Co-founder of CyberCash Inc., which provided electronic wallet software to consumers and software to merchants to accept credit card payments, Lynch has also served as owner of Lynch Enterprises since 1993 and as a Technology Partner at El Dorado Ventures. He co-founded CyberCash with William N. Melton (who served as president and CEO, and later chairman), Steve Crocker (Chief Technology Officer), and Bruce G. Wilson. Lynch served as its Vice President and Director during its formation in August 1994 and served as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman until January 1999.
CyberCash, Inc. was an internet payment service for electronic commerce, headquartered in Reston, Virginia. The company initially provided an electronic wallet software to consumers and provided software to merchants to accept credit card payments. Later they also offered "CyberCoin", a micropayment system modeled after the NetBill research project at Carnegie Mellon University, which they later licensed. In 1995, the company proposed RFC 1898, CyberCash Credit Card Protocol Version 0.8.
The company went public on February 19, 1996 with the symbol "CYCH" and its shares rose 79% on the first day of trading. In 1998, CyberCash bought ICVerify, makers of computer-based credit card processing software, and in 1999 added another software company to their lineup, purchasing Tellan Software. In January 2000, a teenage Russian hacker nicknamed "Maxus" announced he had cracked CyberCash's ICVerify application; the company denied this, stating that ICVerify was not even in use by the purportedly hacked organization. On January 1, 2000, CyberCash fell victim to the Y2K Bug, causing double recording of credit card payments through their system.
The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 11, 2001. VeriSign acquired the CyberCash assets and name a couple of months later. On November 21, 2005, PayPal (already an eBay company) acquired VeriSign's payment services, including CyberCash.
Lynch is the Founder and Chairman of Interop networking trade show and conferences. He served as the Director of Computing Facilities at SRI International in the mid-to-late 1970s and formerly served as the Manager of the Computing Laboratory for the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI. While at the firm, he performed initial debugging of the TCP/IP protocols in conjunction with Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN).
Lynch served as a Director of the Information Processing Division for the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey from 1980 to 1983, where he led the ARPANET team that made the transition from the original NCP protocols to the current TCP/IP based protocols. In 1985, recognizing the lack of information availability and appropriate training, he, in cooperation with the IAB, arranged to hold a three-day workshop for all vendors to come learn about how TCP/IP worked and what it still could not do well. The speakers came mostly from the DARPA research community who had both developed these protocols and used them in day-to-day work.
About 250 vendor personnel came to listen to 50 inventors and experimenters. The results were surprises on both sides: the vendors were amazed to find that the inventors were so open about the way things worked (and what still did not work), and the inventors were pleased to listen to new problems they had not considered, but were being discovered by the vendors in the field. Thus a two-way discussion was formed that lasted for over a decade.
From December 1990 to December 1995, Lynch served as the Chairman of Softbank Forums. From April 1994 to August 1996, he served as a Director of UUNet Technologies, Inc., which he founded. He has served as a Director of Covad Communications Group Inc. from April 1997, as well as Director of Maxager Technology, Director of OutPerformance, Inc., and Director of EXDS Inc. from January 1998. Lynch has also served as Chairman of Clearsight Systems, Inc.
He has been a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, a Member of the Association of Computing Machinery, and a Member of the Internet Society. Lynch has been active in computer networking with a primary focus on promoting the spread of the Internet. He holds an M.A. degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles and a B.S. degree in Mathematics from Loyola Marymount University, where he also received undergraduate training in Mathematics and Philosophy.
