AMA Session with Douglas Horn of Telos Blockchain Network (TLOS)

Guest : Douglas Horn. Chief Architect of Telos

Host: Iris L of MXC Exchange

Introduction:

I’m Douglas Horn, the chief architect of the Telos blockchain. I began the project almost three years ago as a truly decentralized, grassroots, no-ICO project to harness the world-leading technology of EOSIO without the many problems of the EOS chain. I lead the Telos development team and work with others to set the priorities for Telos and ensure the chain runs well and continues to attract new developers and users.

My twitter: https://twitter.com/Douglas_Horn

Questions about the project:

Iris L: Telos has been running its main net for over 2 years and has many users, dapps and advanced features. Why does it have such a low profile and token price still?

Douglas H: That’s a great question. A lot of people wonder about that.

Telos is truly decentralized and launched without an ICO so it never had the financial resources of most crypto projects. We have bootstrapped everything we’ve done to date and that meant that for most of our time, we were on smaller exchanges with little volume or liquidity.

This recently changed, however, when the Telos liquidity plan allowed us to raise new money and launch an ERC-20 version of the token on Uniswap. This quickly increased the volume, price and liquidity of the token versus a couple of months ago.

Now we are able to become listed on a number of bigger exchanges, starting with MXC. We can also provide more liquidity and marketing to help people know more about Telos and all of the advanced features it offers.

I think the Telos profile is about to go through the roof though because of the new features we’re launching and dapps that are leaving other chains to come to Telos for faster, cheaper operation and the great community and features.

Iris L: We notice that Telos is the top blockchain on Blocktivity in terms of daily actions, topping all other blockchains. What are Telos’s speed and capacity?

Douglas H: Yes, Telos has been in the top three chains on Blocktivity for the past year or so and lately has risen to number one. As one of the only blockchains with free transactions, Telos can both attract and support millions of transactions every hour.

We believe the capacity is 10,000 transactions per second but at the moment, there aren’t enough live transactions on all blockchains combined to really put that to the test. We know the chain can do over 100 million transactions per day without problems though.

Telos block times are one-half second and they are able to handle a very large volume per block due to the protocol. This, plus the fee-less transactions and elimination of front-running transactions make Telos ideal for any kind of IoT device network, low-cost DeFi and dapps.

So if you look at Blocktivity you see that we are about to double the daily transactions of EOS which is number 2.

And only Telos is decentralized AND has free transactions.

Iris L: Wow- that’ll be a huge capacity! And the fee-less feature is quite astonishing today when the gas fee is outrageous.

Douglas H: Yes, it’s a major benefit.

Iris L: Looking forward to it!

Iris L: What unique features does Telos offer already and do you have a roadmap?

Douglas H: EOS just stopped having free transactions. Telos thinks it gives us a big competitive advantage over others now.

Telos has built a number of advanced features for developers and users. Telos Decide is a powerful governance engine that the chain uses that is also available to any dapp on Telos to use for their own governance needs. Telos is the first chain to extend its L1 governance to other developers in this way. And we expect to extend it to other chains as well soon.

Telos EVM is also live on our testnet and about to launch on our mainnet. Telos EVM is going to be the fastest, highest capacity, lowest cost EVM around and the only one that eliminates the scourge of front-running and “sandwich trading” that robs DeFi traders of value.

Telos EVM will be 30 times faster, hundreds of times more scalable, and about 1/10,000th the price of Ethereum for the same transactions and it accomplishes this without any sharding or roll-ups.

On our 2021 Roadmap, we recently completed **T-Bond NFTs** — a new DeFi NFT that locks up fungible tokens like a bond so they can’t be traded on exchanges but allows the NFT to retain liquidity in a secondary market. A number of projects are lining up to use this as a new and much better ICO platform.

We are also about to launch dStor decentralized cloud storage. Other projects on the current roadmap include:

**Telos Identity** — an identity solution that allows verifications without data leakage and also helps prove the unique, one-person-one-account identity of an individual for governance and UBI purposes.

Telos Location provides blockchain proof of location for verification of deliveries, maintenance, and other needs.

Telos Private will be a zero-knowledge proof side-chain for Telos that allows the first anonymous transactions among smart contract platforms. We believe that these features will form the basis of exciting new blockchain dapps and innovations on Telos.

https://telos.net/telos-technical-roadmap-2021/

Iris L: That would be interesting now that NFTs are soooo hot in the industry.

Douglas H: Yes, definitely. NFTs are very exciting and there are more ways to use them than just art. So we are using them as a financial product, for example.

More great Telos innovations coming!

Iris L: Can’t wait to see them go live!

Iris L: Telos has around 100 dapps, what types of dapps are they and are there any real world uses?

Douglas H: Telos is all about real-world uses!

There are many types of dapps on Telos and most are real-world applications. There is very little gambling on Telos at the moment, but there are several games and game platforms like Qudo which makes it easy for casual games to add real crypto incentives via their SDK.

NFTs are also a growing usage of Telos as is DeFi. While Telos is not known as a social media app chain, we have Discussions.app, Appics, NewlifeAI and other social media type dapps deploying or already on Telos.

Similarly, a lot of ecological and regenerative economy dapps are deployed on Telos making us a hub for forward-thinking environmental, agriculture and preservation efforts such as carbon credits, reforestation and biodynamic farming.

Some exciting real-world apps on Telos are TAIKAI hackathon operations and management with clients like Pfizer and Microsoft, Zeptagram music rights market, Unbiased AI dataset-creation, Qubicles call centre management and outsourcing, and Telos Task task outsourcing.

The list of real uses is long and these are applications that are live now or will be in the next month. So real work and the economy is happening on Telos now, not next year.

Iris L: Super cool! You guys sure definitely try them out!

Iris L: How does Telos compare to other smart contract platforms like Cardano or Tron?

Douglas H: Great question! Most of the smart contract platforms are far behind Telos in actual development and usage and many will never be able to do what Telos does now, let alone what we are building next. For example, there’s really no decentralized chain out there that lets people make micropayments of 1 satoshi without fees. Only Telos allows that which puts it on top for IoT deployments and nano-transactions.

Cardano really isn’t a smart contract platform at all yet, to be honest. Smart contracts don’t run on Cardano and they only recently got tokens on the chain, but without smart contracts, the tokens are all essentially the same with economic functions only. Telos has been running smart contracts since 2018.

There’s no other chain that has created a governance engine for dapps — and soon other chains — like Telos Decide. It not only allows voting on proposals, but amending documents such as governance charters, and electing and managing committees or officers — all with smart contract actions tied to the ballot outcomes.

Some chains now have EVMs, some even with low costs, but it’s unlikely that any will offer the mix of speed, capacity, incredibly low cost, and the elimination of front-running that Telos does. Telos could become the go-to chain for DeFi trades under $1,000 all the way down to $1 DeFi trades that can still be profitable due to the low gas fees. We can really bring DeFi to the masses where other chains would not be able to.

Telos doesn’t take an adversarial stance towards other chains, though. We see how we can help support chains like Ethereum by offering essentially free voting and a place for lower value trading that will reduce some of the congestion. That’s a big reason why we launched our Telos-Ethereum bridge with help from pNetworks.

And we will soon have a second bridge from Ethereum directly to Telos EVM so that Ethereans don’t have to interact with Telos native until they want to.

Iris L: Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Douglas H: Absolutely. I don’t mean to be harsh about other chains, but some of them really aren’t being honest about where they are in their development.

Iris L: If you could summarize your project in one word, what word would it be? Why?

Douglas H: That’s a tough one! So I’m going to cheat just a little bit.

Iris L: Haha tough one for the tough guy!

Douglas H: In ‘one’ word (with hyphens), I’d say that Telos is: Real-World-Ready

Telos is ready to face the challenges of real-world blockchain uses today due to its world-leading speed, capacity, fee-less transactions and governance features. Real-world companies and dapps are already building on Telos today.

A lot of chains are talking about features they will bring eventually. Hey, we are excited about our future stuff too, but Telos is already onboarding dapps — often coming from other chains, actually. Because we have the features, speed, scalability they need right now.

Iris L: I love this made-up one word haha. Well describes the essence of Telos.

Douglas H: Thanks Iris! You’re a good sport!

Iris L: Thank you!

Free-Asking Segment

Q1.

- Increasing Token price

- make Token Valuable

- Building Community Trust

From the 3 aspects above, I want to ask, Which one the most important for team TELOS?

If all above are important for team TELOS, Which one that Will team TELOS do first?

Douglas H:

These are all three quite important to Telos. I think we have been incredibly successful on two of these and we’re only now focusing on the third.

We have built community trust since day one by delivering on our promises, launching a no-ICO, grassroots project, operating our mainnet for over 2 years without a single pause, and mostly by putting our community entirely in control of our blockchain through our governance.

We have focused on building value in the token by building unique features, creating funding mechanisms for dapps and our own development on-chain despite our meagre resources at launch. The Telos feature set is second to none and our roadmap is the most ambitious one around.

The one that we are actually tackling last is token price. We had not hyped ourselves as we probably should have before. That’s why the price is still so low despite all we’ve accomplished. But now we are putting the focus there (not ignoring the other two of course) We have expanded liquidity greatly. Also volume. The price is up about 12X from February, but currently off our recent ATH. So we think there’s a lot of room to run ahead and we are bringing in new Exchanges like MXC and others to make that easier for people, and marketing firms to spread the word.

Q2. Regulation is very important. Many projects were closed in many countries due to failure to use the correct regulations and permits. In order to go global, how does the TELOS team deal with these issues?

Douglas H:

Telos is on some of the firmest regulatory footings of any blockchain project. First, we never performed any kind of ICO so we did not raise money from investors, it was totally bootstrapped. We did not create any tokens at all before the mainnet was life, another important point to regulators.

Equally important, Telos is one of the most decentralized blockchains in the world. There is no single company or group operating Telos. Instead, the chain is operated by over 50 companies around the world seeking to earn token holder votes to be validators. 21 validators operate at any time but another 21 also operate regularly so there are about 42 or more validators each month, which is quite decentralized.

Telos is also economically decentralized. The US SEC goes after companies like Ripple that own huge huge portions of the XRP supply. But there are no real whales on Telos. The largest single holders have no more than about 3% of the token supply on Telos which is unheard of in crypto. So we fit the regulatory definition of fully decentralized, meaning there is no “owner” somewhere for the community to look to for running the chain. It is truly community governed. That means that even if governments wanted to go after Telos, where would they go? There’s no one with enough control to be seen as an owner or to stop Telos.

So Telos is extremely secure on this basis due to the hard path we have chosen for our launch.

Q3.What makes TELOS different from other Platforms projects? Could you tell us some Extraordinary functions & objectives of TELOS tokens that attract more Investors to TELOS token?

Douglas H:

Yes. Telos is currently the blockchain with the most transactions per day according to Blocktivity and it has led this for many months. This shows the massive capacity and even current usage of Telos. The scalability is incredible.

Telos is also the only decentralized blockchain that has fee-less transactions. This is incredible because it allows all kinds of networks to operate and perform nano-transactions down to 1 satoshi in value, for example. No other chain can really do that.

Telos governance through the Telos Decite governance engine is the most powerful in the world and the only one that is available to all Dapps on Telos. We hear from developers that we literally save them a year of development. Governance is becoming a hot topic now and no one can touch Telos. In fact, the GBA — Government Blockchain Association with over 15,000 members most of whom work in government in various countries — chose to build their governance DAO using Telos Decide. That’s a pretty huge endorsement.

Telos EVM will be the fastest, cheapest and most scalable EVM around when it launches on our mainnet in a few weeks. It’s also the only one that solves the problem of frontrunning, which is a scourge on other defi platforms because bots are able to steal value from traders by sending their transactions first by paying more gas or having a deal with mining pools. But this is impossible on Telos.

Another thing that’s going to be incredible for defi on Telos native is the “profit-or-cancel” DeFi feature that will only be available on Telos native. That means you can do a defi trade no matter how complex and include our special “profit-or-cancel” code that looks at your account balance just before completing the defi transaction, and if it isn’t higher than it was when you started, then it just cancels the transaction like it never happened. So these traders can literally guarantee themselves a profitable transaction. Don’t you think that will bring a lot of traders to Telos DeFI — especially when there’s also free transactions and no front-running?

There’s a lot more going for Telos but those are some pretty special and unique features that will drive usage.

Iris L: Thank you so much for joining us today, Douglas. It has been a great pleasure being able to host you here with our MXC Global Community.

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