Ethan Burnside

Background Story

Resourceful Resilience

Ethan was raised in Heppner, Oregon. The farm taught him work ethic; necessity taught him resilience. Growing up without access to expensive electronics, he built his world from salvage. He pieced together broken stereos, car batteries, and discarded amps to power the music for his high school team’s bus rides. He learned early that if you want something to work, you have to understand every wire, every connection, and every failure point yourself.

This resourceful pragmatism defined his transition to the digital world. He founded Kattare in 1997 to build the entire tech stack from scratch—power, networking, servers, and software. While others relied on out-of-the-box solutions like cPanel, Ethan engineered bespoke infrastructure designed to endure.

His career is a series of answers to the question: “How do we make this reliable?”

When he saw a game his wife loved collapsing under its own weight, he rebuilt its server architecture to handle 100 million players without interruption. When he saw the crypto ecosystem failing its users, he built exchanges grounded in proof-of-reserves transparency rather than reputation. He joins Pathize with a singular purpose: to build a digital foundation that benefits humanity by solving the crisis of trust at the architectural level.

Professional Experience

Pathize || Chief Architect & Engineer

Ethan is the guarantor of Pathize’s technical reality. He is responsible for the soundness of the entire architectural stack, ensuring that the vision is built on bedrock. He combines deep regulatory expertise (SOC 2, SOX, PCI) with a builder’s instinct for resilience. He architects a system where security, scalability, and sovereignty are the fundamental physics of the environment.

BlocPal & TxQuick || Co-Founder & Chief Blockchain Architect

Ethan architected the bridge between legacy finance and Web3 to solve the exchange trust problem. As Co-Founder of TxQuick, he built a high-frequency blockchain exchange platform from the ground up, pioneering proof-of-reserves mechanisms to replace blind trust with verifiable solvency. He personally coded the Secure Deposit & Withdrawal Engine capable of executing transactions across all major blockchains and successfully led the company through its acquisition by BlocPal.

Playtika || VP, Live Technology

Ethan managed the massive infrastructure supporting over 19 million daily and 100 million total players for a Caesars Entertainment subsidiary. Motivated by the desire to keep the experience joyful and uninterrupted, he delivered absolute stability in a high-stakes environment.

The Architect: Designed and built the Santa Monica datacenter and managed corporate IT for hundreds of employees.

The Operator: Oversaw deployment for major titles like Bingo BlitZ and Total Rewards, ensuring that the infrastructure never got in the way of the game.

Entrepreneurial & Early Ventures || Founder & Engineer

Ethan has been building businesses at the edge of the internet since its inception.

BTC Trading Corp: In 2012—years ahead of the industry—he built a high-performance exchange that handled a meaningful portion of global daily volume. When regulators stepped in, he led the industry standard for integrity by protecting every cent of customer capital.

Kattare, Inc.: Before there could be a commodity, Ethan was building it.

He founded Kattare in 1997 and led it for 14 years, supporting thousands of domains across every major operating system. He grew the company 10% year-over-year purely through word-of-mouth and rock-solid service.

Education

• Studied Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Oregon State University