above: David Lavecky

It’s Sunday night and the Lavecky clan are together enjoying homemade pizza that the youngest brother David and his kids have prepared. It’s a weekly ritual that grounds this family of entrepreneurs who between them have built successful ventures in fashion, food and finance. 

Their latest foray is a web3 startup called CANVAS that seeks to allow users to invest, trade and transfer defi tokens and cryptocurrency without paying transaction fees. The CANVAS Connect protocol, which successfully completed a testnet and is awaiting a code audit before it goes live on Ethereum, works “by batching multiple defi transactions into a single proof,” according to an Oct. 16 Crowdfund Insider story.  

The Lavecky brothers, David and Daniel, have been in business together for over two decades. Their previous company, Pure Commerce, was an early innovator in the fintech space that was acquired by Euronet Worldwide in 2013. It was one of the top fintech exits in Australia at the time. 

Reflecting on this chapter, David said, “Over the course of 13 years, it wasn't a straight line. There were many times when you think it's all over, but the entrepreneurial journey is to get back up, dust yourself off, and keep pushing along.”

After wrapping up with Euronet, the brothers took time to rest and reflect. For David, it was an entrepreneurial journey that started as a young kid visiting his grandparents’ clothing factory after school. There he would do his homework and play on their computer, occasionally breaking it and then having to fix it himself. This started his lifelong passion for tech. Those early years spent with his grandparents were pivotal in his formation as an entrepreneur. 

“We've always as a family been exposed to business,” David said. “It was never a question that I would start a business or go into the family business after school. And now, having gone on the journey that I've gone on, I realize my journey is all about access to opportunities and financial inclusion.”

It wasn’t long before David and Daniel’s sabbatical turned into a brainstorm of what to do next. At the time, they looked into the big tech trends - blockchain, robotics, AI, self driving cars, and considered what they wanted to spend the next decade or two working on. Believing that blockchain-powered services would replace or enhance ways of doing things over time, they decided to go all in on web3. 

Describing this next chapter tongue-in-cheek as “Season Two of the Lavecky brothers show,” David is hoping to ride this new wave of innovation in the same way as Pure Commerce did with the Internet and e-commerce.

Original blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are known as layer-one protocols because they form the backbone of the network. Over time, however, Ethereum became so popular that it strained under the demand, slowed down and became expensive. So-called layer two protocols were developed to help ease the pressure on Ethereum by conducting much of their business off-chain. CANVAS Connect is one such layer two protocol.

“There is a lot that is made possible now with this whole world of blockchain, crypto, defi and layer two,” David said. “A lot of the services that are coming up in the space, the projects that are building, and what they are enabling access to, is levelling the playing field and letting people access financial services and products that were really limited to the few, and now it's available globally.”

Back recently from TOKEN2049 in Singapore, David, Daniel and co-founder Tim Moddel are taking CANVAS to its next stage of growth. 

The company considers that all assets and value will be tokenized and move on blockchain rails over time. CANVAS Connect allows investors, issuers and blockchain-based assets to move or transact instantly with no gas or surge pricing using Zero Knowledge (ZK) rollups built in collaboration with Starkware, a pioneer in Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs).

Of the relationship with Starkware, Lavecky says, “Starkware has taken what was thought to be theoretical and academic, and put it into a commercial product that's now handled close to a trillion dollars in volume. We have a really good working relationship with them to build this and bring defi-powered services to the masses. Because in order for it to scale and in order to get the billions of users in, it has to be easy, fast, cheap and compliant.” 

He continued, “the billions of users [who] are not in blockchain today will be accessing and using services and financial products, or just a range of different services, that are powered by blockchain and defi underneath the hood. They might not even know it, because it just becomes part of the plumbing of the world and technology. This is the CANVAS vision - to provide the financial infrastructure to onboard the next billion users into this digital economy.”