Since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, our lives are increasingly condensed into these small, handheld devices and have become central to everything we do. Smartphones are the ultimate do-it-all device. Everything from navigation, health monitoring, socializing, banking, payments, shopping and entertainment are all accomplished with two thumbs and a bit of dexterity.

According to a Pew Research Center report, more than an estimated “… five billion people have mobile devices …” and Statista reports that “… the number of smartphone subscriptions worldwide today surpasses six billion and is forecast to further grow by several hundred million.”

As smartphone ownership nears equaling the world’s population, smartphone crime is also on its own meteoric rise. Authorities in some countries are reporting up to 80-percent increases in smartphone theft, creating what U.S. authorities are calling a smartphone theft pandemic. A telecommunications expert estimated to Financial Times that the industry is suffering a loss of nearly $17 billion annually in insurance payouts alone.

Cell phone carriers do operate blacklists tagging smartphones that have been reported lost or stolen using the device’s unique International Mobile Equipment Identity number, better known as the IMEI. While this often does effectively prevent the stolen device from being used within the country it was stolen, it may not be effective at all should the phone be shipped to another country. A quick Google search reveals more than 646,000 results on tutorials and third-party services to bypass the block for easy activation in nearly any country. This is made possible for one simple fact: wireless carrier blacklists don't interoperate with each other. It’s a massive blindspot that enables phone theft to proliferate in a globalized world.

A $30 billion smartphone theft pandemic is, ironically, being enabled by the phone providers’ own strategies designed to prevent the issue. Unfortunately, the blacklisting systems designed to stop this criminal industry often operates in silos restricted by country and network. This generally means wireless carriers’ programs do not work together to assist one another, leaving massive gaps for stolen devices to go undetected.

The phone companies are, quite understandably, locked in deep competition with one another. This pushes each of them to adopt their own standards when possible, including which radio signal to use (GSM or CDMA), along with dozens of other modular choices. However, when it comes to identifying smartphones, wireless carriers have adopted one global standard — the IMEI number.

Every cell phone device is assigned a unique IMEI, giving individuals, carriers, law enforcement and insurance companies a way to track down stolen phones, or, at the very least, place them on a blacklist.

IMEI Blacklists Aren't Widely Adopted

IMEI numbers are, theoretically, great for flagging or tracking stolen phones. Unfortunately, the centralization and separation of IMEI blacklists operated by carriers have produced several problems.

Amongst them are:

1. IMEI blacklists are geographically restricted by country;
2. Some wireless carriers respect certain blacklists, while others don't, creating inconsistency;
3. IMEI blacklists are often proprietarily held, making it difficult for law enforcement, insurance companies, or individuals to access and use blacklist data.

This isn't all to say that attempts to create a universal IMEI blacklist haven't been made. GSMA, a mobile network industry group, created the GSMA Global IMEI Blacklist. Owing to the breadth of its globe-spanning member networks, GSMA has had limited success, bringing 110 carrier networks under the same blacklist standard.

However, centralized, interest-driven groups like GSMA exclude networks that don't align with their industry efforts, driving both large and small operators away.

Additionally, the centralized nature of industry groups like GSMA leads to a concentration of power wherein their blacklist is subject to influence. Finally, centralized attempts at creating blacklist standards give operators and government regulators great pause when deciding who should be in charge of creating such standards in the first place.

Despite the actuation of blacklists within specific geographic regions, the ongoing lack of a cohesive global blacklist means tainted phones need only cross a border before being operational again.

As such, the incredible amounts of red tape have led to the creation of an international black market for stolen smartphones that gets more valuable by the day.

Designed to target and dismantle the global phone theft industry with a decentralized blacklist empowering the individual to report phone thefts.

The core concept of an IMEI blacklist is sound, but the execution of such blacklists by centralized parties is not. When Satoshi Nakamoto first described decentralized ledger technology in the Bitcoin Whitepaper, it became clear that the technology for eliminating the stolen device trade had arrived.

Using a dual NFT proof-of-ownership model to ensure control across multiple devices, LOX Network puts the power of device ownership in the hands of owners — not wireless carriers.

Just as anyone can build using open blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, Solana, and Polkadot, developers, carriers, law enforcement, insurance agencies, and private individuals can create applications using the LOX Network decentralized blacklist API integration and also accessible via the LOX mobile app and the forthcoming Lostorstolen.io web-based app giving everyone access device status information.

The LOX standard is especially crucial in today's market given that the market for unlocked phones is skyrocketing around the world. In the U.S. alone, a 22-percent increase in unlocked device sales was reported in the first quarter of 2019.

The $30 billion illicit phone trade is a global problem requiring a network agnostic, public, universal blacklist.

• By lowering the barrier to reporting and blacklisting a stolen phone, LOX Network provides the first truly crowdsourced solution for combating device theft no matter where it occurs.

• Keeping the blacklist publicly accessible by default (as an inherent quality of public blockchains) makes it impossible to hide a phone's IMEI status, and enables marketplaces, whether centralized or decentralized, to securely sell devices with good standing.

A network and geolocation agnostic blacklist provide interoperable infrastructure for the emerging decentralized marketplace niche.

The backbone of the security suite is the LOX Network. LOX Network bridges both the users’ unique digital and physical ownership through unique non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. These NFT depictions of the profiles are called SmartNFT and SmartLOX. LOX Network pairs SmartNFT to SmartLOX NFTs creating a bond that is the core of our decentralized NFT security network.

The user mints a SmartNFT creating an NFT representation of themselves including name, contact information, and any other pertinent information. This user then mints an NFT representing the user’s device called SmartLOX that records data such as the device make, model, IMEI and any other unique identifiable marks. Recording these two NFTs on the LOX Network bonds them as one creating proof-of-ownership that is verifiable on the blockchain.

LOX Network lives on the XRP Ledger. Using the power, speed, reliability, cost efficiency and, most importantly, the decentralization of the XRP Ledger, any actions recorded by LOX Network are verifiable on any public XRP Ledger scanner such as XRPScan or Bithomp.

The LOX Security App enables users to manage the security, whereabouts, and ownership rights of multiple devices accessing LOX Network’s proof-of-ownership system. Proof-of-ownership whitelists device owners on allotted devices, thereby excluding non-whitelisted users and detecting instances of theft.

With the LOX Security App suite, users can:

• Check the security status of a device
• Remote lock a device
• Remote backup a device
• Remote locate a device
• Block and blacklist a device
• Forward proof of ownership to a new users
• Offer rewards for recovery of lost/stolen devices
• Secure rewards for finding lost devices
• Secure rewards for returning lost devices to owners

While the LOX Security App’s initial rollout is limited to smartphone devices, upcoming development milestones will see the addition of any network-connected devices such as smartwatches and laptops along with other high-value items such as e-bikes.

LOX blacklisting technology primarily relies on IMEI, serial numbers, and IP address tracking for identifying, locating, and locking lost or stolen network-connected devices.

However, not all items that are prone to theft contain network connectivity or identifying data. Additionally, in most instances, when a smartphone or other high-value item is stolen, the owner rightfully wants to do more than blacklist it — they want to retrieve it, if possible.

Blockchains have proven immensely useful in combating fake, non-genuine goods in the retail world. By tagging and tracing retails goods through the entire duration of their production and lifecycles, blockchain-backed platforms have proven that decentralized ledger technology simply works for track and trace use cases.

LOX Network is a distributed network built for securitizing your possessions, which is why we're currently developing LOX Nano Security Tagging — an invisible method for tagging and tracing items using Microdot Technology.

By tagging your valuables with Microdots, then registering them on the LOX Network, your undisputed ownership of an item is publicly claimable. If that item is ever lost or stolen, it can easily be tracked, and your unique Microdot-based LOX Security Tag identifies it as yours.

The LOX Network captures the unmet need for a global blacklist that unites wireless carriers and device owners. As such, LOX Network data is immensely valuable for a long list of wireless ecosystem participants:

Anyone, including the entities mentioned above, can quickly and securely receive LOX Network data using the LOX API. Additionally, as blockchains continue being adopted by incoming services, smart contracts will become a standardized part of tech stacks the world over.

The LOX Network API is designed to account for this, and is connectable to smart contracts using a simple oracle intermediary.

Central to the LOX Network mission is recovering devices through global data sharing. $LOX has three functions in a reward structure to incentivize our mission success.

1. Device owners can create bounties paid in $LOX for the recovery of lost or stolen devices.
2. Users who find a lost device and return it to their rightful owners receive a reward paid in $LOX.
3. Users who find a blacklisted device with no apparent owner receive a reward paid in $LOX.

(The value of the rewards paid in scenarios 2 and 3 are subject to community governance votes.)

In the first phase, $LOX tokens used to pay for network products and services will be burned at the beginning of the next financial quarter. As such, each fiscal year will contain four token burns preceded by a report on the financials of the previous quarter.

To balance token burn and token emission, a governance vote before the mainnet launch will take place amongst SmartNFT and SmartLOX token holders to decide:

1. Token burn program duration.
2. Yearly token emission rate.

All network rules, standards, mechanisms, and direction are transparently laid out, organized, and enacted by the LOX Foundation, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

To participate in the LOX Foundation for proposing, voting, and passing governance decisions, one needs only to hold SmartNFT or SmartLOX tokens in their wallet, both tokens enable the holder to participate in all governance Issues dictating the platform’s future direction.

To propose an issue to the LOX Council, an amount of SmarNFT or SmartLOX is staked by the proposer. Any subsequent token holders can then choose to support the referenda by stake-pledging an amount of tokens equal to the original amount.

Once the issue has received enough collateral to be made an official governance matter, it's held to a council-wide vote wherein the result is protocol-binding.

All token holders are entitled to one vote per SmartNFT or SmartLOX token held. However, some may choose to consolidate voting power to control the network's direction by becoming “whales,” or individuals with large wallets with the intent to control smaller wallets.

To avoid this scenario, we've included a stake-pledging function that empowers smaller wallets with greater voting power. Small wallets (>1% total) can stake their tokens to their vote for a period of up to 30 days. The longer the stake-pledge, the greater the weight their vote carries, allowing smaller wallets the means of influencing governance decisions on a larger scale by signalling commitment.

SmartNFT

SmartNFT was the first of the ecosystems’ three XRPL tokens to launch on Aug. 28, 2021 via airdrop. The token distribution rewarded the earliest supporters with the largest airdrops. The gifts gradually decreased with each trustline milestone achieved and will cease once 30,000 trustlines have been achieved. Trustlines can be verified on XRPScan. The token can be purchased on the XRPL’s decentralized exchange.

• Issuer Address: rf8dxyFrYWEcUQAM7QXdbbtcRPzjvoQybK
• HEX ID: 536d6172744e4654000000000000000000000000
• Limit: 100,000,000
• https://t.co/g7jEOro0gw

SmartLOX

SmartLOX was the second of the ecosystems’ three XRPL tokens to launch on Sept. 5, 2021 via a snapshot of all SmartNFT holders. SmartLOX was distributed on a 1:1 ratio. The token can be purchased on the XRPL’s decentralized exchange.

• Issuer Address: rBdZkMKuPnzYVVkyL2DrQKV3DsYt5PPVRh
• HEX ID: 536D6172744C4F58000000000000000000000000
• Limit: 100,000,000
• https://t.co/kv7HlxuxLF

LOX

LOX is the third of the ecosystem’s three XRPL tokens on Sept. 10, 2021 via an IDO on the XRPL decentralized exchange. Additionally, a snapshot of all SmartNFT and SmartLOX holders is scheduled Oct. 1, 2021 to distribute $LOX to LOX Network supporters.

• Issuer Address: rLLJvh6bwj2eTYwzLL484AW6EyH4rdZqWZ
• Token currency code: LOX
• Limit: 1,000,000,000
• https://t.co/6yUgGGMvBW

(Note: XRP Toolkit permits Currency Code to be letters if the currency is no greater than 3 characters. Hex ID is only required for tokens with more than 3 characters)

LOX Network launched in the 3rd quarter of 2020 as an Ethereum project. As the project was in developments, Ethereum’s gas fees began to become uneconomical for LOX’s intended use of microtransactions.

Imagine paying a nominal fee to use LOX Network and be faced with insurmountable gas to pay for the transaction.

Following Ethereum’s London hard fork, our team observed the gas fee issue was not going to resolve quickly enough and LOX Network began it’s transition to the XRPL in the 3rd quarter of 2021.

LOXNetwork will take advantage of the XRPL’s proven speed, reliability and efficiency with essentially no transaction fees. This updated roadmap focuses on the new goals and estimated times of completion.