MarkCrest

Origins (2002) · context: intellectual property

MarkCrest was created in 2002 as a foundation to assist entrepreneurs with intellectual property, with a remit covering both the development and the monetization of IP in technology, financial services and business operations, including supply chains.^[1] It followed directly from Milinx: Dokken has carried the lineage forward in MarkCrest's own materials, which describe the organization as "the real Milinx" and an incubator for cutting-edge technology.^[1] He is named as its President and chief executive.^[1]

Where Milinx had built the plumbing of secure online transactions — a client-centered payment gateway, a hosted desktop, an early mobile application — MarkCrest turned to the layer above the plumbing: the intellectual property itself, how it is protected, valued and turned into something an inventor can live on. The organization ran an original website from 2004 to 2010 and has since reorganized its public framing, grouping its audiences as entrepreneurs and corporations and its offerings as networks.^[1][6]

The illiquid-assets invention · context: illiquid assets

The central piece of invention work from the MarkCrest period is a framework, filed in 2003 with a 2002 priority date, for depositing and investing illiquid or restricted assets — published as patent application US 2004/0054613 A1, with Dokken named as inventor.^[3]

The problem it set out to solve

Most of what ordinary people and small businesses own is illiquid or legally restricted: a small-business loan, an insurance contract, a house, a car, a piece of art. A bank will lend against such assets, but it will not accept them as an interest-bearing deposit, and an individual cannot readily deposit, pool or withdraw value from them the way one can with cash.^[3][11] The result is that assets which represent real wealth sit idle, earning their owners no return and offering them no liquidity — a disadvantage that falls hardest on exactly the owners who are too small to structure around it.

The mechanism

The filing describes what it calls a reverse investment fund. Rather than investors putting cash into a fund that buys assets, the owners of illiquid or restricted assets pledge or assign those assets into a pooled, governed vehicle and receive shares in return.^[3] Independent Claim 1 states the method in full: "accepting a pledge or assignment of said assets from an asset owner; investing said assets or securities based on said assets; obtaining a return on said investment; and providing a return to said asset owner based on said return on said investment."^[3]

The vehicle is run by a defined set of parties — a fund originator, a fund manager, a trustee, a custodian, a transfer agent and an asset registry that verifies the pledged assets have not been pledged elsewhere — inside a bankruptcy-remote, creditor-protected trust.^[3][15] It can be organized open-end, redeemable at the owner's request, or closed-end, with shares sold in the open market and potentially listed on a stock exchange; and it can be layered into individual, master and feeder funds, the standard architecture of pooled investment funds.^[13] The pooled assets are invested and lent — including to financial institutions under liquidity-providing terms such as repurchase agreements and conditional letters of credit — and the income, net of fees, flows back to the owners in proportion to their shares.^[3][12]

What makes it workable for a cautious owner is a Base Risk Margin Database: a risk-analysis engine that rates each participant and issuance — on financial strength, external ratings and track record, in grades comparable to an "A" or "BBB" — and prices, from those factors, the cost of a guarantee of the owner's principal.^[3][14] An insurer or financial institution then issues that protection as an insurance guarantee or surety bond, a liquidity bond, or a conditional letter of credit to repurchase the pledged shares — protecting the owner against loss of assets, bankruptcy, and the inability to withdraw.^[3] The result is a governed unit of value: a share, backed by real assets held in trust and by a priced guarantee of principal, that the owner can redeem, sell, "pledge ... as payment," or use as collateral for a credit line, and whose account can be opened "electronically over the Internet."^[3]

A governed model for a digital currency · context: asset-backed digital currency

Read closely, the filed mechanism is already most of the way to a currency substrate. It defines a unit of value — a fund share — that is backed by real assets held in a bankruptcy-remote trust, carries a priced guarantee of principal, can be opened and held in an account "electronically over the Internet," can be "pledged ... as payment," and trades through a described collateral exchange and information portal.^[3] Backing, custody, a guarantee of principal, electronic accounts, a venue to trade: what the filing leaves off is the top layer — treating that unit as a general medium of exchange.

That top layer was the intended destination. The governed unit was meant to circulate as a digital currency whose stability came not from scarcity or speculation but from the same machinery that protects the fund owner: assets held in trust, participants rated through the Base Risk Margin Database, and principal guaranteed at a priced, measured level.^[2] It is, in effect, an asset-backed, principal-guaranteed stablecoin with governance, custody and accountability designed in from the first page — described in a 2002 filing, roughly six years before Bitcoin and more than a decade before asset-backed stablecoins became common.^[22]

A family of value-exchange filings · context: patents

The illiquid-assets framework was not a one-off. It belongs to a cluster of patent applications, all with 2002 priority dates, in which Dokken is named as an inventor and which share a single underlying idea: units of value, backed by real assets and guarantees held by a custodian, that can be exchanged under governed terms.^[3][4]

The loyalty-points filing (US 2003/0225619, filed by Dokken with a co-inventor) is the clearest sibling of the illiquid-assets idea: it describes a clearing-house that converts and settles loyalty points between accounts through a "settlement point," with the points backed by assets and guarantees held by a custodian and able to serve as collateral for financial or insurance services.^[4][16] Taken together the filings sketch a consistent thesis: that almost anything of value — restricted assets, loyalty points, a consumer's own purchasing data — can be given custody, a measured guarantee and a governed path to exchange.

The intellectual-property practice · context: IP valuation

Alongside the invention work, MarkCrest operates as an intellectual-property development and monetization practice. Its public method is a ten-step sequence that walks an entrepreneur or corporation from a raw idea to a protected, documented and monetizable asset: Idea, Protect, Plan, Policies, Access, Agreements, Ownership, Audits, Infringement and Documentation — with the middle steps framed as the path to monetization and the last three as audit and diligence.^[1][17] The practice positions itself for the inventor and the small company facing the headwinds of much larger players — the side of the table that usually cannot afford a full IP department.

MarkCrest charged its clients no fee. The figure it reports — valuations approaching US$500 million, reached up to a hiatus in its active client work at the end of the 2000s — refers to appraised valuations achieved for the intellectual property its clients developed, not to revenue the organization earned.^[1] That distinction is what makes the "foundation" description substantive rather than nominal: MarkCrest carried inventors' IP toward value without taking a fee from the value created.

How these ideas related to later developments in finance and technology · context: financial technology

The mechanisms described in the MarkCrest-era filings anticipated directions that finance and technology later took. This is a lineage of ideas, not a claim that any later company used MarkCrest's work.

• Liquidity for illiquid wealth. The reverse-investment-fund idea — pooling restricted or illiquid assets so their owners gain liquidity, a return and protected principal — prefigured the fractional-ownership and alternative-asset platforms that later made shares of real estate, fine art and private credit tradeable for ordinary owners.^[18]
• Asset-backed units of value, governed by custody and guarantee. Value represented as units backed by custodial assets and a priced guarantee anticipated the logic of asset-backed instruments and, later, the tokenization of real-world assets — with the distinction, central to Dokken's own framing, that governance and protection of principal were built in from the start.^[19]
• A clearing-house for points. The loyalty-points settlement idea prefigured the points-exchange and loyalty-settlement businesses that later let consumers move value between unrelated rewards programs.^[16]

From illiquid assets to shared ownership · context: fractional ownership

The MarkCrest work also marks a turn in Dokken's own thinking. The illiquid-assets framework was about governing dead assets so their owners could finally draw value from them. The question it left open — who should ultimately control that value — points directly to his later ventures. The idea carried forward into a shared-mercantile model, and from there to RIF Industries, where the aim was no longer only to give owners liquidity but to give people direct ownership of the physical aggregate itself: the goods and assets, held in common, rather than a claim mediated by the market that had left them behind.^[2]

Industry context · context: intellectual property management

MarkCrest took shape in the decade when intellectual property came to be treated openly as an asset class. Through the 2000s, patent-licensing and IP-monetization firms, securitization of intangible and future revenue, and technology-transfer offices all grew up around the recognition that ideas, protected and documented, carry measurable value.^[20] MarkCrest sat deliberately on the inventor's side of that market, aiming to give independent creators and small companies the protection, valuation and structuring that large firms took for granted — the same orientation, toward the party the system usually leaves behind, that runs through Dokken's financial filings of the period.

Legacy · context: the patent record

MarkCrest is the bridge in Dokken's career between building transaction technology and rethinking who owns value. On one side sits the Milinx-era machinery of secure exchange; on the other, the ownership and shared-mercantile ideas that followed. In between stands a small cluster of patent applications that, whatever their commercial fate, placed on the public record in 2002 a coherent and early thesis: that illiquid wealth, loyalty points and a consumer's own data could each be given custody, a priced guarantee and a governed path to exchange — governed value exchange described years before cryptocurrencies raised the same questions without the governance, and liquidity for ordinary owners of illiquid assets described years before fractional-ownership platforms delivered it.^[3][4] The digital-currency use he designed on top of that unit — a governed, asset-backed, principal-guaranteed medium of exchange — he kept out of the filing by choice; it anticipated the asset-backed stablecoins that arrived more than a decade later.^[2] As a practice, MarkCrest's stated mission — backing the inventor against the headwinds of the large players — is the through-line that connects the invention work to everything Dokken built afterward.^[1]

See also

• Intellectual property
• Patent
• Provisional application
• Patent monetization
• Technology transfer
• Securitization
• Asset-backed security
• Market liquidity
• Restricted securities
• Investment fund
• Trust law
• Surety bond
• Letter of credit
• Loyalty program
• Fractional ownership
• Stablecoin
• Digital currency
• Asset tokenization
• Startup incubator

References

1. MarkCrest — official site (company history, the ten-step method, and the statement on valuations achieved). markcrest.co; "About" / Steps pages at markcrest.co/about-maynard-dokken-steps-to-future-wizard.
2. Maynard L. Dokken — official site. maynardldokken.com.
3. Patent application US 2004/0054613 A1, "System and method for depositing and investing illiquid or restricted assets," inventor Maynard Dokken; priority 30 April 2002; filed 30 April 2003; published 18 March 2004; later abandoned. patents.google.com/patent/US20040054613A1.
4. Patent application US 2003/0225619 A1, "System and method for dealing with loyalty program points," inventors Maynard Dokken and co-inventor; priority 15 March 2002; filed 14 March 2003; published 4 December 2003; later abandoned. patents.google.com/patent/US20030225619A1.
5. Patent CA 2,300,347 A1, "Client-centered secure e-commerce," assignee Milinx Business Group Inc.; filed 2000; later abandoned (Milinx-era prior work). patents.google.com/patent/CA2300347A1.
6. Internet Archive — capture of the original markcrest.com site (operated 2004–2010). web.archive.org.
7. The Wall Street Transcript, biography of Maynard L. Dokken. twst.com/bio/maynard-l-dokken.
8. United States Patent and Trademark Office — Patent Public Search (verification of application numbers, dates and status). ppubs.uspto.gov.

9. World Intellectual Property Organization, "What is Intellectual Property?" wipo.int; also Intellectual property on Wikipedia.
10. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, "Patent essentials / Patent basics." uspto.gov; also Patent on Wikipedia.
11. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, "Selling Restricted and Control Securities" (Rule 144). sec.gov; also Restricted securities on Wikipedia.
12. Investopedia, "Letter of Credit" and "Repurchase Agreement (Repo)." investopedia.com; also Letter of credit on Wikipedia.
13. Investopedia, "Investment Fund." investopedia.com; also Investment fund on Wikipedia.
14. Investopedia, "Surety Bond"; U.S. Small Business Administration, surety-bond guarantees. investopedia.com; also Surety bond on Wikipedia.
15. Legal Information Institute (Cornell Law School), "Trust." law.cornell.edu; also Trust law on Wikipedia.
16. Investopedia, "Clearing House" and "Loyalty Program." investopedia.com; also Loyalty program on Wikipedia.
17. World Intellectual Property Organization, IP valuation resources. wipo.int; also Patent monetization on Wikipedia.
18. Investopedia, "Fractional Ownership." investopedia.com; also Fractional ownership on Wikipedia.
19. Investopedia, "Asset-Backed Security (ABS)." investopedia.com; also Asset-backed security on Wikipedia.
20. Investopedia, "Securitization." investopedia.com; also Securitization on Wikipedia.
21. Investopedia, "Illiquid." investopedia.com; also Market liquidity on Wikipedia.
22. Investopedia, "Stablecoin." investopedia.com; also Stablecoin on Wikipedia.
23. Bank for International Settlements, research on digital currencies and stablecoins. bis.org; also Digital currency on Wikipedia.