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A native Californian who grew up surfing and skateboarding in Santa Cruz, Carter’s eye for business building began in tandem with his entrepreneurial career. What started as a promising electrical contracting company in his early 20’s short-circuited in the wake of Black Monday, the stock market collapse of 1987. When the developer failed to pay, it turned on a lightbulb in the electrician’s head.
"When this big project didn’t pay out, I thought, the next time around I’m going to do something I love to do so that if I don’t get paid, at least I had a good time doing it," Carter said.
First, he became a pioneer of the action sports industry with skateboarding and surfing influence brought into his wakeboard design. In the process of founding his very own action sports company he founded a media marketing company called Netrom which he took public. This in turn landed Carter his first cover and feature with success magazine. As he built a reputation for success in raising capital and taking his own companies public, he was soon fielding offers to put other companies on the same path. This birthed his passion for helping entrepreneurs better understand the productization of private equity.
As an emerging leader in FinTech, he began to look deeper into the utility of blockchain, leading him in 2016 to build the DealBox platform to provide capital marketing advisory and consulting. Under Carter’s leadership, DealBox has achieved millions in annual sales, thanks in part to their innovative approach, bringing SEC compliant tokenized securities into capital markets using the tezos blockchain.
“I think when you are passionate about what you are doing, it is going to really help you have the outcome you are looking for,” Carter said. “You want to have something that excites and challenges you every day. If you like what you do, you could work through any sort of obstacles and things that get in the way. Nothing is going to stop you. I think you have to have that kind of attitude to ultimately achieve success as an entrepreneur.”
As he cut his teeth raising capital, Carter got a firsthand look at the dark side of investment banking: banker manipulation. When asked why he founded DealBox, one of the first blockchain companies, it’s no surprise to learn that emotion drove his decision to decentralize finances and democratize wealth for all.
“I have a heart to help entrepreneurs,” Carter said. "I believe if you have a heart to help people, God gives you wisdom. Entrepreneurs are good at building up a product and a service but they don’t make their business a product. If you could productize it, then you could make it more consumable. It’s about having the right data sets and taking public company best practices to private companies. We are really looking at where the entrepreneur wants to exit. DealBox provides capital markets advisory as a business service for an entrepreneur so they can focus on their goals while we build the proper capital roadmap to achieve their end vision.”
Is Thomas Carter an entrepreneur? A futurist? Or something else entirely? Swagger sat down with Thomas, the FinTech and financial services expert to pick his brain on "blockchain/crypto" which may help connect the dots for readers who just know crypto from headlines, but not blockchain yet.
I think it is the value of exchange and the simplicity and ease of use. I think there is a lot of speculation around crypto and skepticism. Fair enough. The one thing I always say is that we are seeing centralized governments that have a lot to gain from financial decisions that make their constituents happy and they are inflating the currency. The value of your dollar isn’t what it was a year ago. That’s happening all over the world and especially at a time like in Covid.
It’s no surprise that at the same time you see governments spending dozens of trillions of dollars and printing money to pour into their economies while we see cryptocurrency have this meteoric rise. For the first time ever, you have something that can move with the quickness of the internet but have the same anti-inflationary principles as gold.
If you have something that can’t be manually inflated and is anti-inflationary – it gets more valuable with time – that is highly valuable. The world has never seen that before. It is an experiment and it is going very well so far.
It took eleven years for all the combined cryptocurrencies to achieve one trillion dollars in overall market valuation. So, when you hit a trillion, that’s a number where more institutions and larger entities start to take you seriously. What took eleven years to happen achieved another trillion and a half in value taking it to over two trillion in under six months. We are at this inflection point where you are starting to see more adoption. It is this really large shift that is happening right now, and it’s going to be significantly bigger than the internet.
I think asset backed digital securities (security tokens) are the future because they are tied to real world assets. I think most cryptos will remain a digital asset. But a watershed moment might be the rise of asset backed digital securities, which are regulated. The growth of digital assets as a whole – both crypto and digital securities. The watershed moment will be once STO are adopted by traditional investment institutions, which will come sooner than later. Another key factor to adoption is making crypto easy for the everyday person as well. That’s a problem that TNS is solving with the digital names.
Thomas Carter: Very simply put: it’s like GoDaddy for blockchain and crypto. In the 90s you had IP addresses and it was complicated. So human readable names went on top of IP addresses. Then came the creation of register.com and Go Daddy that built a business around that. Much like GoDaddy was the picks and shovels for the internet boom, TNS is very similarly the picks and shovels for the blockchain internet boom that people scratch their heads at. So, a human readable name goes at the top of that.
Now, you can have $Taylor or $Mary or $John — whatever name you choose, it sits on top of a long, hexadecimal alphanumeric key that is your cryptographic public wallet. By having a dollar sign name, it makes a connection to over 250 blockchains. Essentially, it makes crypto easy for the everyday person, and with this simplicity will come more adoption and frequency of use.
TNS also provides blockchain hosting services and related blockchain networks. We place a significant focus on the blockchain standards within industries and partner with them to develop new standards for this emerging technology.
More recently, we’ve been able to move into music and other media technologies by embedding our tech into audio and video files. This creates a supply chain, providence, and security around data files that are entertainment related.
Piracy in the telecommunications industry is a $140 billion problem. This is what we’ve made to solve it. In the entertainment industry alone, piracy costs between $30-40 billion. TNS will mitigate piracy, keep track of hit rate, and provide general security and trackability of files and data.
It’s having your vision and plan mapped out in a way you can measure and manage. If you can measure the project, then you can manage it better. That’s all about having really good data. It is one thing just to build the product and the service, but you have to have your business be a product at the same time in order to achieve the proper capital partners.
Also, have yourself in the best position to defend the value of the company. A lot of times without that data, entrepreneurs get taken advantage of because they don’t understand how to value what they have. I think by leveraging the services that DealBox provides, it helps create that value, it gives you the data to measure and manage as you build the business. Spending all the time upfront to do the work and structure the deal properly then you can really have the rewarding outcomes.
Most importantly, in order to be a successful and forward thinking business owner, you have to be willing to create novel solutions to legacy problems. I like to say ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it.’ Being stuck in your present reality may be comfortable but the most revolutionary entrepreneurs were all laughed at in the beginning stages of creating the future they saw. Blockchain technology unlocks the doors to solving countless problems we are faced with today as a result of the internet being the place we store all of our most valuable assets and personal information. It allows TNS and DealBox to solve problems nobody thought could be solved.
At TNS we’re working with leaders in the Telecommunications space to create a new blockchain powered technology that will enhance the legacy approach to security for all internet connected devices - solving massive problems with supply chain security, identification, authentication and piracy.
All the while at DealBox we’re utilizing blockchain by issuing compliant security tokens which offer investors the potential of enhanced liquidity by trading those tokens on compliant platforms 24/7/365.
Thomas Carter is the founder of DealBox, Inc. and CEO of Total Network Services Corp "TNS". You can read more about Thomas at $1 Trillion Dollar Market Cap Prediction Comes True or connect with him on LinkedIn.
He will get a Vertalo wallet, with a 12 month lockup then they will be tradeable.
SWAGGER Magazine is North America's Men's Luxury Magazine. We focus our content on everything men love. Gear, Tech, Fashion, Rides, Sports, Health & Fitness, Food, and Feature Men and Women who possess SWAG.
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