link up to it. They are doing a ton of different things in their satellites. If you watch SpaceX launches, sometimes you'll hear their name at the end of the mission after the big rocket has deployed the larger satellites. You'll hear the little ones, and they'll say, 'Here's Tyvak satellites.' It's pretty interesting to see that they regularly launch these.

This rack of satellites are known as Doves for Planet Labs. These are what's called a 3U, so these are three CubeSat satellites together as one. Planet Labs was the first innovator and they've been around for a bit. They image the entire Earth every day using these satellites, getting high-definition imagery so you can see the difference in what is happening and changes on the Earth's surface. I believe the payload is three or four thousand dollars, and I'm not sure what the launch costs are, but they're dramatically less expensive than some of the larger satellites. One company I met with in Europe, you can test your payload in high-altitude balloons before you even get into launching. At 100,000 feet, you'll be able to test any new technology without having to launch a satellite.

This is our long-term sustainable competitive advantage: the ability within our ecosystem, our wallet, and our network to eliminate the use of the internet with new storage and transmission technology. With the use of these geometric shapes, it really becomes its own coding system. As we talked about, we can create a near infinite amount of geometric symbols. This idea that you could create a symbol language for a company, a department within that company, potentially a transmission language for a person, or if there's a large cryptocurrency transaction, we could create a symbol language for that specific transaction, move that money, and then never use that same makeup again in another transaction. Highly secure and not yet seen in the market.

I wanted to give a sense of how all of this works with the system and where we're headed. To fill in the gaps, I've had a lot of questions like, 'I really want to know about the technology.' I wanted to give people a little bit as we start to progress with BankEx and all the ecosystem of dApps, the network, and the Lockbox wallet device that we'll deploy. In this process of getting to this, I built a hardware prototype that was sort of that idea of having a keychain and a virtual computer in the beginning. I did a Kickstarter for that. It was a very good experience, but we ended up not getting to our funding goal. That is when I pivoted it to the big data solution. You're going to see articles in Fortune and Bloomberg that talk about this big data solution. That was all because you could see the data density advancements in what we're doing.

Along this process, I wanted to know what other people were doing. I was routinely talking to NASA and was invited to be on an industry panel for the Delay-Tolerant Network, which was basically a network they wanted to push to outer space. If something blocked the transmission, how could that network handle the delays or tolerate the delays? That panel and that project ended because the person that ran it passed away. Before they ended that program, they had controlled an arm on a satellite with an Android phone. Six or seven years ago, that was pretty interesting. That whole Delay-Tolerant Network was an initiative by Vint Cerf, the original inventor of the internet. It was pretty cool for me to be able to sit with him and talk with him about inventing the internet. That's a rare thing to run into.

The other thing before I met my technical co-founder was I started working with a few mathematicians and scientists at UCLA. One of those was Solomon Golomb, the original co-inventor of CDMA technology. In talking with him, he said, 'I have this idea where we can encrypt zeros and ones in geometric shapes.' I said, 'That's incredible.' So we started working on that together and filed a patent. That was more of a learning exercise, and we got that working. I think that was one of the many things that got us to this point. Around that time, I met the communication scientist who was the person who architected and deployed the first ever satellite mesh network for the US Army. I worked with him in architecting exactly how the ConnectX and Lockbox satellite system would work, as far as how the satellites operate, how they communicate with each other, and how we have this multi-level deployment of satellites. You have this production constellation, and then right above that would be the backup, not only in data but nodes that would fly in and replace the production constellation system. We have some other techniques we're going to put in where you could have a master backup in a Lagrangian point. A Lagrangian point is an area in space where two celestial bodies have equal gravitational pull, and your satellite sits right there. There are several of those close to Earth. That's another thing in the architecture we came up with.

In 2018, after all of this that we've done to build, we raised a million and progressed further with the technology. I think we're at a point where we could deploy an alpha version if we were to raise say $10 million. Within 12 months, we would have an alpha version showing the technology storing cryptocurrency wallets and securely passing those between our secure servers and the device. That's where we are. While we were proving those things out, I was looking for what application we could use to do all this. That's about the time I was talking with a bunch of investors. One of them ended up being a physical commodity trader. I started talking with him about all the problems he has of fraud, trust, and all the issues in the banking system of having to pay for letters of credit. I said, 'This has been great on the blockchain.' That's when we built Exportly. With his guidance on the UI and how that would all work, what we found was it was very difficult to get commodity traders into that system because they're not very technologically savvy. I think that is certainly a use case we could use, but they need to be brought further along.

The idea with BankEx was that if we have this commodity trading application, how do traders get their trades financed? That's where BankEx came in. I actually purchased the BankEx domain in 2017 because that was going to be a mechanism where we had Exportly using the Paxos USD stablecoin, and BankEx was where corporate treasury and high net worth individuals would come in and back these trades. About this time, the cryptocurrency market crashed. I was looking for investors. When I had this group of commodity traders, I pitched them on this whole concept and they loved it. We got a whole group of them together, and they were basically pulling their assets together to start a fund that they were going to invest in and be on the board. About the time that was going to happen, the whole pandemic shutdown happened, and it just killed everything I was working on.

At that point, I just didn't want to wait to do any more of what we wanted to build. I thought, 'I can make a much better stablecoin than Paxos.' That's how all this started. In early 2021, I was looking at all the stablecoins that were out there. I thought there were some really good ones, obviously we mimicked some like Terra Luna and Frax, but I wanted to make one not only that's fully decentralized but does all the things that we have with BankEx. It came through building and starting things, and then something making us take a right or left turn. That's how BankEx came to be. I hope that helps fill in the gaps and give you a little more of my background, and help you get to know me and the project a little better. Go to our YouTube and watch the explainer video to learn more. There's a section where you can get a little more sense of the BankEx system. There's a fundamentals area. We welcome anybody new to the community. I just wanted to give this video to people who are interested in learning a little more about how we got here and a little more about me. Thank you very much.