Howey Tez was a regular working class kind of guy who took on multiple jobs from waiting tables at a local coffee shop to hustling hard as deck crew on a leisure yacht in summers. All just to put food on his table and save enough money to invest in the public markets for an unlikely retirement. Howey seemed destined to work until his last breath. But this all changed on one fateful day in 2010.

It was just another dreary work day at the coffee shop. In walked a stranger who had ordered a coffee, only to realise that he had forgotten his wallet. Being the nice guy that Howey is, Howey helped foot the $4 bill, not expecting to be paid back by the first time customer. Unexpectedly, the stranger thanked Howey, gave him a little thumb drive and said that the thumb drive had $5 worth of Bitcoin in it – which included a $1 tip to show his appreciation. Now that was about 1,000 Bitcoin at that time and would be worth about $40 million today.

Being the least tech savvy person, Howey promptly forgot about the thumb drive. It was not until late 2017, with news going on about Bitcoin making all time highs of over $10,000 that Howey frantically searched for his little electronic treasure chest.

It was said that Howey took profit on most of his Bitcoin at about $10,000, returning a bewildering 1,000,000X for $10,000,000. Some say that Howey had squandered much of the 1,000 bitcoin on a slice of pizza back in 2011. Yet others say, he kept a Bitcoin ‘moon bag’ that he will never sell until Bitcoin is over $100,000. No one truly knows but one thing is for sure, Howey’s life was never the same again.

Howey quit his jobs and gained great interest in blockchain technologies thereafter, investing into crypto projects and gaining clout as BAYC #2371 in the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project. He also developed a keen interest in private markets, investing into startups, losing money in some and doing ‘spectacularly’ well in others. You know, like a ‘spectacular’ 10X, which paled in comparison to his returns from Bitcoin.

But he noticed problems in both crypto and private markets. In crypto, he would sometimes get rugged by faceless crypto founders with little to no consequence. While in the private markets, there was illiquidity and opacity. And the lack of proper price discovery mechanisms that allowed errant investors to secretly transact their holdings through under-the-table deals.

“There has to be a better way,” he thought. If only he could marry the best in blockchain technologies, such as transparency and immutability etc, with the advantages of securities like proper diligence, accountability and regulatory oversight etc.

And at that moment, a light bulb went off in his head. Blockchain technologies will be the game-changer for the $7.5 trillion private markets. The future of private markets is ‘transparency’, ‘liquidity’, ‘frictionless’, ‘interoperability’ and ‘access’. The future is made possible by blockchain technologies with Security Tokens.

But first things first, if you round down to the nearest million, the global population of investors who know about Security Tokens, the number is probably ZERO. To fulfil his vision, Howey has to be the Paul Revere of Security Tokens, bringing the message across to the world that “Security Tokens are coming!”

With that, Howey has taken it upon himself to assign his own BAYC #2371 NFT image to a company and minting 5,000 IXAPE security tokens to represent the economic interest of his endeavour. And he is giving a big slice of IXAPE away to early adopters who will go with him on the journey to the future.

Question is, are you ready to take the journey with Howey?