Why another L2: Mode, the OP Stack and the Superchain

Transcript

why do we need another L2 and what is the super chain these are two of the main questions we seek to answer in today's interview in the case of mode a new L2 built on top of the op stack the answer is quite simple first to build a defi specific chain with features for defi Innovation second is to scale defi across the super chain and ethereum and third is to write the playbook for incentive mechanisms which reward users for growing the network today we are joined by James Ross the co-founder of mode and prominent crypto Builder to discuss Mod's new economic mechanisms and experimental Revenue sharing model

the landscape for l2s and ALT l1s and now l3s and James vision for how the whole blockchain ecosystem will look in the future Mod's current airdrop and points program and their upcoming token generation event and why mode chose to build on the op stack and the vision for the super chain a hint success is native apps on mode supporting users across optimism base Zora and all other super chains welcome to milroad radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto I'm Jay Hamilton and I believe that onchain is the next online this is the

opportunity and we're here to guide you to capitalize GM James welcome to milk Road radio thank you so much for having me excited to be here we're excited you're here too because we know you're in Dubai right now and it looks like that city is underwater so thanks for making the time for us and making it work while dealing with h the crazy weather that's happening there so good to hear that you and your team are not drowning in all the fat water at token 2049 yeah absolutely it's kind of wild we kind of came here with the plan that we would just co-work for a week and spend most of the time at like our HQ and yeah I guess we're forced now to do

this yeah no events just uh Gonna Keep cranking cranking it out with the rest of the team here so the the boss is like this is great productivity over socialization works exactly exactly yeah no excuses everyone's got to sit in the room 12 hours a day okay I want to go back to the beginning of mode and I want to start with on January 25th you wrote a tweet you said I've spent the last five years in crypto building incentive mechanisms our team has worked with 30% of the projects in the top 100 on coin gecko representing a 100 billion in market cap I've assembled the top research in the space to

collaborate on mode next week is going to be wild are you ready what did you mean when you said you saw an opportunity for incentive mechanisms what led you to focus your time and be so excited about the possibility of incentive mechanisms I've been building stuff I've been like a pretty active investor and defi user LP uh since like 2019 2020 so since like really really the early days I was one of the first users on synthetics compound dydx when they had LPS and I've kind of seen like I guess the full life cycle of how projects have tried to get

users and incentivize users to build on their protocols or how they've tried to get capital and users to their protocols I also ran for two years a company called hype like a group of companies hype worked with most of the projects in the top 100 on their go to market so when I was there we worked with projects like B&B chain near definity we like worked with igen layer also last year loads and loads of others and the focus is really always you know when you're trying to design any type of product the focus should be on like what are you doing for the user what are you making

easier what are you making better and the same when you're building a protocol or any tool any piece of software for developers you have to ask the question what are we doing better or what are we making easier right and I try and kind of have this approach with everything it's like what's in it for me right and that can range from maybe it's being part of a community like people might join a project because they're like the other people in it they're like The Vibes and there might not have to be like a specific utility but when it comes to defi often there is a specific utility people are looking for right and uh that utility is to earn yield or to get some kind of return on their assets

on a risk adjusted basis so the kind of Genesis story of mode is that after working with all these teams I thought that a lot of them were overlooking different kind of incentive mechanisms that can bring users to their chain and they really weren't taking enough of a product approach like especially l2s I thought there wasn't really a product approach to how they think about growing their user base of like the user base of a protocol would be split across like loads of different applications and the users might have like the central Discord but they wouldn't really have like many other information hubs so the user Journey out of someone discovering an L2 like let's

say just for example like optimism or arbitrum was that they would discover the L2 usually through a protocol and then through that protocol they would like maybe go back to the L2 website they would then like Bridge via like a bridge if the L2 even had like bridges on their website then they would go back then they would have like everything in metamask then they would go back to the application they would use the application they might like follow on Twitter it's kind of like you're being thrown all around the place and this is partly by Design This is definitely the most decentralized way for an like a protocol to grow to have all these separate appliations and you know as a

user you have to discover them or yourself but with mode we really wanted to try and think about how can we create a really good user experience so a user can come to a central place they can discover applications on the network which have been vetted and which have had Audits and pasted a certain uh level of scrutiny they can understand the benefits of each of those protocols quickly and then they can go and explore those protocols and the actions they do on those protocols will feed back into like a larger model of contribution so if they perform certain actions on the protocol and it benefits the network then they should yeah earn something from the network that was kind

of always the vision and after I spoke with a number of different l1's l2s about like this type of approach none of them were really that interested when I de started to discuss this idea with optimism optimism explained like the vision for the super chain and how they would prioritize or they would look to prioritize all these different chains building using the op stack and they kind of saw a world where there'd be hundreds of chains each running different experiments like this around not necessarily the tech stack like op mainnet would focus very much on Tech governance and they wanted other chains to start to focus on different areas like gaming def5

consumer like Bas has done an amazing job of and yeah also to experiment with different incentive models different governance models so we saw a really good opportunity to start mode with the support of optimism and build out a chain that focuses on Defi and I guess more broadly like bringing different incentivization models different economic models to the chain to Mo to the op stack to ethereum that's what the last two months have been focused on and Things Are going great so far shout out to you and your team I know you just hit top 25 in tvl by uh within defi ecosystems so way to go to the whole mode team now before we go further into

talking about the L2 landscape and where you see mode playing I want to talk a little bit more about these new economic mechanisms because it's such a big part of what you're building and it's so different than as you said not many other s to be honest the only other one blast seems to be the only other one that is really focused on building these incentive mechanisms and building a product around their L2 that attracts users and attracts developers in a way that maybe others haven't prioritized as much uh and on your website it literally says mode is the ethereum L2 that rewards you you for growing the network via New Economic mechanisms can we talk a little bit about what these economic

mechanisms are and maybe you're still building out can you explain them in a way to us in layman's terms of how these might work for a user for a developer for a protocol that's building on mode yeah absolutely so I think like we've definitely been inspired by um optimism's retr funding so optimism is very much focused on uh public goods funding and they use retr funding and retr funding looks at the contributions of developers to the ecosystem I think it's every year and they review proposals and then they fund People based on the pool based on governance decisions and the goal of optimism is to continue funding public goods continue

funding amazing open source software and build like a sustainable model for growth around this like we think that's super cool we think there should be a number of funding mechanisms that exist within crypto and at mode what we're trying to do is build some very quantifiable models right so we're trying to answer the question what is a dollar or an eth in defi in an LP pool Worth to the network right Worth to the Network's growth versus say a dollar of eth on a lending protocol versus in a deex versus on a per protocol versus say an eth in fees that's paid when

someone's trading what are all these things Worth to ecosystem growth and how can we reward people directly for their contributions essentially like the big question we're trying to answer because that's essentially like yeah thinking about like an L2 as a business or having a business model and we're trying to figure out how can we direct uh incentives to the users that contribute the most and how can we create a sustainable ecosystem from this if you think about any open- Source software the biggest reason for failure is it runs out of funding and like open source software or software in general the key

thing is to build a sustainable business model and so that's what we're trying to do here like we're trying to firstly build mode into a sustainable ecosystem but build out uh new funding and new distribution mechanisms uh for Value so that all the applications build building on mode can also build our successful businesses that are sustainable in the long term so we have the the airdrop Campaign which is like a campaign which if people do certain tasks on chain across the different protocols on mode they own points those points will become tokens and uh that will be yeah the mode token which people can then use within the ecosystem we also have a developer

airdrop which rewards application Developers with nfts that they can then pass on to their users dependent on like how they are decide users are top users is based on like their application goals so a bit more of a micro level these nfts can be redeemed for tokens as well in the future so it's really about like trying to think of different ways that you can allocate resources and how can you optimize those for future growth right like in the past some people did retroactive airdrops where maybe they gave out like 10% of the supply just one day as a surprise it

was like Hey surprise guys thanks so much for using us for the last five years here's like 10% of the supply like that's pretty awesome but I don't know if that's the most optimal way to distribute rewards especially for like future growth so we've tried to be really clear that like there are certain things you can do that you don't have to like guess we've been very clear with the mode users that if you add Capital to mode you get a certain multiplier on points if you add Capital across these applications if you become an LP you get 4X points for example it was 3x points but we realized actually this is a valuable role in the ecosystem so we increase the points there across all LP positions like on Dees so yeah we've

been trying to essentially work out a model or like optimize a model that rewards grow growth yeah that's essentially like the hardest thing to balance when you're building a protocol is you're trying to balance the relationship between developers users and capital within the ecosystem right and a successful ecosystem will have those three groups working together developers will build great applications users will bring Capital to those applications and because there's capital and there's applications more developers will come and that's how you like start this beautiful flywheel I was just going to say it is a flywheel and you're

basically trying to reinvest the value back into the ecosystem for growth right but you're doing it in like an automated way I guess optimism is the one I think who who mainly has done the retroactive Goods which I always think is great and it is a good gesture to the community but I always thought the same thing Jay and I have talked about in the podcast a bunch of times of like it's great but like it's probably not the best way to incentivize the community like you probably want to tell them ahead of time and actually tell them what to do and then you can probably get a lot more it becomes more efficient I think in the way that you're incentivizing people and we noticed mode is one of the ones that has done this very very well I get the feeling that you have a maybe a

marketing background or something like that just from the way that you're you're speaking I'm not sure if that's what hype was you said that was it in marketing yeah hype hype was doing a a lot of different stuff but um there's like around 150 employees at hype around 100 were focused on marketing the other 50 were doing like product stuff running validat is yeah different stuff but yeah i' I've mainly always been on like the business kind of growth side of supporting protocols so I'm always trying to C at problems from the angle yeah Jay so Jay and I outside of milk road we run an agency which is a growth Agency for media companies and so when you started speaking there I was like oh he's really speaking our language and what's interesting is you know we've

obviously interviewed a ton of people in the crypto space for a few years now and what it's nice to see now about the people we're interviewing like yourself is like it's people that have experience in growing companies and in like marketing and all these sort of incentive models Etc whereas previously I think the first iteration of Founders were just like we're just trying to make it work you know they didn't think about how can we make this like the best ux how can we incentivize people how can we go grow for scale it was like let's just make this thing work and hopefully not get hacked and it seems like we've reached this turning point now or this inflection point where now the founders are building not just to make it work but to make it actually scale and I think that's super exciting but

that's what I've learned in the first like 15 minutes of this episode yeah AB absolutely in general like just going back to optimism's like funding model I think that for them and for funding like public goods it's kind of important it's it's kind of a really good model for them and I think also when you look at more creative Endeavors and like more creative projects it's really hard to like build like quantifiable models right just is and I don't think that's ever going to be a problem like that can be fully solved but for defi if everything is really defi it should be onchain and it should be visible and we should all move to a world where

everything is automated on chain and we can see the results of all the onchain activity and we should be able to Crunch the data and quantify like what means growth and what doesn't so I think that's why it's exciting for us because yeah we have this opportunity but yeah it's also like quite challenging because when we we went out with mode like and we went out with this kind of first campaign we expected there to be around like 10 to 20,000 users I think in the first 48 hours there like a 100,000 everyone was like spamming transactions still like going crazy and we're like guys like it's okay it's like a three Monon campaign like it will be optimized

it will like become very clear like we're gonna keep telling you what you have to do as we add new protocols we have new things and people just like nah we're just G to go crazy and like just do everything because we're excited this is a new protocol we definitely had to work overtime the first few weeks to make sure we were like indexing everything and that was quite challenging because yeah there was way more data than we expected but yeah now we're in a pretty good place with it all so we're starting to add more like complexity to our models and yeah on the incentive models you talked on obviously the point program but there was other things I think that I read when I was looking into other things you guys were doing which was like is it fee share like from the revenue of the L2 I think

you're going to find a way to like put that into the protocol to share with maybe developers or the protocols and then um I think similar to what blast is doing with yield you guys don't have that yet but I think that was part of the thesis or part of the plan as well is that the incentive me incentive mechanisms other than points and is there more than I'm missing or were those the the main ones yeah so I think the main ones right now we had sequence of fee sharing so sequence of fee sharing essentially takes the fees that users spend on transactions so yeah pre- denin fees on mode were fairly I don't know they weren't high but like it was like 20 cent of transaction around 50 60% of that could sometimes be profit depending on the L1 fee so we were

sharing like this fee with developers of the smart contracts in the first month of mode being live I think there was a around a million dollar of profit from the sequencer and we shared around like $300,000 of that with developers that was really great in the first month it worked really really well however since denen the fees on mode have gone to under one cent so the sequen is not that profitable anymore which is obviously great uh like transactions have uh three or four xed so transaction volume has gone up like significantly and users are paying like sub one cent for most

transactions on mode which is awesome but yeah it means that sequence of fee sharing isn't as lucrative as it previously was for developers but when you say not as profitable it's got to be more like the margin's got to be bigger at this point it's just much less Revenue it's bringing in or is it actually not as profitable too well it really depends so now the margin is kind of up to us and we just decided we don't want to take a margin okay and the only margin is when people would pay like a priority fee so if you pay a priority fee that's basically profit to the sequencer because there's not really much congestion on mode right now since denin so like on a one-cent transaction

if you pay half a cent or one cent as a priority fee your transaction will get included like super fast right technically it could still be profitable but I think think we'd need to like probably we have around 250,000 transactions a day we probably need to be getting towards like a million I think before we see like the L2 fee kick in and there be like congestion and then that's when like people would start like paying property fees and things like that so so yeah what is the business model then I think originally when people first started launching LT they're like oh yeah obviously it's super profitable on all the fees obviously denin Comes Along Came maybe out some more I mean it can be like vase

is still printing money there are a few l2s that still are but they're probably you know purposely taking that that margin but obviously and the way most businesses go is like if there's a way to get rid of that margin then everyone's going to get rid of that margin and it's going to go to zero and so you guys have already started that there's other l2s that have done the same so most are going to do that I would assume if that goes away or maybe like you said if you get 5x the volume you start to make some money there is there other business models or like what's the plan yeah absolutely firstly I think that like this is temporary right we see block space or we see like Innovations in Block space kind of always deliver like an initial boost in performance or

scaling and then we see that like over time that like deteriorates like that edge or the block space gets filled so I think we'll see the same thing and I think we will see like sequences becoming profitable for a lot of l2s again because demand is continuing to increase it's been like kind of up only with demand for l2s for the last like 9 12 months so I think we'll continue to see that so there is potentially still Revenue that l2s will get some l2s are yeah purposely continuing to add fees on and taking that Revenue some are deciding to pass it back to users and developers which is awesome and we we would like definitely continue to do that even though yeah might be a small

amount a smaller amount than 100 of thousands per month as we saw at the beginning other kind of business models or models like are focused around Building Products so we've looked at like building different like Vault products on mode that have like native yield enabled so we have a couple of those that are being built right now one of them's nearly finished with audits so that's quite cool when you have a vault product or a yield product you can obviously look to like take a small fee I don't think we will to at least the St with but like in the future that's like a possibility other types of Integrations are possible but really like we're not so focused I guess on like being profitable right now the core

goal is to build up the user base build up the application layer base and when we launch a token like ensure that there's like enough interesting activity on chain for the token to govern like the ecosystem I guess the goal is if you're not going to take profits from the sequencer it's like well let's just get mode to be a household name to get big to get ton users and then you have the distribution Channel if you want to launch a product you can do it and you'll have a ton of users right off the bat if you don't want to do it that's fine you can do Partnerships like you can once you have the the users you can figure out models after that right absolutely yeah absolutely let's talk about the L2 ecosystem for a second before we go further like I do want to

talk about obviously what you guys are playing for with your token how that fits into to the mode ecosystem Etc but the L2 ecosystem has kind of been in the Limelight lately there's so many l2s at this point I don't even know how many there are but they're taking off like tvls transactions users are just going off everywhere basis having a moment so is mode to be honest and there's l3s now I think there's like 10 plus of those so walk me through your sort of like I don't know one three fivey year vision of where this ecosystem goes do we have millions of l2s and tens of millions of l3s do we have just a few like how's this gonna all play out the way that we see mode fitting into a world where there's like multiple l2s Mode's goal is to be a defi Hub so there'll be l2s for

different things right like you said we've seen Bas do like an incredible job of developing let's say like a consumer crypto world so you have like it started with like applications like frch and now there's farcaster there's all these awesome like applications being built that help on board like the 10 million coinbase users and bring them on on chain our goal is to build a defi Hub within the optimism ecosystem we believe that over time markets always March towards efficiency and liquidity is going to flow where that is the best risk adjusted yield so our goal is to build out an ecosystem which offers a

variety of different yield products so right now we have a lot of easy eth which is a product from Renzo which essentially enables reaking through the easy eth token and Renzo kind of like bundles together a lot of what is happening within the Igan lay ecosystem so just by holding easy eth you get your staking yield your reaking yield from all these avss potential air drops from avss IG layer points Renzo points all through one token right and that's available on mode and I users really love it right we also have like RS E from kelp E from ethery or rap E from

ethery so our goal is to have a number of yield bearing products on modad have a load of Integrations around these so people can for example leverage their positions they can lend these assets they can earn interest on them they can swap them they can you know do whatever they want to do with these assets and we want to continue building out some of our own products like that complement these so there's like a chain that's like a defi Hub you go okay I can deposit my assets my eth here I can earn this type of yield and then I can borrow against this and maybe go and like play a game on bass or I can like go and buy

Zora nfts on Zora so this is how we see things converging we see that like optimism has built out this group of chains and soon there'll be interoperability and users will want their assets to be in a place where they're earning yield or the majority of their assets and then they'll want to maybe borrow against these assets or you know Bridge some of these assets out to other super chains to use them for different things so our goal is really yet to continue to build mode into like this yield Hub and yeah have as many kind of different types of assets as possible for users I'm pretty bullish in General on the super chain I think like

the reason is because yeah optimism has obviously done an incredible job on building out a really flexible Tech stack so the op stack for building an L2 is really accessible it's incredibly powerful that's kind of clear at this point because base has obviously adopted this and done such an incredible job of helping scale the technology we also see projects like worldcoin who they'll be launching a super chain they currently have one of the largest onchain user bases via uh their advocation or one of the largest the largest verified user base on chain and I think this ecosystem

is going to continue to grow exceptionally fast and so it's a really good place to be and I think right now like when you look at the L2 landscape you have to really think like it is getting competitive so you kind of need to find your tribe as an L2 and find like your mission because just becoming like an L2 doesn't really mean anything anymore and just becoming an L2 with like a slightly different stack or like an L2 with ZK it doesn't necessarily give Val that much more value to users that's why I think like a lot of the Innovation we're going to see over the next couple years is going to be very

much focused on like the user experience and like what value people can really bring to users Beyond just yeah potentially having airdrops or whatever right I see this um the super chain of having these like um with optimism having these like Niche hubs right like you guys are defi you said Bas is sort of the crypto consumer app you have Zora which is for nfts and so on and so forth right world coin's going to have theirs and so it's a bunch of hubs of Niche things and then eventually interoperability sort of connects them all together and ideally it works all like one chain even though it is actually a bunch of sort of L l2s under the hood two questions here one how does that actually look like right now to get from Basse to mode whatever it is still

a bit clunky you know you got to add the freaking base and then mode and whatever to your metamask wallet and you got to bridge it over and so like of course I know that that's all going to get fixed but like timelines around that and how will it actually work and function from your vision I know it doesn't exist yet but it's it's being worked on so if you can talk about that and then the second question I have just to add on to that is the listeners here that are like I just use salana I don't have to worry about you know bridging and moving from one L2 to the other why don't we just put all this stuff on Sal and it's all good you know when fire dancer goes live it's going to be a million transactions per second and we don't need all this

stuff if you can just sort of touch on that as well when you answer that question that would be uh that'd be great I think like right now having a load of chains is definitely a bad user experience it just is kind of hard to keep track of assets and different stuff like this we will see like the super chain ship certain interoperability features which will make things a lot easier so there will be a bridge that's a super Chain Bridge that's super chain that connects super chains so you'll be able to bridge in like a few seconds between different chains and applications will integrate this bridge to enable users to very quickly move their assets like within the application

across different chains so maybe you're on a DEX and the Dex is super chain Dex and there's different pools and you can move your assets between the pools between the chains without like going off and having to bridge going back right it'll just be you'll be able to do it within the same UI so I think that's like a certain element of like super chain abstraction which is going to be quite interesting and that's probably going to be the biggest like ux upgrade but you still will be like on different a different chain right and things will still like asset will still be on different chains so you know our goal here is to make sure that mode is the chain with the best opportunity so people are trying to zap into the mode pools how this compares to like salana and salana scaling Vision I think that

salana is a different chain I think the core or the reason why people will continue to use l2s is because you have the option to fall back to ethereum when fraud proofs ship it will essentially mean that the L2 is more secure so if you need to force withdraw back to ethereum you can and you have that like added layer of security and I think that's going to continue to be of like a lot of importance to uh layer to users from now like into the future so yeah uh I think that's probably the main difference I think yeah we'll we'll see like a number of scaling Solutions emerge for ethereum 2 or for ethereum l2s as well and we'll see at l2s adopt

those but uh I think it's G to every ecosystem has different challenges I think right now like l2s have done a pretty good job of scaling ethereum and there's lots more to come so yeah next step is chain abstraction can you share some highlevel metrics that you and your team are looking at on a regular basis what do you care about what signals matter to you as you I mean you're only four four months in here but what are the things that you pay attention to and measure success on yeah so I mean we're very much focused on like having a defa ecosystem that functions so quite a lot of like like yeah I've been like all our

team we're like very Avid onchain users I think we've probably taken part in most protocols launches that have happened over the last like five years so um we're very interested in how can we build out a defi ecosystem that benefits people like power users so we're looking at like what are the volumes like across the ecosystem across exchanges what is the slippage like across like e usdc pair for example so can I make a 100K swap with less than 50 basis points slippage at the moment I think you might be able to just about maybe it's like 1% but uh yeah things

like that we're also looking at like how different applications can be interoperable with each other so when you have lending protocols for Lending protocols to be able to have borrowing caps like higher borrowing caps you need more Dex liquidity so we're always monitoring like the Dex liquidity to make sure that lending protocols can if there is an issue perform liquidations effectively different things like this so our core kind of metrics I would say like the level of like tvl within Ling protocols the volumes across dexes and the depth the borrows on lending protocols volume on pup dexes I think that's kind of interesting then we're

looking at like retention metrics around like how often the users come back how often do users on learning protocols like adjust their positions are people like static or active as LPS indexes do they update their positions when prices change things like that how ult is it for you guys to separate sort of the signal from the noise in terms of metrics like you said when you first launched everyone came and was just doing ridiculous transactions and most that is not like real sustainable stuff is it difficult for you guys to figure out like who are real people and what are like I don't know maybe Bots or just people trying to saal attack and stuff like that or what has that been like over the last few months I think that like well we tried to be pretty clear

that like mode is not a place for people to come and Bridge $1 and make like five transactions and think they're going to get a $20,000 airdrop it's like not it's not happening it's not how the system is built if you come and provide value and you are a large LP and you use like different protocols and you'll earn points and those points will translate into are you being rewarded a point system it's you know this is very much a product and it's an incentive mechanism and this mechanism is designed to improve the ecosystem you should only have points programs running as any kind of application or protocol that help your users get you as an ecosystem

closer to your goal right so you're trying to align everything so our program is trying to align the interests of users capital and developers and this is you know the interest or like the overall goal is to have like a thriving defi ecosystem where everyone is getting value from this from the time that this episode goes out it's like a few days and you guys are going to be launching at the end of the points program or at least launching the token is there going to be a continuous points program I mean many other protocols have they finished one and they're like okay now it's time for season two we just said ethery on and they were like yeah we're GNA do season two but like we can't do much more we're gonna run out of tokens here

so curious like is this a ongoing thing do you sort of transfer this into a new way that points can just continue forever so you always have this sort of incentive mechanism or or how do you think through through the the long term of this yeah absolutely we want to like have us while we have planned a season two it's definitely got some different elements from season one a lot of things we learned and have improved on and rebuilt for season two so yeah season one will finish people will be rewarded for their contributions in season one and then season two will begin it's something that we see as like part of Mod's vision is that we will continue to reward users the way that we've designed

the mode emission schedule is to continue to incentivize and reward users who grow the chain over the long term I think what's interesting here is there's a segmentation between a points program the way we think about it right now and the seasons that we're seeing and what you guys are in right now in your season one and an ongoing incentive mechanism to build an econom within the M ecosystem and it sounds like you know you're doing both and my guess is if you're strategic about it you're using the points program to test different incentive mechanism to see what works and then you will maybe blend those into the just ongoing emissions of mode imp perpetuity it's like ethereum right it's

kind of the only one that's really figured this out where like the more activity on ethereum the more those who secure ethereum gets rewarded and it's the sustainable way that they've set it up and it like it just continues as long as there's more people using using it it just it works and it's sustainable long term most others don't have that most of it is just inflation and so it sounds like you guys are working towards what Jay said which is like figure out a sustainable way to build that within the ecosystem right absolutely and like yeah for a long time the idea was the sequence of fees would be like a a significant contributor to this I think right now we know we need to scale up activity massively for that to happen so that's like really the focus again scale up activity see sequence of Revenue

increase and then work you know then we have the model on how we can reinvest into the ecoystem for growth and like keep that Flywheel spinning right let's move on to the Token that is an evitably coming and I know obviously people are are excited about my question is how does this token play a role in the mode ecosystem what is it used for is it just some sort of governance thing or like how do you envision Moe I'm sure it'll there'll be iterations over time but like how do you envision it fitting in with the total goal and big strategy of of what you're doing with mode so initially the token will focus on governance and ecosystem rewards and over time the community has already

started building out different Integrations but there'll be various Integrations which will be built around the token but yeah right now like the focus is very much can to be on governance can I ask the direct question when tge yeah I think it will be like it should already be announced when this goes live by the time this comes out right yeah there should be a blog post that's been published potentially a few days before this this going live okay so if you're listening to this you should know when the tge is so just all of our listeners know that we asked the question for you because many of you wanted us to ask that question in this interview so now at least I could say that we asked it

yeah there will definitely be um an update post on on Mo's Twitter so sweet one thing that I'm really taking away from this conversation is the manner in which the super chain is being built and the manner in which you are playing a very Niche role and it kind of goes back to the what we talked about at the beginning of like this Founders phases of Founders within crypto is phase one was Tech Founders Engineers no idea about product noidea about user experience and then the innovation of that the infrastructure layer got to a point with things like the op stack that a Founder like yourself could come in

and say okay now I can use the op stack to hyper get to a point of of a fully functioning L2 and I can instead focus on what I'm more interested in which is incentive mechanisms and how you grow an ecosystem and how you grow an economy and then the next phase and what I think you're now looking at is how do we attract a new level of founder who want to build the app layer on top of mode and I know you've talked about how you've said multiple times in your Twitter my DMs are open and if you come to me will help you with how do you get access to op grants will help you get your first 10,000 users how do you do

that how do you think about that and all of these it's these different levels of these layers are really setting up for different Founders who want to focus on different areas of building on chain was that always your approach and always the way you you saw this happening yeah like I think that that's always kind of been the approach right like we see ourselves having a role to play and our role is to give a variety of risk adjusted yield opportunities and we want there to be like some very secure yield opportunities on mode and we want there to be some you know potentially more highrisk fund ENT stuff right and we want users to have those options we want them to be informed we want those

applications Integrations to exist and we want this to be like a hub for the optimism super chain and yeah we're aware that like you know we need a lot of Builders to come in and build this out and from speaking to builders you know over the last few years like the biggest thing they struggle with is getting users or getting Capital most devs now don't really struggle with building the tech that's usually just a function of like time and resources so if you give them like the resources and the time they'll get it done they might need some help with things like audits but they really need a lot of help with like how can they go to market and right now as a developer you have a lot of great options right and you have a lot of great options from a lot of great

ecosystems and you really need to think about like how you can make your protocol your application successful so are offer to builders is like if you want to build on mode we will guarantee you these users and this Capital because we've built a system and a product where we have like the users attention and they trust us and we can present your product to them in a way that you know if it's compelling enough and if it has a strong enough value proposition you it will be used and we can make sure you're integrated with all our ecosystem partners and yeah we can really take you through like that step by step to get

you through like the bootstrapping phase so you can then go on scale and like when people build on mode like the goal is that they'll come to mode they'll build something awesome and then they'll scale across like the super chain right like if they want to launch on base or they won't launch on op main net that's completely fine that's like part of the plan for Builders they get access to like retr funding they get access to all the funny mechanisms on mode so I think it's pretty compelling we've seen some like awesome Builders already like there's like nearly 30 protocols on mode quite a few of them are native to mode so yeah it's super cool we're really excited about yeah how like we continue to scale the developer community and

ecosystem and yeah we're also now kind of maturing a bit and working to bring on like more Blue Chip defi protocols as well so I think as we move into this second phase like this was very much like a boost strapping phase for us and now like the ecosystem is matured there's like a considerable amount of Assets Now we need to scale up with these like larger growth drivers we have like some institutional tooling that's been added to the network we have like yeah these large Integrations like valad Drome is launching on mode maybe it's launched by the time this goes out we have a couple other large defi protocols launching so yeah it's going to be really cool to like see how this

develops over time if the next Hayden Adams happens to be listening to this podcast and he or she is listening and and has this amazing idea and wants to deploy it somewhere where can they go to get hooked up and and get into mode you can DM us on Twitter or we have a Dev channel in Discord we also currently have a like accelerator yield accelerator running we're doing that with some awesome Partners Igan layer valad Drome Circle azero a load of other awesome partners are doing that so you also get access to these partners that be able to help with ideas and the mo team of course so that's also something interesting for people to look at like there's loads of funding from the mode kind of ecosystem and also like

opportunities to get like grants for 100k cool we'll put the links in the show notes before we wrap up we put out a tweet before we went live and we just asked the audience what should we ask you and basically everyone said when token of course but one person said can you ask me about his skincare routine I don't know why that question came about but uh is this a thing and do we need to ask you about this or what's what's going on here is it because drink a lot of milk is that why I think I drink yeah I think I drink quite a lot of milk I eat probably too many eggs I think I have like on average like six eggs a day I used to drink them raw just like in a smoothie in the morning kind of like hardcore I didn't

do that that so often but my partner is like a Instagram influencer she's a singer and an influencer and so yeah she uh often throws me various skin creams so does does she have a points program running or anything like that can link notes for for her SK care line or I'm incentiv I'm incentivized to use the skare awesome oh James this has been just a delight thank you so much for joining milroad shout out to you and your team for everything you guys have built and your focus on really growing the ecosystem of l2s in a way that not enough are focused on

I think you guys have got a clear path to onboarding more users more devs and helping them really create a distribution channel to reach the users and the capital that they need just a a pleasure thanks for joining us today hope you and your team are able to paddle out of Dubai or get out of there however you're going to get out of there thanks so much it's been awesome really appreciate it really yeah really great quick questions fory great chat awesome thanks for listening in everybody have yourselves a great day thank you for listening to milk Road radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto if you like this episode share it and hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5minute daily newsletter where we simplify

crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game then we'll leave a link to milk Road Pro as well your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto is risky so you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and we'll see you in the next one