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ParclOur Story

Our story / since 2015

Built with people.
Made to outlast platforms.

Parcl is a story about real estate, friendship, civic purpose and a belief in better systems — from Kjell and Digital Vikings, through Dealspace and Stephen’s Philadelphia vision, to a new global foundation.

2015 — Parcl begins in Philadelphia2016 — First blockchain demonstration2026 — Full circle

The long version

Most technology companies are a few years old and already describing themselves as infrastructure. This one has been arguing about property records since 2015.

Parcl started with a small group of people who saw the future of blockchain and real estate before most of the world was paying attention. A decade later, the ambitions are larger — and the technology has finally caught up.

What follows is not a pitch deck with dates attached. It is a record of the people, relationships and experiments that shaped the work, including the parts that did not go as planned. Where something is uncertain, we say so.

01 2015

The beginning: Parcl

The first version of Parcl was not a marketplace. It was an argument about records.

In 2015, Philadelphia was full of property data and short on agreement about what any of it meant. Parcels, assessments, sheriff sales, vacant-land inventories and neighborhood knowledge lived in different places, in different formats, with different levels of trust.

The original team started from a simple observation: the transaction, not the listing, is where property relationships are actually decided. A listing advertises a property. A transaction binds people to it — with terms, contingencies, signatures and obligations that can run for years.

The question was whether better digital infrastructure could make that binding moment more legible, more accessible and easier to verify. That question has outlasted every version of the software.

Parcl was founded in Philadelphia in 2015. The city remains its provenance and first proving ground — not a boundary around what it can become.

02 Dec 2016

Kjell Hegstad and Digital Vikings

A prototype — and proof that the conversation could move beyond theory.

In December 2016, Parcl worked with Digital Vikings to demonstrate a transaction between a buyer and a seller recorded on a blockchain in Philadelphia. Technical.ly documented the demonstration.

Kjell Hegstad was an early innovator in digital banking, associated with the founding of ING DIRECT USA, and a co-founder of Digital Vikings. More important to this story, he was a champion and a partner who believed new technology should change what people could actually do.

He helped the team look past the novelty of a blockchain demo and toward real applications: who holds the record, who can check it, and what happens when the company that built the system is gone.

In memory of

Kjell Hegstad

A Viking spirit. A lasting influence.

Kjell passed away after a long illness. He did not get to see how far these ideas have traveled — from a single demonstration in Philadelphia to an architecture designed for agreements that last a century.

His curiosity, generosity and insistence on making things real remain part of the work. We carry his contribution forward with gratitude, and with the standard he set: build the thing, then prove it.

03 After 2016

Bryheim, Lloyd and Dealspace

Property information only creates value when people can move a deal forward.

Working with Bryheim Murray, Lloyd Emelle continued building Dealspace around a practical truth: the useful unit of real estate software is not the listing, and not the map — it is the deal. Sourcing, underwriting, diligence, negotiation and closing all depend on the same small set of facts staying consistent.

That work kept the original technical ambition honest. A record that cannot survive a closing is a demo. A workflow that cannot survive a difficult seller is a diagram.

Bryheim and Kyle Easley carried the practice further into Philadelphia development and acquisitions through BKP Development Group, including mixed-income housing work. Their continued presence in the market is part of why Parcl’s product thinking starts with real negotiations rather than idealised transactions.

Dealspace was the bridge between the 2016 demonstration and the platform now being designed: same question, more practical constraints.

04 After Kjell

Stephen Arrivello and the Philadelphia mission

The city was never just a proving ground.

After Kjell’s passing, Bryheim and Lloyd connected with Stephen Arrivello, who has served as Parcl’s chief executive and helped carry its vision forward. Stephen’s commitment to improving Philadelphia brought renewed focus to the lives affected by vacant property, underused land and disconnected civic information.

Under that leadership, Parcl’s mission widened. Property intelligence stopped being a technical curiosity and became a civic instrument: which properties are stuck, who is responsible for them, what interventions are possible, and how a neighborhood organization could act on any of it.

That chapter is not a detour from the commercial platform. It is the reason the platform has to be honest about data provenance, jurisdiction and the difference between a record and a right.

05 2023 — 2025

Code for Philly and Clean & Green Philly

A civic project — credited to the people who built it.

Lloyd is a co-founder of Code for Philly. That personal connection led Parcl toward Clean & Green Philly, an independent, volunteer-built civic application. It was created and led by Nissim Lebovits, with contributions from more than fifty volunteers and organizations across the city.

Under Stephen’s leadership, Parcl adapted the MIT-licensed application and explored how to extend its useful workflows through 2025. The work connected Parcl’s engineering to a concrete public need: helping community groups identify vacant and underused properties, understand neighborhood conditions, and plan interventions with better information.

The original project ended active development in July 2025 because reliable vacancy source data was no longer available. Its archived vacancy indicators date to June 2024; the final citywide parcel outputs were produced in July 2025. Those layers are historical observations, not a current inventory — and Parcl does not present them as live.

Parcl’s adaptation is not a claim of ownership, succession or official endorsement of the original Code for Philly initiative. The MIT license, attribution and contributor credits are preserved.

Attribution · MIT © 2023 Code for Philly

Clean & Green Philly was built by a team of Code for Philly volunteers.

Nissim Lebovits created and led the project. Will Budreau led user testing and research. Brandon Cohen was lead developer. Nathaniel Sidwell led the UX team.

With thanks to Code for Philly leadership Jon Geeting, Dante Leonard, Mjumbe Poe and Vicky Tam, and to Dr. Eugenia South for the research that grounded the work.

Original repository Parcl Civic
06 2024 — 2026

The technology matures

emelleme → Steadwell → HeartBadge.

The engineering work behind Parcl broadened well beyond a single demonstration. Through Steadwell and HeartBadge, the team worked across Bitcoin Script and programmable transaction conditions, identity, distributed systems, private collaboration, blockchain evidence and cryptographic verification.

Each of those problems is a prerequisite for the others. A signed agreement is only useful if you can prove who signed it. An identity claim is only useful if it can be disclosed selectively. A commitment is only durable if it can be verified without the original vendor.

The lesson from a decade of building is unglamorous: durable systems are mostly about what you refuse to put on-chain, what you promise to keep exportable, and how carefully you separate a cryptographic fact from a legal one.

07 2026

Full circle

This time, we build for generations.

The 2016 demonstration proved that a property transaction could be recorded on a blockchain. It could not prove that the record would still mean anything in 2066. That is the problem Parcl is now designed around: durable commitments, independently verifiable evidence, and software that assumes it will eventually be replaced.

Bitcoin Layer 1 provides a neutral, widely validated anchor for those commitments. Encrypted off-chain evidence keeps the confidential parts confidential. Jurisdiction adapters let the same core serve Philadelphia community work, private dealmaking and regulated ownership platforms in Canada without pretending the legal requirements are identical.

Not limited to Philadelphia, yet committed to the city that shaped it. Not dependent on one application staying online. And not confusing a token with the legal rights it may represent.

The arc

2015 — 2026

A decade, in order.

  1. 2015

    The beginning: Parcl

    Parcl begins with a question: what if real estate could be more connected, more accessible and easier to verify? Philadelphia becomes the first proving ground.

  2. December 2016

    Parcl × Digital Vikings

    With Kjell Hegstad and Digital Vikings, Parcl demonstrates a live buyer–seller transaction recorded on a blockchain in Philadelphia. Technical.ly covers the proof of concept.

  3. Following years

    The work becomes Dealspace

    Lloyd Emelle and Bryheim Murray continue exploring real estate workflow and deal infrastructure through Dealspace, connecting the technical vision to the reality of sourcing and closing property.

  4. After Kjell

    Stephen Arrivello takes Parcl forward

    Lloyd and Bryheim connect with Stephen, who has served as Parcl’s chief executive and helps extend the original idea toward civic redevelopment and property intelligence.

  5. 2023 — 2025

    The civic redevelopment chapter

    With Stephen’s Philadelphia ambitions guiding Parcl’s direction, the team adapts the Code for Philly Clean & Green Philly project. The independent open-source project ceases active development in July 2025 after reliable city vacancy data becomes unavailable.

  6. Beyond the pilot

    People who keep doing deals

    Bryheim Murray and Kyle Easley advance their real estate practice through BKP Development Group and ongoing Philadelphia-market activity.

  7. 2024 — 2026

    The deeper technology arc

    The engineering work expands through emelleme, Steadwell and HeartBadge into Bitcoin Script, privacy-preserving proofs, distributed computing, identity, event verification and offline-capable systems.

  8. 2026 →

    Coming full circle

    Parcl returns as a generalized, Bitcoin-first infrastructure system for properties, agreements and verifiable records — not a product limited to one city or one kind of transaction.

On sourcing

Selected history is based on team recollection and linked reporting. Organizational and product relationships are described as a development story, not as a claim that the entities are legally identical. Dates, roles and photography are being confirmed for public release; where a detail remains unverified, the site does not assert it.

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worthy of the next decade.

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