Building Bridges: How Ease Protocol Aims to Transform Government and Business with Blockchain

In a riveting episode of The Edge of Show, host Josh Kriger sits down live in Dubai with Douglas Horn, CEO of Goodblock and founder of Ease Protocol, to explore how Ease Protocol is redefining blockchain adoption. With a background spanning magazine publishing, film directing, and pioneering blockchain work on Telos, Horn explains his mission: make blockchain not just powerful, but accessible, compliant, and user‑friendly for governments, enterprises, and everyday users. From the innovative sequestered encryption key management system to modular, jurisdiction‑aware layer‑one chains, Horn details how Ease Protocol enables financial messaging, exponential liquidity, and no‑code smart contracts—all while preserving privacy and regulatory clarity. Whether you're passionate about Web3, crypto, or enterprise blockchain, this was a masterclass in real utility over hype.

Key Topics Covered

• Sequestered Encryption for Compliance
  How Ease Protocol uses Apple-style enclave key management to secure private keys in transit—unlocking regulatory visibility without sacrificing user privacy.
• Modular Layer‑1 Built for Governments
  Deployable jurisdiction-specific blockchains with optional “regulatory mode” to satisfy court-ordered account control alongside open public use.
• Exponential Liquidity Token Economy
  The EASE token underpins a novel liquidity model with far fewer pools and dramatically reduced impermanent loss.
• No-Code Smart Contracts & Financial Messaging
  User-friendly “super app” interface delivers on-chain escrow, loyalty tokens or certificates, using wizards and business logic automation.
• Cross‑Chain & Stablecoin Infrastructure
  Ease enables inter‑Ease and EVM bridges, supports ISO‑20022 integration, and facilitates stablecoin/CBDC deployment tailored to diverse regulatory frameworks.

Episode Highlights

• “We need an Apple style user experience… making blockchain easier to adopt” — Douglas Horn
• “Governments need a regulatory mode… with a court‑ordered rekey function” — Douglas Horn
• “Sequestered encryption is the same as Enclave Keystore on your Apple” — Douglas Horn
• “At 100 tokens, it’s 50× more efficient with liquidity” — Douglas Horn
• “End users never use smart contracts, so we built no‑code deployment” — Douglas Horn

‍

Transcript:

Josh Kriger: Welcome to The Edge of Show. I'm your host Josh Krueger and we feature a variety of top-notch guests and other hosts as well. It's another production of The Edge of Company, a quickly growing media ecosystem empowering the pioneers of Web3 tech and culture. And it's responsible for other groundbreaking endeavors like Outer Edge Innovation Festival in LA and Riyadh. Today's show is brought to you by Ease Protocol and features Douglas Horn, the CEO of Goodblock and founder of Ease Protocol. He previously founded the Telos blockchain and helped develop innovations like Telos EVM, Decide Government Engine, and cross-chain bridging technologies. He's now focused on making blockchain accessible and compliant for businesses and governments. I'll also mention we are live in Dubai. Good to see you, Douglas.

Douglas Horn: Good to see you live in Dubai. It's crazy, right?

Josh Kriger: Yeah, it's been a whirlwind sort of week, and it's been great to see sort of how excited people are about real applications of blockchain to make the world better again. It feels like the mean narrative is fading, and now it's like, oh, utility. We like utility again.

Douglas Horn: Oh, we can do stuff. Yeah, it feels a little bit more grown up, a little less kid's table.

Josh Kriger: Absolutely. And I'm honored to be a partner with you guys and to be part of your journey. We should let our audience know Ease Protocol is a blockchain platform built to meet regulatory standards, enable financial messaging, and make blockchain easier to adopt for real-world use cases. And we'll dive into all that on the show.

Douglas Horn: Yeah. But in short, it's like, we need an Apple style user experience, right. For blockchain to take off. And we also would be great if we didn't have governments and regulated industries, you know, to be able to actually use blockchain without ruining everything that's great about blockchain. That's kind of in it. We're trying to ease into that with ease protocol.

Josh Kriger: Absolutely. And I think, you know, I'm one of those guys that's done a lot of different things. And I look at it all as sort of blending together to who I am and what I do now today. And you also have this interesting background from entertainment to blockchain, you know, where you sort of looked at the world from different angles in terms of the big problems that can be solved. And I'm curious, like, what initially sparked your interest in blockchain? because you've been involved in technology for your whole life.

Douglas Horn: That's a great question. Yeah, since when I was like 19, I was writing magazine articles for computer programming magazines. Nobody knew I was 19, right? For me, it was like, hey, 60 bucks, all right. Um, and, uh, but I also took a time and worked for several years in, uh, in entertainment as a creative, uh, also on game development. And, uh, it all comes together, you know, like there's, there's skills we've talked about. Like if you can put together an independent film and keep everybody there and keep your vision and get it online, then you, then you're, you can do almost anything. It's very similar to, to the blockchain space, but. What got me involved in blockchain was I had been working in tech and I felt like I didn't have enough faith in myself to, and my ideas when mobile and, and, um, web and all these things are coming. I had so many ideas. There's so much stuff I thought, oh, this would be so cool, but I didn't have the faith in myself at the time that my ideas were meaningful. And when blockchain came around, you know, 2015 or whatever, and I mean, I came into it, I said, no, I have all these ideas, I'm gonna really go for it this time, because I think they could be valuable.

Josh Kriger: Makes sense. So fast forward a little bit. You decided to create Telos at a time where the industry was having another sort of key precipice where you wanted to see adoption. And sort of you learned some things from that that led you to deciding to create Ease Protocol. Maybe you can kind of talk to us about sort of how TELUS led you to the sort of insights that you needed to now create Ease.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, so Telos was designed around having great governance, having access, and even providing some finance for small teams to come in. And because it was small and low cost, it was great for people in developing nations to come in. So it gave me a lot of access to builders who were coming from Latin America, Africa, places like that. Like really inspiring stuff, right? Because now they would have access.

Josh Kriger: And there's a lot of unchained activity. I mean, what was the market cap at the peak approximately?

Douglas Horn: After about three years, there was a change. It was 400 million market cap, so approaching half a billion market cap. Not that much in crypto, but if you start from zero, which we did, no ICO, no secret funds, it's kind of a lot.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, and you built the fundamental governance structures that you now realize could have more amplification capacity with a different sort of fundamental layer 1. That's the gist?

Douglas Horn: I learned that it's very hard for end users, it's very hard for everybody, and I wanted to solve those problems. But I also wanted to make sure that these tools that we created on Telos could be updated and expanded because they were really useful. It's almost a shame that they didn't get used more, but we're going to bring these things in and give them to everybody via use protocol.

Josh Kriger: So if you could describe ease protocol in one sentence, just to sort of break it down for everyone, what would you say?

Douglas Horn: It's an ecosystem for building super performant layer one blockchains that solve the problem of user interface, make it easy for everybody and make it possible for governments to come in and use blockchain to make services easier and better and more efficient and less expensive for everyone.

Josh Kriger: makes sense. So compliance stands out as my mind as a key consideration. And I think, you know, when we sort of talk about how excited we are about adopting new legislation, sort of removing the ambiguity from the space, we now have to play by the rules too.

Douglas Horn: But at least there are rules, you know, like the From the U.S. space, the worst thing anyone can do is not make bad rules or arcane rules or whatever. The worst thing you do is make no rules, have it totally unclear, and then suggest that you're going to regulate using old, non-applicable rules, right? And that's what the system was in the United States. until the current administration comes in and they're like, hey, let's make Washington, D.C. the new crypto capital of the world. I'm like, great, finally, right? Like a lot of us who worked in the U.S. for so long have struggled and like, no, like we can't, we want this here. And now the concept that, you know, that's even been floated, like there may be no capital gains on U.S. based crypto projects, pretty exciting.

Josh Kriger: So specific to the world of compliance is there something that you feel like other blockchains aren't doing or could be doing better that that ease can sort of resolve?

Douglas Horn: Well. No blockchain is really serving the needs of what a government would need. Like governments are finally ready to start using blockchain, but there's nothing built for purpose, right? What do they need? Specifically, they need a very small set of functions that support their mandate to govern. Right? You can't go in and be hardcore Bitcoiners and, you know, who I love and am in some ways, but I'm not trying to recreate that. You can't say, sorry government, we're going to thumb our nose at you and you can't do anything. What they do then is they seize it anyway. That's why we have a global, that's why we have a Bitcoin reserve because it got seized. But the way they seize it is they seize it, you know, through leaning on people and it's not fast enough. It's not, there's just so many problems. It'd be better if there was, If people could have complete control of their keys, except there'd be like a regulatory mode for blockchains that want to turn it on, right? When you deploy your blockchain, you've got regulatory mode and open mode. If you're open mode, great, it's whatever you expect. If it's a regulatory mode, it means that there's a function, one function, that allows a government with a court order to rekey an account to a court-ordered custodian until the end of the pre-deceitings, right? That's what governments need, that and the ability to see all the actions on the blockchain. Now, every blockchain has that, except we're going to bring in privacy. But in deploying privacy and looking at the various ways to do that for account, for end users, we said, well, the governments are still going to need to see this. So we use the gating technology instead of like a ZK proof technology.

Josh Kriger: So obviously, I think the government's like, yeah, that sounds great. And there's some traditional sort of decentralization maxis that are probably thinking, wow, Big Brother might be watching us now. Like, how do you respond to that sort of concern?

Douglas Horn: Well, I mean, Big Brother is watching us just as much as they've always been watching us, right? Everything's available.

Josh Kriger: On-chain.

Douglas Horn: On-chain, off-chain.

Josh Kriger: I mean, chain analysis can find just about everything at this point.

Douglas Horn: They can find everything, right? Yeah. So that, I think, is a red herring. Going back to the, you know, look, Bitcoin security is fantastic and unbreakable. And yet, at the same time, there's a bunch of seized Bitcoin. right? How do they seize it? Like I said, they lean on you, they ruin your life, they threaten to put your kids in jail. Like, I'm not, I don't think that's good, but in the end, they're going to do what they're going to do, right? Because they're government, because they have the guns and the jails and the courts and everything, right? Anyone who thinks that they're going to be able to escape that paradigm should look at, you know, McAfee, right? Nobody knew more about computer security than John McAfee. And he still lost his coins and died mysteriously in a Spanish prison, right? So, Unless you think you know a lot more than that guy did, and I know I don't, right? Like, the idea of fighting government is very challenging, right? Maybe a better way is to give governments just the tools they need so they don't overreach and grab for everything. Because if they want to use blockchain, they will, but they'll develop their own and it'll suck. right? Let's as an industry, let's develop something that they can use that also supports the needs of all our users, right? Because we know much better, right? They're not experts. We're experts in how to serve the people who are using this. And I mean, all the people who haven't started using it yet, right? That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to say, look, even with some small concessions, blockchain system is going to be far better than what we have now, far, far better, as long as we preserve the good things about it, which we do. So that's my approach.

Josh Kriger: So with that in mind, I guess part of your secret sauce is a technology you call sequestered encryption.

Douglas Horn: Right.

Josh Kriger: Can you talk to us a little bit about what that is?

Douglas Horn: Sure. So sequestered encryption is, the easy way to describe it is it's the same thing as Enclave Keystore on your Apple. So we didn't really invent anything. We just took something that is very common, everybody uses and trusts already, and applied it to a blockchain model. So instead of being a part of a chip, it's a server, you know, a protected server. So now the way that, so our sequester management system, the way that this works, the same way that Enclave Keystore works is, Private keys are generated on the sequestered key management system or on clean key space. They're generated there, they're never transferred. They're stored in encrypted form and only the owner has access to the decrypted key for the private key and that is only decrypted in transit. So it's not sitting around, right? This is state-of-the-art. This is Apple-designed system. We're just saying, yep, that's the right way to do it and applying it.

Josh Kriger: So... Has anyone ever applied this to... I think so.

Douglas Horn: Yeah. Look, I think a few, but we're not rolling our own anything, but it's not widely used. And, you know, this is... Ease, by the way, it stands for easy adoption, sequestered encryption. And we could have called it Easy Adoption Enclave Keystore, but it's just not as good an acronym. We want to remind ourselves this is always about making things easier, about easing the path for people coming in, about ease.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, so I should sort of say that the secret sauce is the combination of the sequestered encryption with a different approach to the user experience that you're proposing that sort of ideally changes the game. We've seen sort of companies trying to make getting a wallet easier, trying to buy Bitcoin easier, other crypto. We've also seen sort of this idea of sort of having email access now through EtherMail. But you're talking about something more radically different, which is sort of an easy to use L1.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, a series of them that are specific to each jurisdiction, right? Because the state of Wyoming is going to need their own. The country of UAE is going to need its own. There's not one master one. The reality of working with governments and industry groups and regulated industries is a lot of them are going to need their own.

Josh Kriger: So do you have to customize the SDK for every single user?

Douglas Horn: Uh, no, it's, it's designed to be very modular and they, they pick out their features they want. Do you, so it comes with like, uh, in, it comes with messaging, right? It with, so it's a super app interface, right? They use a simple sign on single click actions, but it's in, it's like a super app like WeChat or, or Coco talk in South Korea, right? Which is a great format. It has messaging built in. Now the community can decide whether it's going to be. end-to-end encrypted messaging, which we have using the signal ratchet system, or something else, right? The governments may want that, they may not want that. But certainly in the open mode, open mode ones, blockchains will be wanting to use the encrypted. But you've got messaging set up. You've got payments. You can set up how these payments work. There's a liquidity system called Exponential Liquidity, which is fantastic. It's just what it sounds like, and it's the most efficient liquidity system yet. And they can turn it on or turn it off, right? It's all modular. The people who set up the blockchain are the people who decide what the parameters are.

Josh Kriger: And can you add new parameters later?

Douglas Horn: Sure, I mean Ease Protocol Inc, right, is all, that's what we do. We're always going to be constantly adding things.

Josh Kriger: But if you want to, you know, maybe I don't, I didn't want messaging and then a year later, actually I do want messaging.

Douglas Horn: Well, anything can be done on computing. I think everyone will want messaging. The question will be whether they want to allow it to be end-to-end encrypted or not. And yeah, anything can be done. There are certain things, you know, in consensus that may be more difficult to change. But yeah, I mean, it's computer software. You can do pretty much anything.

Josh Kriger: So with regard to the messaging part of it, I am curious, like, is this sort of a replacement for WhatsApp or Signal or, you know, whatever internal messaging tools they're using today? Or is this messaging with a very specific sort of financial use case?

Douglas Horn: So it's messaging that is generally there to promote and facilitate transactions on chain. And not, you know, those can be financial, that can be, hey, I'm selling you my bike, you know, how much, blah, blah, blah, blah, okay, great, send me, you know, I like the price, send me a Estro contract from the no-code smart contract thing, you know, for five cents or whatever, and then you pay the money into that, right? That's great, but, Yeah, that's what it's used for. I don't think people are going to use it as Slack.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, yeah. But it's a really important use case that I think has a lot of value. I just moved out of a place in LA, and one of the problems with Facebook Marketplace is the transaction has to occur in person. You don't know this person. They're in your house. They're giving you money. Is it real money? Is it not real money? You know, it's the one part of Facebook Marketplace that's a little dubious, but if that was done all on-chain, it was an escrow, they come in, you go, here's the item. So, I mean, it's a consumer analogy, but I think it shows the sort of value of financial messaging.

Douglas Horn: A hundred percent, right? I mean, look, it's built into Venmo, right? Nobody uses Venmo messaging, I think, to run their company, but they use it when they're buying and selling stuff, right?

Josh Kriger: If they want to brag about paying their friend for a pizza or something like that. Maybe, yeah. There's a whole world of these people that are really into that, but yeah, it's a little bit of a sidetrack.

Douglas Horn: I think there will be places that it becomes a preferred form, right? Like especially places that don't have other methods of great messaging that's in encrypted. We have privacy preserving social functions, right? So there's a lot of things that I think We'll make the tools and the users will decide how to use them. And I'm excited to see what they do. But the more tools we give them, you know, the more they can do.

Josh Kriger: Another analogy would be like the brag on Venmo would be like, hey, I'm going to jet ski with Anna McLaren, which is actually possible here in Dubai. There's a lot of things possible here that.

Douglas Horn: You can do almost anything here in Dubai.

Josh Kriger: Pretty much. Come to Dubai, check it out.

Douglas Horn: Yeah.

Josh Kriger: So big news recently, Michael Turpin has come on as president of your board. Congrats on that. Yeah, chairman of the board. Yeah. Yeah, chairman. You know, Michael's been a long time partner with Edge at some of our events, and we had him on to celebrate his new book that came out about Bitcoin's super cycle, which is really something everyone needs to read. Um, you know, talk to us a little bit about what it's like to have someone like that, his caliber sort of helping, um, you know, at the strategic level and, and maybe some of the other folks that you have in your orbit sort of supporting this project.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, for sure. So, so starting with Michael, I mean, it's amazing. This is not a, the size role he takes in most projects. And, you know, he's advised us a lot, but he's very few at this level, like I think his own project, his own venture cap studio and open carbon and ease protocol. We are using his advice to work on government connections, banking connections, stable coin connections, exchange connections, and strategic investors. Right. We have, but he's in really good company. So my, my brother from another mother, Shreesha Chintamani, she's done, you know, billions of dollars in VC over the past 20 years. He's a, he's an advisor and also on the board. A guy who came here with me to Dubai to his first crypto conference, right. Named Bambo Shofala. He's Nigerian. I know him from Microsoft. He's worked at Microsoft 32 years. He's a general manager there working in Windows, Xbox, Azure, and emerging markets. He is helping us. I mean, this is amazing. He's helping us apply the Microsoft product to understanding. a process to understanding product, revenue streams, you know, all the things. It's so much beyond what I would have known. That's like, that's great. He's also, right now, he's just gone to Kenya to get some additional connections because he opened the first Microsoft Development Center there, you know, 15 years ago, something like that. That's great. My brother, Greg, was president of GNC, or CEO of GNC. He's had a huge illustrious career, and he's now the managing partner of a Wall Street broker-dealer firm. He advises Goodblock, the parent company of Ease Protocol. And boy, a lot, you know, Josh Lawler, our friend, is a great counselor. We have a pretty solid group, man. And that's just the advisors, the executives and managers are people I've worked with for most of them for five years.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, you kind of, you know, brought in the A-team, the people that you've worked with at TELUS and other projects that...

Douglas Horn: you collect good people around you if you're lucky, right?

Josh Kriger: You know, with sort of your ambitious sort of goals to support both government and enterprises, reporting and compliance also includes existing standards that are out there, like ISO. And there's apparently a new standard, the ISO 2022, if I say that right.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's ISO 20022, it's two zero zero two two. What that is...try not to say that very often.

Josh Kriger: I've got like the government cobwebs because it's been like, you know, 20...I'm almost like, oh, it's been too long. Yeah. Since I've had to use all this government jargon.

Douglas Horn: So I would say it's like, forget the number, right? It's an international standard organization. What is it? It is the way that banks message each other. It's a bank messaging system. People are probably familiar with Swift, which is what's in place now and being phased out for this new one, ISO 20022. But that's the important thing. It's bank messaging, right? It's how banks communicate with each other. Now, There's about eight blockchains that say that they're compliant with it, like Ripple and Celluluna and whatnot. What they mean though, as far as I can tell, is that they will write the messages, they will just record the message to the blockchain to be scraped and dealt with later. No automation available. What we've already built the backend of, and we're building the front end now, is the ability to integrate that into smart contracts. And what, for the first time, what that means is banks and financial institutions finally have a reason to actually come in because why? It automates their processes, right? The smart contracts they can have, they can have business logic. They can say, well, if it's from account on this list and it's to an account on this list, and it's, you know, between these numbers, then instead of having to have a human, you know, approve it, just approve it.

Josh Kriger: So I'm a big bank. Am I replacing an existing process or procedure I'm already using with this solution? Or is this augmenting my current tech stack?

Douglas Horn: Well, I mean, I think there will be a transition period, but the best case for the bank is that they adopt this and use it instead. At least with the customers that they can use it with, right? It'll start out with, you know, the customers need to have an account on an Ease-based blockchain. Um, but there'll be a lot and they'll be working with governments, right? So, um, when that happens, they'll be able to, I mean, they'll, you know, how these things work. They have a pilot program. They try it out. They say, but when they see the efficiency, I think they'll want to migrate towards that as much as they can.

Josh Kriger: So you got to be excited about all this new stable coin action in Hong Kong and Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Europe in the U S where.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, this is what I was hoping for, right? These stable coins, having these live on ease protocol blockchains, that's going to empower everything, right? It means that I don't want to go in and create my own stable coin. That's the last thing I want to do. I want to create a platform for stable coins or for countries that want to do an actual CBDC, or for places, which I think is a hybrid that you'll see a lot, where there is a digital currency twin of the local currency. You know, like e-Naira in Nigeria, but better, right? That was a bit of a failure, but I think there's a way to 2.0 that. That'd be great. But then people can spend their own coins within their own country, digital twin to those, but not necessarily issued by the central bank, the same way Tether's not issued by the Fed, right?

Josh Kriger: Is this a sort of situation where Europe may have its own deployment of ease and that would be different than Nairobi? Or is there also this cross-pollination potential across the stable coin universe that's possible with ease?

Douglas Horn: Both. Can't we have both? So we have jurisdictions that each have their own jurisdictional rules, right? Usually that means that, you know, for things for like GDPR and whatnot, usually that means that the servers have to reside within the jurisdiction, right? And they each have, and they will each modify the way their thing is set up, their network is set up at the initiation point, like we were talking about before, based on their own laws and whatnot. So If you look at that, you realize that each jurisdiction most likely needs its own national or state provincial blockchain, right? So, you know, the laws of Germany, you know, maybe the Schengen area, the EU can have one. We're trying, yet to, the first one that's launching is trying to do this in multiple African nations. But I think you'll see all things, right? You'll see if UAE were to come on board and do this, they would have their own blockchain, they would have their own Ease-based blockchain because the servers would have to be here, they'd be running government offices, they'd be set up. with the local laws and it'd be the, you know, the local ministries would be the ones in charge of any law enforcement or regulation, right? So same thing if in the state of Wyoming, right, in the state of New York would have to have their own. So I foresee a lot of these, like 196 countries and municipal all the way up. Now, very likely, cities could use their state blockchain, right? Their state-based blockchain. Is this balkanization? No, because we've built proofs-based, lossless cross-chain bridges from ease to ease. And also from ease to EVM and eventually Solana and the whole ecosystem. Cosmos will be probably one of the easiest ones, right? And that's a great ecosystem to interact with because they already have something analog on their own system, right? So yes, there will be a lot, there will have to be a lot, but sending value or sending transaction, you know, actual actions across these bridges with IBC will be possible as long as both bridges, both chains agree that they're going to interact.

Josh Kriger: Thanks for unpacking all that. Obviously some major innovations when you combine both pre-existing technology that hasn't been used quite this way and some of the unique technology that you've built, as well as some of the new things that you're building here. I guess, you know, we are sort of the edge of show. We'd like to talk about blockchain, but also I assume there's some kind of token economy around the governance.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, sure. It's actually not around the governance, it's around the system called exponential liquidity. And what it does, the EASE token will power this system that's the most efficient liquidity form ever. I mean, almost burying the lead with this, right? So at four tokens, right? For tokens, it's 50% more efficient with liquidity. At 100 tokens, it's 50 times more efficient. Wow. Yeah. The reason is when you have a bunch of tokens and you need a one-to-one pair for each token, right? Those grow exponentially. As the number of assets grow linearly, those grow exponentially. So

Josh Kriger: I think that's one of the issues with gaming on chain and when you have multiple players all playing. Yeah, it's complicated.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, in math it's called the handshake problem. Go Google it. But it's, you know, this is the problem, right? So when you have a hundred, right? When you have a hundred assets in our system, you only have a hundred asset pools. Why? Because everything is this atomic intermediate token. It's Bitcoin to ease, USDC to ease, Tether or USDT to ease, right? And so instead of these one-to-one, right? And so every action, it goes from Bitcoin to ease and then ease to tether, right? It's a two-step atomic transaction, but it all happens in one block. And what that means is we only need one-to-one pools for everything. So that's a hundred pools with a hundred assets. With 100 assets in one-to-one pools, almost 5,000. 4,950 pools required. So that means, think about how much you could put in each of those pools, right? It's literally 50 times more efficient. It means if you have, if you have a million tokens and you could put, you know, divide that up a hundred times and the amount in each pool would be the same as if you had, you know, uh, 50 million tokens and divided that up because the amount in each individual pool would be the same. Right. And because we have one token sort of that joins them all, that token can be regularly rebalanced by the system. So it eliminates impermanent loss too.

Josh Kriger: So does this kind of change the narrative around TPS?

Douglas Horn: Well, TPS is different, right? So TPS, because this is horizontal scaling, we have basically limitless TPS, right? And that's what most of these groups who are coming out and say, oh, we have 100,000, we have whatever TPS. What they're saying is, well, we have 20,000 TPS on this one and 20,000 TPS on this one and 20,000 on this one. So that's what 60,000, right? And with dozens of chains, they have whatever number. It's true. And that's the same thing we do, this horizontal scaling. So like I was saying, each jurisdiction and each group is likely to need their own, each of those groups will have 40,000 TPS on these blockchain.

Josh Kriger: Which is more than enough for what they need to.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, and it'll grow. You know, it keeps growing as we upgrade equipment and should we have something go absolutely gangbusters, then we can just invisibly do another horizontal scaling within that system. But mostly, you know, one per system will handle us for a good long time.

Josh Kriger: I guess one question that comes to mind is why isn't there a governance token? Because clearly, you know, you're part of the EOS project. Most blockchains have a governance token. It feels like you're pretty intentional with choosing the token sort of approach in this case and going a little bit different.

Douglas Horn: It's a great question because I also built Decide Governance Engine, which is the most advanced governance tool in existence still, right? It's been used for over six years on Telos, used some on Wax and some other places. I made it open source when I made it. My team at Goodblock, not Telos, core devs. And, uh, we intended for it to be, you know, our own thing. And we, I said, Oh my gosh, this could actually be the Linux of governance tools. So I made it open source. So governance is governance is super important to me. I would say governance tokens are. often less about governance than they are about other things. That's one thing. Most of the governance platforms don't have very good actual robust governance tools. You can vote on one thing or not.

Josh Kriger: A lot of these governance tokens were proxies for just like what they could get away with, right?

Douglas Horn: I would not disagree with that.

Josh Kriger: I mean it's just saying the obvious like when the regulations are ambiguous and folks are trying to figure out a way to create a token economy that became like the loophole per se.

Douglas Horn: What's the utility? Governance, right? But here's the thing, when we're making blockchains as basically enterprise tools for governments, right? Yeah, you don't need a governance, you don't even want a governance.

Josh Kriger: It's built into the fundamental structure of the chain.

Douglas Horn: Right.

Josh Kriger: If people could use, and also I like separate... They're like wizards, right?

Douglas Horn: Yeah, so it, again, in our quest to make this as easy as possible for users and also to fully use what blockchain can be for users, right? Smart contracts, smart contracts. Everyone's like, oh, the great thing about blockchain is smart contracts, right? But end users never use them. So we built a system of no code, smart contract deployment. that is prime for users, like even in the nomenclature. So like instead of talking wonky Bitcoin words like multi-sig wallet, right? We say group wallet. That's something my wife can understand, my friends can understand. We're trying to get all the names right, all the things very tuned up for end users. All they do is they decide what they want to do. I want to do an escrow contract. Great. Who's it to? How much? What's the thing? Who's the escrow agent? Just fill in the thing and then it deploys pre-compiled audited contracts and just fills in basically that are parameterized and fills in your answers and boom, you're there.

Josh Kriger: Sounds like you could also do things like there's a 30-day or 60-day accounts payable windows, too. It's a smart contract. Touring complete.

Douglas Horn: You can do anything you want. What we do, we actually make families of these things. If you're going to do an escrow, there's a lot of ways to do it. very similar contracts, but some are simpler and more complex. So the wizard actually decides based on your answers what the most efficient one is and doesn't do anything bigger than that. But I mean things like loyalty rewards, like giving very small companies the ability to have loyalty tokens. kicking out NFTs, whether those be art NFTs or whatever, kicking out what I'm trying to call digital assets instead of NFTs to go along with that better, or digital objects. So like a certificate, right? So we have a system where you can I can issue a certificate on you, saying that you passed this test. And when we set it up, we can say, well, is this forever? Is it revocable? Or is it something that times out after a certain amount of time? And you just set all that up, and then it's done. And we build, for these smart contracts that are built into the app, we have their interfaces also within the super app.

Josh Kriger: I think the certificate part is cool. I wish I got a certificate for passing statistics. And I want it to be for a lifetime.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, as long as you don't have to do it again. But no, like school credits. or Microsoft certifications or any of these things would be great. Some things you want people to have to re-up every year, some things are good forever.

Josh Kriger: Some kind of blockchain association could have their membership certificate built on Chain.

Douglas Horn: So easy. You can even pay for it that way, right?

Josh Kriger: It's pretty cool, man. So you got this token economy. It's not launched yet. What's the TGE story there?

Douglas Horn: So the plan is June. We know what plans are, but I think I'm excited about it. We've sort of ramped up from stealth to full-blown, hey, let's launch a token really quickly. So as a result, we're going to grow our community. We're going to offer a lot to the community to get excited about this. Mainly just tell them about the features we have, right? But yeah, I think that's going to be an exciting way for people to get in, to be on a major exchange. We already have a partner and we keep looking for more. And yeah, very exciting. You know, that's one of those places where it's great to have the connections of Michael Um, you know, and I'm hoping by then that we'll have some pretty big announcements in other fields as well. I don't like to announce announcements, but, um, let's just say a lot's happening.

Josh Kriger: Great. Great. And for those that are interested in learning more about ease protocol, um, I guess there's two perspectives, one from just the consumer, you know, blockchain and these perspective and two as a potential partner, what next steps do you recommend?

Douglas Horn: Go to EaseProtocol.com. That's got a lot of information about the project. It has the full white paper, which is very thorough, but lots of pictures. How many pages? Oh, that's a good question. I think it's around 60.

Josh Kriger: Ah, that's too bad.

Douglas Horn: No, I mean, come on. It's not at all.

Josh Kriger: But it's, you know, it's important. I mean, it's not like this 20-pager that's just like cliff notes here. You get into the technical new,

Douglas Horn: Oh, very much so. It explores and illustrates the whole tech stack and describes it layer by layer, feature by feature. I mean, I'm really proud of it. It took me quite a while to write. And I think that the features, you can understand all the features and why we have them. And that's the point, right?

Josh Kriger: Cool. So check out Ease Protocol.

Douglas Horn: Easeprotocol.com. We have, if you go there, we can also, and probably down here, we have all the socials. So visit our socials. We're excited to like really start communicating with the peeps who want this, right? Who want this really exciting way to finally use crypto the way they want to use it, right? Well, I'll bring their family in, bring their friends in, you know, and share their, share their joy of what they're doing to people who have been held back because their user experience has been terrible.

Josh Kriger: Thank you for sharing all that. I'm certainly really excited about what you guys are doing to share more updates and have more conversations in the future. Keep going to great places like Dubai and talk to different folks about what East Protocol is all about. But I'm also interested in getting to know you better and to let our listeners get to know you better in our next segment. So let's move on to that. All right, well, welcome to Edge Quick Hitters. It's a fun and quick way to get to know you a little bit better. There are 10 questions. We're looking for just a short single word or a few word response, but feel free to expand if you get the urge. I'll mention, Douglas, this is like inside the actor's studio, so you should be fine with this type of content. You ready for it? Let's do it. All right. What's the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

Douglas Horn: A comic book. I know it was a Marvel comic book. I think it was the New Mutants or something. Yeah.

Josh Kriger: Okay, before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Douglas Horn: Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, before.

Josh Kriger: Not to date your comic.

Douglas Horn: No, no, I'm old, let's face it.

Josh Kriger: Yeah. But that's good for building government tech products, right? They like us older folks.

Douglas Horn: Yes. Got a few gray in them.

Josh Kriger: But you were going to mention something about the comics? All right, I entrust you.

Douglas Horn: No, I... It was great. I remember putting my own, I remember buying it with my own money. It's funny how you asked that and it just comes right back. I remember buying it with my own money and yeah, like I had earned pulling weeds or something like that. Yeah. Nice. Really interesting.

Josh Kriger: And what's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

Douglas Horn: Well, from the time I was about 12, I had like two paper routes. So the Seattle times, right? Um, I grew up in Seattle area, but my parents were from Iowa and that had that impressed on us. The, the, the Midwest work ethic of, you know, go get a job. So yeah, still papers.

Josh Kriger: Was it like, uh, in Boston, the Boston Herald on Sundays was like ginormous. So you're actually lifting bricks.

Douglas Horn: Oh yeah, and also you had to stuff. You had to like go to the paper shack and you had to like take the ends because you get the papers and you get the inserts and on Sundays and Wednesdays you had to stuff them in. It was like all this extra, extra labor.

Josh Kriger: Extra unpayment. Yeah, they were smart about that.

Douglas Horn: Yeah, they were.

Josh Kriger: So what is the most recent thing you purchased?

Douglas Horn: I bought a hat. My wife and I were on our 30th anniversary in Scotland, in Edinburgh, and we found this great hat, and that's what I bought. I don't buy a lot.

Josh Kriger: So you like rainy places. I'm seeing a trend.

Douglas Horn: I'm comfortable with rainy places, yeah. So this fantastic Scottish cashmere, it's great. That's what I bought. Cool, I gotta get over to Scotland. What is the most recent thing you sold? I sold some traditional assets so that I could buy more Bitcoin.

Josh Kriger: Not financial advice, but I might've done the same thing recently.

Douglas Horn: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's exactly, I don't buy or sell very much really. I mean, other than like food and stuff like that, but, um, yeah, this is a great, this has been for me, great time to really get back in and make sure that I'm less, less traditional economy, more, more Bitcoin and crypto economy.

Josh Kriger: If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, experience that's currently for sale, what would it be? I guess if you want to say Bitcoin, that's fine. But if you have another answer, go for it.

Douglas Horn: I mean, that would be boring, right? That would be a great answer. But what would I buy?

Josh Kriger: I would totally buy a lot of Bitcoin.

Douglas Horn: I would buy all the Bitcoin I could. Well, but that's what I'm doing. It's not like... So here's the thing that's funny about these questions, right? What would you do for a job if you could do anything you wanted? It's like, I'm doing it. I can do anything I want and I'm doing it. What would you buy if you could buy anything you wanted? Well, I can buy with some, you know... different amounts, whatever I want. I'm a free person, right? So, like, these are funny questions because it's like, you know, it's conjecture. What would you do? It's like, well, exactly what I'm doing in my life right now. That's what I would do. What is your most prized possession? Oh, my family. By far. I mean, not that they're a possession, but I've, like I said, great wife, 30 years of putting up with my, you know, issues. Great kids, they're kicking butt. I'd say beyond that, it's my friends and the people I work with at Good Block and Ease Protocol. Those are the things I treasure. People, people and good relationships are really everything. I guess there's our health and whatnot, but boy, they're pretty, they're pretty close.

Josh Kriger: Right on, I couldn't agree with you more. If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?

Douglas Horn: I question authority. I question even my own authority. And I think we will increasingly need that ability to wisely question things that we think we know are true. So I would pass that along.

Josh Kriger: That's a great insight. I don't think anyone's ever entered that way on over like 450 episodes.

Douglas Horn: All right. Call me an original.

Josh Kriger: If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be? Just one? You know what?

Douglas Horn: I'm very rude. I interrupt people. I'm really trying to eliminate that for myself. I'm so in my head that I, I, I don't listen as much as I want to do. And it's something I'm really working on. So I'm trying to eliminate that in this generation, but I would definitely want to eliminate that, you know, in, in my line going forward. More presence, always a good thing. More presence for sure.

Josh Kriger: What did you do just before joining us on the podcast?

Douglas Horn: I set decked this lovely set.

Josh Kriger: Thank you for your assistance there.

Douglas Horn: I worked in doing corporate and television and film shoots for a long time as a director. And I want things to look the way I want them. I want to fill the space and have everything. So I thought, what the heck? I had a few minutes and I set it up. Nice.

Josh Kriger: And what are you going to do just after the podcast?

Douglas Horn: Oh, hit the pool, man. Yeah. Hitting the pool for sure. It's so hot here. It's been a long week. I've been here all week. I'm like, it's right out my window and I'm like, staring at you saying, yeah, yeah. Take me. Yeah. Do a couple laps. Be great.

Josh Kriger: Cool, well we always like to ask one bonus question to our guest that seems like on par and like you know I think part of your journey and adventures have I feel like you've met some really interesting human beings over the years. and has some pretty unique experiences interacting with them. Is there one such meeting, one individual that you've met over the decades that really stands out as you as a very special encounter?

Douglas Horn: Well, I have a lot. I like so many. But probably the thing that's most interesting is I was the last intern for Ronald Reagan. and we can flash up the picture if you want. But this was in 1989, told you I was old. I was like 19 years old. I was studying in Japan and he had just stopped. He had just ended his term and he was there on a goodwill tour. And I got to work for, you know, three weeks with the advanced staff and a week with them. And he personally introduced me to Nancy. He said, one of the boys who's helping us. And she's like, hi. That was pretty cool, you know? Yeah, I'll put that on my tombstone.

Josh Kriger: Very cool. Yeah, he's definitely a special individual in history and a cool, cool opportunity. And, you know, it kind of comes back to, you know, probably one source of inspiration for doing something, you know, for government that actually, like, would make an impact and feels good.

Douglas Horn: It was, I learned so much, you know, I learned, I, I, I came into that just loving the secret service guys. I wanted to be that for a while. You know, I was like, Oh my God, this is amazing. You guys are amazing. They know everything about money because they work for the treasury department. They do all this security stuff. So, um, I did not follow that path. Clearly.

Josh Kriger: Uh, you came back around.

Douglas Horn: But yeah, now, now I'm here. I love, I love the learning that they did. And I mean, all those guys had masters, like master's degrees and PhDs and stuff. And they're, then they're, they're like bullet catchers, but they're not, they're super smart. So, um, so yeah, that was a great experience. I treasure that.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, that's great. And I mean, to, to talk about like the full circle, I mean, my career started government consulting. I worked with over, uh, I think 18 different agencies over, over a decade and didn't necessarily think I'd be going back into that space, but here we are where these worlds are all intersecting again.

Douglas Horn: So we forget that it's the biggest industry. Yeah, it really is. It's essentially the, you know, maybe food generation, but, but it's one of the biggest industries in the world is government. We just don't think about it as an industry. It's an important one to do it right. Yes.

Josh Kriger: So, um, that was helpful. I learned a lot about you. I didn't know. Um, and, uh, I would love to sort of, uh, close out with one last segment, which is our shout out where you get a chance to honor someone in your world that maybe doesn't get as much of the spotlight, uh, as, as, uh, necessarily they deserve. You mentioned, you already mentioned your, your, your significant other. So, um,

Douglas Horn: No, I know exactly who it is. I want to shout out to the ladies of Goodblock, of Ease Protocol. Our COO, our CISO, our investor relations and partnership and business development team, so many women. It's more than half the company is women and they kick butt and they work so hard and they're so great. So Erica, Leah, Leah, Caitlin, CJ, and anyone I forgot, you guys kick ass.

Josh Kriger: That's amazing. I mean, we're breaking down barriers there. There's, you know, people talk about how this industry needs more women and you're sort of leading by example there.

Douglas Horn: I guess, but that's not why I'm doing it. I'm just doing it because they're awesome. They're hardworking. They're super cool. And it just so happens that they work great together, you know, but certainly hire more as I can.

Josh Kriger: Absolutely. Well, this was really cool. If anyone's interested at home in learning more, again, that's EaseProtocol.com. And are you on X as well, personally?

Douglas Horn: Yeah.

Josh Kriger: Douglas underscore Horn. All right. So give Douglas a follow. Give Ease Protocol a follow. Get to know what these guys are up to. Douglas, thanks so much for hanging out today. Enjoy the pool.

Douglas Horn: Thank you. This has been great, Josh. I really appreciate it. And yeah, it's a great chance to talk to users and tell them about Ease and everything we're doing. Thank you. Right on.

Josh Kriger: My pleasure.
‍

People and Resources Mentioned

• Josh Kriger (Host)
• Douglas Horn (Guest)
• Ease Protocol
• Goodblock
• Telos Blockchain
• ISO 20022
• Michael Turpin
• Shreesha Chintamani
• Bambo Shofala

About Our Guest

Douglas Horn is a seasoned technologist and entrepreneur. After launching his career writing programming magazine articles and directing indie films, Horn co-founded the Telos blockchain, pioneering cutting-edge governance, EVM compatibility, and cross-chain bridges. He now serves as CEO of Goodblock and founder of Ease Protocol, striving to make blockchain accessible, compliant, and scalable for governments, enterprises, and mainstream users. His leadership focuses on regulatory-friendly blockchain design and real-world utility.

Connect with Douglas Horn

• LinkedIn: Douglas Horn
• Website: EaseProtocol.com
• Twitter (X): @Douglas_Horn

‍

‍