James Ross, founder of Mode Network. Welcome to the Block by Block show. Thanks for having me. Excited to chat. Yeah. I know you've been in the space for a while and for the audience that may not be familiar with you, you know, we'd love to hear a little bit about how you got into crypto and what makes you stay in crypto. Absolutely. So I got into crypto back in 2017, like late 2017. I was previously pretty interested in fintech. I had a number of fintech startups with varying success and yeah, I was very interested in Ethereum from their crowd sale. And then, yeah, got very interested around the time that ICO started appearing. I was pretty actively like participating. lots of different Ethereum ecosystem stuff. I followed the community very closely. Was very active in DeFi Summer, was like an early LP on lots of different protocols. And yeah, we just became obsessed with the idea of decentralized finance and on-chain cooperation, all these things have been developing over the last few years. And yeah, spent a lot of time in crypto, like running different trading strategies, helping teams with go to market around how they're going to get liquidity for their protocol, how they're going to grow, how they're going to traders, investors, all these different stakeholders that help a decentralized organization grow. And then yeah, around a year and a half ago, started Mode. And yeah, the last year and a half has been pretty fun. So excited to dig more into that. Yeah, absolutely. remember about a year ago, I remember hearing about Mode last January and I believe you guys just hit your, I don't know if it's, I know you had been building prior to January, but I think January might've been your coming out month. So I think it's, you just hit your year anniversary, is that correct? Yeah, actually I'm realizing right now that the year anniversary of Mode is like today. because, I told everyone that, yeah, we had to launch in January and so yeah, we were like pushing as hard as we could and we launched on the 31st of January. So yeah. remember when you guys launched, when Mode Network launched, you guys came out with announcement after announcement for weeks. And it was just super exciting. And I remember thinking to myself, how are these guys doing this, like behind the scenes? And can they keep this up? Because you were running, think, a really amazing marketing clinic on how to do go to market. And I'd love to get into some of that, of course, of things you're willing to share. But I think the audience, the marketing folks that are listening to this are probably thinking like, how did they do that and how could they do that for their own projects? Yeah, I think that like our general approach is like, you just have to ship, like you just have to be like default trying to ship something, right? So if you're in BD, you have to get a deal done, you have to get it closed and then you have to ship whatever like is from the deal, whether it's like a partnership, an announcement, an integration, you have to get that to the next person who then also has to ship that, right? So has to go to marketing, you have to ship the announcement or PR team. but yeah, we're kind of just like really, really focused on being aggressive, like hyper aggressive with like pushing things forward. Like we don't have the same resources as some of the other like big L ones and L twos. So I think we just have to be a bit more scrappy. and yeah, just really like hyper focused on getting stuff out the door. Like we take the same approach with everything. whether it's like partnerships within the ecosystem. whether it's making sure we're active on social media, whether it's updating the community, whether it's building new products, testing new products, giving out grants. We generally like, yeah, to try and push things forward as fast as we can. I think that's really the only way you can continue to win in crypto is to constantly try and push ahead and kind of be on the cutting edge of what's happening in the industry. It's really important. And as long as you're building things that have value to the end user, then yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna succeed. That's, I'm surprised to hear that you, you described it. Mode network is a small team because the outward perception is that there has to be tons of people employed at Mode network because, you guys are everywhere. Content is, is I think spot on. You've gotten videos, you've got GIFs, you've got, I mean, you guys are producing tons of content. so you're definitely punching above your weight. If, if it is a small team. Yeah, I mean, that's good to hear. It's good to hear that it's working. Yeah, I think we're like in total, like 18 people, which I think is relatively small. Definitely for the amount we get, we seem to get done. So that's good. Everyone works hard. no, it's great. I was just looking at your feed on X and love the approach that you take with the community, how you, as a founder, you are involved with the community. And I think as projects grow, the founder typically becomes more and more distant and focuses on other stuff, but you've stayed right there with the community in the trenches. And I think that's really admirable. Let's go through your year anniversary. We'd love to hear how did we get here, starting with season one. I remember season one very well. And now you're in Mode networks in season four. Take us through the last year. How did we get here? Absolutely. essentially, like Mode was founded to push DeFi forward, like push DeFi innovation forward within optimism, super chain, this ecosystem we're part of with optimism or OP main and base and Fraxel and these other chains, and then also just Ethereum and in general. So we really tried to focus on our early ecosystem having like novel new applications. So We, yeah, worked very closely with the early teams to launch this time last year. We had like four or five teams that were ready for launch with new protocols, launching on Mode, which was very exciting. We then had like 50 or 60 more protocols in the pipeline, which launched on Mode in like the coming weeks and months. And around this time last year, the big trend was yield bearing assets. And so we focused very much on. thinking about what DeFi users wanted. And at that point in time, there was this big meta around people leveraging their yield-bearing assets to earn points. So there was like Easy ETH and EETH, these new types of assets that had this restaking yield or staking yield. And so we essentially worked really hard on making sure that these assets could integrate across all the apps on Mode. And users on the DeFi power users primarily could run like more complex strategies with these assets. So they could loop the assets and they could do a number of things. And that was like very much our initial focus and that helped us bootstrap from like literally zero to like 500 mil or like 700 mil TVL at one point. So that was pretty cool. We also started then looking at different types of assets, not just ETH. We started looking at yield bearing Bitcoin. and we saw a lot of Bitcoin come onto Mode, which was very interesting. and some unique strategies be built around that. we launched the token in May. the token launch was, I mean, we launched into a pretty poor market. Volumes were low. we had a lot of kind of overhang, from incentives. Maybe we over incentivize the ecosystem. maybe not, but yeah, we, we saw the token see like a lot of cell pressure. So we really focused on like redesigning the ecosystem and trying to think like, where do we go from here? Like what's like the end goal? what is like our vision? Where do we see DeFi in a few years? And that brought us to essentially focus in on AI as like a core theme, make sure that everything we're doing, each part of like the stack we're building is enabling, agents to essentially work on chain and do cool stuff, run new strategies, automate a lot of the things that DeFi users are doing. It also focused us very much on like, how do we rebuild the token model? How can we create value within the token intrinsically? So we built out this new VE Mode token, which is essentially a new type of, yeah. governance token, enables users to stake their Mode and then use their VE Mode to vote across different protocols. can, and by doing this, they're essentially distributing incentives to those protocols. So it's a nice way to give the community control of like growing the ecosystem or the community and apps. And yeah, we started funding pretty aggressively teams that were interested in building at the intersection of Defiant AI and we saw the first agents go live on Mode that were like really moving capital around without any user involvement. We ran our accelerator. We had like nine awesome teams doing crazy demos of stuff they built in section of Defiant AI. And yeah, we've just launched a terminal. have like, yeah, an endless amount of products coming out. Yeah, it's been a pretty wild ride. I think it was definitely like the right decision to focus much more in on AI. And we've already seen like huge benefits when it comes to like UX security that you are, that AI is bringing the change. So yeah, it's exciting. Yeah, you said a lot there. I want to double click on a couple of things. First off, I'm impressed that you take a of a self-reflective approach to where can we improve is essentially what you're asking and what can we do better to serve the community. Again, this is what's really unique about founder led projects where the founder is still very active. And I think the community appreciates that. and another thing that really impresses me is it's starting with season one that, you know, I, I agree with you at the time there was the mind share was on, you know, liquid staking, restaking. That was the meta of the time. And then being able to pivot from that to what was like the next thing that, in crypto, it's so hard because mind share shifts, but, finding the, the, the mind share that has. kind of staying powers is really key. And we've seen a couple of that now with the staking meta and then the movement towards meme coins. then now we're looking at AI. Internally as a team, when you look at where the mind share was of the overall crypto ecosystem, what led to kind of those shifts in strategy and or kind of product in or focus and how do you make those decisions like what does that look like in the in the background? I think essentially like you have to set the vision or like redefine the vision, right? Like your goal as a founder is to communicate the vision with your team and inspire them to build that vision together. and that kind of goes from like the way like your weekly team call the way you plan the way you strategize the way you allocate resources. So we're not funding this type of project anymore with grants. We're funding this type of project, the way you recruit developers to the ecosystem. I mean, like this pivot to AI, like when we actually launched Mode, the block wrote an article about us and they asked me like, what are you focusing on with Mode? That's going to make you different. And I said back then, like a year ago, like we're focusing on AI agents as well. and so we were always, it was always the plan. It's just, yeah, we, we ended up doing it a little bit later than we expected because there was so much other crazy stuff happening with this. Yeah. Liquid staking. Meta. But yeah, like, I think like the key thing is like our team also, a lot of them worked at AI startups before pretty well, were pretty well positioned to also kind of make its pivot. And I mean, we were seeing what was happening in web two with, yeah, open AI and all these other startups coming and essentially starting to eat software as we know it. So it was, yeah, not too hard to convince people that this is like the vision for DeFi. We see agents being like this new layer of users. and yeah, being like the main consumers of block space in the future. And yeah, the team were like super aligned with that. they pretty much everyone was like, yeah, this is what we think is going to happen too. and yeah, through like our discussions through our observations of users on Mode, we saw that a lot can be optimized and a lot can be automated and. agents of the perfect tool to do that. That's cool. I met with another AI project last week and he had shared something that was really interesting. Their infrastructure for agents, this project. And he said that users are able to create an agent really quickly on their platform. And he said that one behavior that they're seeing is that there's a lot of web two people coming on through inbound requests. and asking for help on how to create an agent. And one of the more interesting agents that they helped this project create or the potential, the qualified lead is that they created an agent to help them create like a storytelling, a storytelling agent. Like I think it was an agency is what it was. And they were, they needed some help creating an agent that would like collect stories and then like, and then. push them out, I'm not exactly sure, but he saw a lot of Web2 people. I understand that's not the audience that Mode Network is focused on, but as we look at the AI space, it is incredibly large with interest from everybody in and out of crypto. And especially, it seems like Mode's focus is on AI plus. the DeFi piece, so DeFi, D-E-F-A-I, which is I think a subsection or a subsegment of AI that is a very large market. So I'm curious about your thoughts on the audience that would be interested or maybe that's already participating in DeFi on Mode network and like what's their characteristics, web two, web three, all over the place? Absolutely. I think, yeah, we can look at this through like the way we're currently breaking up these three types or this like this stack becoming like the DeFi AI stack. So we have like the applications and the interfaces. These new interfaces like the Mode terminal is a tool that you can just go to and say, hey, swap $10 in USDC, 10 USDC for ether or do it for you, right? That's like an AI tool that is, yeah, in natural language. That's, yeah, that's like consumer friendly and user friendly. And that's really cool. And like this part of the stack, this like these new interfaces, I think are to be really important for onboarding, getting new users to, to Mode, to, to every, to every application on Mode. Then we have like the agents that go on chain and automate transactions for you, like automate optimizing your yield, things like this again, like that's like this application layer. And maybe people who have a bit more DeFi knowledge will be using that, but probably won't be used by like real DeFi pros. They'll probably have their own systems, own strategies. They'll do themself. Then we have this, this second layer, which is like the data layer. And our approach to this is to essentially build out better data for agents to train on. especially pricing data. So we've built out this BitTensor subnet, which essentially provides Monte Carlo simulations of potential prices, future price paths. So it's like a competition to model volatility. When you get these really nice data sets, you can train agents on, and you can start to like give your agent the ability to like forecast or make probabilistic decisions about the future. So this is kind of going to be focused on like agent builders as like the, the target audience, like agent builders can integrate this data to make their, portfolio management agent smarter or have some idea or some way to reason about the future, some data to be able to reason about the future with. we've also seen like a huge amount of interest from like companies that like want to integrate this into the LLM. So like the vision or the goal for this data layer would be like, can we get modes synthetic data within Chatt GPT? So when someone asks, Hey, what is the price of Bitcoin? Will Bitcoin touch $110,000 next week? It can come back and say, according to synth, there's like a 15 % chance that the price of Bitcoin will hit $110,000 next week. So that's like the goal of the data layer. think it can be. used by in many different ways. in much more generalized way by like web two and web three startups. And then yeah, the third layer is like the execution layer, which is Mode the L2. And yeah, this is primarily going to be for the DeFi applications, building on Mode and get the users. But yeah, this is kind of how we see it. So I guess, yeah, we're trying to attack like the full stack and they all have different, core user groups that we're focusing on. Yeah. You mentioned BitTensor and that's a big integration that Mode Network did this year. Tell us more about that because that's an exciting, you know, there's a lot of buzz around BitTensor and what they're doing because they were quite early in the AI space, at least in AI crypto. yeah, tell us about that. Yeah, exactly. Like BitTensor is definitely one of the, I think it's the largest crypto AI products by market cap or networks by market cap. It's pretty incredible. It's like, BitTensor is essentially like a data science competition, right? A big decentralized data science competition, which boils down to essentially being decentralized intelligence. So you as a subnet owner, there's 64 subnets and they all focus on a different topic or niche. And you as a subnet owner essentially create a competition for miners who are data scientists or mathematicians or quants. And they have to take part, submit their, yeah, whatever data they're doing for us, it's submit these hundred price path. simulations every five minutes. And then they're scored and judged by validators. And the validators are super important to the network because they also set weights and the more weights they set via the state TAL, the more emissions you get on your subnet. So the more valuable the prizes for these miners that win or come up with the best models. So it's a pretty incredible ecosystem when it comes to like incentive mechanism design. and we, you know, we could build synth in house. could build this, these data sets in the house. we could also hire 10, 20, 30 data scientists, put them all in separate rooms and get them to compete. But yeah, we see this problem, that we're trying to face like really, really like lending itself well to. the idea of decentralized intelligence and having like anyone from anywhere in the world able to become a miner and start submitting predictions based on whatever model they're doing, whatever mechanism they're using to train their model, whatever method they're using and take part. And that's really how we think you find, get the best, you'll get the best results and the best outputs and the most powerful data. yeah, that's our vision with Synth. And we actually went live on mainnet like last week and we've started to get some really good weights from miners, sorry, from validators. We have miners on our network participating and the data is looking pretty good. So yeah, exciting times. The what is the integration with bit tensor look like with the Mode network and synth? Tell us about that. Yeah, so essentially, like, it's mainly through an API, right? So all the agents on Mode can access the data that comes from BitTensor. So they can get these, the data from the Synth subnet via an API and plug these into the agents to be able to run strategies on chain on Mode. That's exciting. How did the launch go last week? It went pretty good. mean, yeah, it went pretty good. It's kind of a blur because it was like a lot of late nights, but like it was good. there's a dynamic where you have to like speak to validators and essentially pitch validators, your network or so. Yeah. Your subnet. And this is, this is interesting. I think it's probably like a lot of people complain about it and say it's annoying. You have to go to the validators and like, you know, kind of beg them like, please, can you assign some weight and violate our subnet? Here's why you're amazing. But at the end of the day, it's like, that's, that's sales. That's, you know, that's how things work. These people have the power within the network. So you need to convince them what you're doing is good. So that's an interesting process. And it's really incredible how many smart people are working on this project. within this network. it's been very cool to meet them all. Is there a bribing kind of process where, I guess what does that negotiation look like with validators? I mean, so validators will earn more if your subnet is successful, right? I'm not really sure. I don't think there's really any bribing as far as I can tell within the ecosystem. It's very much like validators want to be validating and assigning weights to subnets that will be successful and get more weights because they earn a share of this. So this is why the incentive design is quite interesting. Actually, there's an update coming called detail, which changes, yeah, changes the, the incentive mechanism, which is, yeah, it's kind of like the details were released like today in a white paper. but it's, yeah, there's still like some things to be ironed out, I think, but essentially that will kind of make BitTensor, much more like a virtuals, a virtuals kind of esk ecosystem. Mm. where each subnet will have its own alpha token and speculation can occur around the alpha token so that's something to watch. Recently, there's an agent app store that launched a Mode network. Tell us about that and what are some interesting agents that you can talk about. Yeah, so the AI agent app store is essentially a place to discover new agents that launch on Mode. The most popular one right now is called Armour from Giza. This is a stable coin agent. It moves stable coins around Mode. There's currently like, I think, 9 % APR on your stable coins. So like you deposit into this into your own agent, and the agent will move your stable coins and get maximum yields for you. across the different protocols and Mode. think it's integrated with five protocols right now, three, four or five. And yeah, it's really cool. It's growing fast and people seem to love it. I'm using it. I love it too. Then there's Modius, which has been built by Olaz. They were pretty early team to this like agentic meta. And they take a very like decentralized approach to everything. So yeah, you can run the Modius trading agent. via their Perl application, which is very cool on the desktop. We have a load more launching on a platform called Chirpa next week. So yeah, that's going to be cool. And these will be like social agents that also have a lot of like on-chain capabilities. So it's a blend of like DeFi and socialify and yeah, that's going to be really cool. It's going be a load launching. I'm curious about the agents and like the, they, is there a scope within the Mode network or can they do things outside of it? not just applications within the Mode network, but if I wanted to create an agent that, I don't know, I don't know, just something let's say on X, but I only want the agent to talk about, you know, these specific topics or be a reply guide to these specific topics, something like that. Is that possible? Yeah, it's possible. I they're like, I think so when you have agents that have like, or you're, you're signing them to do tasks, right? Like, yeah, reply or do certain activities, certain actions, on your behalf. Those, those can all be built on Chopper pretty easily, which is cool. When you add in like that they've got to like, they have, they have capital, right? So They're either doing something with their, you know, they're not just talking about trading. They're actually making the trades. Um, that's when things become more complex, right? And you have to take a more, like you have to be more risk aware, um, because there's multiple risks and there's multiple things you need to be aware of when an agent has capital. Cause if you just give a truly autonomous agent capital right now, it's probably going to go off and do some crazy stuff. Um, and it might lose your funds. So. Yeah, these types of agents that have capital have to be designed in a slightly different way. with a lot more consideration around, yeah, the things that agent can do and like the things that it can't do. but yeah, we, we will see agents trading across different chains, going across different applications. It's just that, yeah, just a matter of time. How does that work with an agent crossing a bridge, the interoperability piece? Let's say an agent wanted to do something or you program an agent to do something on Solana or another, like a non-EVM chain. Yeah. Yeah, so essentially, like right now, There aren't many agents moving capital across different chains. There aren't many as far as I know. EVM change is one thing. You use interoperability protocols and intense protocols as well, like intent layer. However, yeah, across Solana and EVM, there are some cool things being built, especially with like... it comes to account abstraction, gas sponsorship, yes, smart wallets that can run across multiple different networks. But yeah, we haven't seen any integrated. One of our partners, Zero Dev, they have some cool stuff they've been building there. So yeah, maybe we'll get the first agent that can go from like Mo to Solana, which would be very cool. Yeah, I think there's definitely potential there. Mode Network recently launched AI Agent Founder School. Tell us about that. That's pretty cool. That's, I think, a really cool initiative. Yeah, so we've done like a lot of hackathons in the past. The hackathons are really cool at like basically just getting loads of people together, jamming on my crazy ideas and just building cool stuff. We wanted to give like a bit more structure. the firstly, like the platforms launch your Mode have like founders that want to launch agents, right? And secondly, like guide them like this is how you can do go to market. This is how you can think about like a token. Do you want to have a token? This is the different ways I get users onboarded. So yeah, we've really focused on that. The last, sorry, one second. All good. Sorry about that. Yeah, sorry about that. Someone was just knocking at my door like pretty angrily. I don't know why. They seem to have gone now. So yeah, I can kick off from agent school, agent founder school. Okay. So yeah, so essentially... The agent founder school came about because we ran a load of hackathons. had a load of hackers just like jamming on ideas, building cool stuff. We did one recently with AI16Z, Crossmin, a load of other partners to work on this Go SDK to essentially give agents more skills on Mode. like, yeah, build cool stuff around that. But after the hackathon, we kind of wanted to do something a bit more in depth and help founders who wanted to launch agents on Mode. with like a lot more than just like a two day kind of hackathon, you know, with some workshops, we wanted a bit more structure. so we've done like go to market, like, classes with Emily from hype. He was awesome. we've like helped them, think about if they want to watch a token, what that looks like. And yeah, it's been really cool. We're actually coming towards the end of it and it's going be really great because these founders are all going to go and launch. Yeah, either on platforms or Mode or just their own agents on Mode at some point. So exciting times ahead. Well, how long is the class? Tell us about the curriculum. And it sounds like if they are part of the AI agent founder school, they don't have to launch in Mode or you'd prefer that they did? Or what's the incentive for them to do so? Yeah, we have like, yeah, a lot of different incentives, support with like, if they launch a token, like grants to cover like various like costs associated with this. But yeah, the goal is that they will all launch on Mode. They can also launch multi chain, but the focus is that yeah, they'll launch on Mode and contribute to the Mode ecosystem. Tell us about how long is the class and the curriculum. Yeah, so it's three weeks long. It's pretty intense. think three to four weeks and we're coming up to the last week. I think it's roughly 12 teams and yeah, they're building like mainly in the defy space actually. mainly defy some social five stuff, but yeah, mostly defy stuff. cool. is there, towards the end of it, is there a demo day where they demonstrate what they've built? Yeah, demo day is coming up in like a week. So watch this space, yeah. Is that going to be public or is it too? It will. Okay. we'll stream it on Twitter for sure. that's exciting. That'll be really cool. And how do you determine, guess, who I don't know if who wins. I don't know if that's that's even a concept, Yeah, I guess it's just like graduating less than like winning, right? It's like, yeah, if they get through it and they launch then yeah, it's been a success. Yeah. When they do launch their project on the Mode Network, what additional support can these founders, I guess, expect or hope to receive from Mode Network? Yeah, so we're going to be adding them into the AI agent app store as long as they have the right audits. We'll help them get liquidity, help them get capital into their agents, but introduce them to partners, our investor network. If they're looking to grow their team, we'll help them with hiring. They have issues with legal security audits, all this kind of stuff that happens around building a startup as a founder. We're pretty hands-on with helping teams. Yeah, with anything really. It sounds like a of like a white combinator for AI agents like within the Mode network Is that kind of a good analogy for it a little bit? yeah, I think that's a great analogy, absolutely. Because all of the things that founders kind of don't really think about but are super important like legal and audit, operations, accounting, all of that's like really important, but it is overwhelming for a lot of founders. The fact that you guys are helping them with all of that, I think is a big value add. How are founders receiving that? So far so good. Yeah, I mean, I'm keeping up with like all the updates of all the teams and like the stuff they're building is really incredible. So yeah, the key thing is like, yeah, helping them launch. that's all to come. So very exciting. That's awesome. Looking at 2025, so we've talked about the AI agent founder school. What other things could the community expect out of the Mode network this year? And maybe things that they can look forward to. Absolutely. So we launched the Mode terminal and alpha. It's like pretty basic right now. It can do things like swaps. can bridge. can do basic things, but we're going to keep building that and make it like enable it to do much more complex strategies for you. We're also going to have a load more agents launching DeFi specific that can help users earn more yield on their assets across the ecosystem. We're looking to integrate synth data and expand the scope of synth from just BTC price to multiple assets, to portfolios, to then different industries. The white paper has just been released on that. So yeah, you can head over there if you want to check out the white paper in more depth. And then we have a load of upgrades coming to the base layer, the Modell 2. We're working closely with Optimism on moving to become a stage one roll up. We have a couple more like stealth projects, which should make the animal lower fee faster. So yeah, very excited about that too. That's awesome. Well, James, I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Lots of really cool stuff coming up for Mode Network. And really appreciate you going through the, like, how did we get here? I mean, and congratulations on one year and the success that you and the Mode Network team have had. Thank so much. A pleasure. Take care, thank you. Cheers, bye bye. Thank you so much.