We're rolling. Jay Kurahashi Sofu, welcome to the Block by Block show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to dive into a lot of things that I think we prepped before the call. Yeah, so you are the CMO at Eco Protocol. Before we get into what you guys are doing at Eco, we'd love to hear about your origin story. You've been in the space for a while, but you started out as a growth leader in Web2. So how did you get into crypto? It's definitely a little bit random when it comes to my, my origin story, if you will. But when I look back in hindsight, I think a lot of the things start to make sense as to why we're here today. Um, so I actually, just to like give a little bit of context in 2010, I founded a music publication, um, during the blog. of explosion in the music industry. It was pre-Spotify, very much like early stages of streaming. YouTube was probably a really big platform, but not as big as it is today. And this publication throughout its time of existence, first two years, it exploded to about a million, two million readers a year. And one of the main things I asked myself is, what is the actual, what is the main contributor to the success? There's a bunch of different things, but one thing that stood out to me was digital marketing as a category. I didn't fundamentally know much about it. Actually. I didn't know much about the really anything about it, except for the fact that I knew how to use the tools because I figured it out. So that was things like social media, search engine marketing, just every single type of digital marketing you can probably think of. And definitely didn't do it well in the beginning, but right place at the right time and a little bit of luck, I suppose, and a lot of effort. And I think that's really where I. found a lot of passion in marketing and thought to myself, I'm pretty good at this. And at the same exact time, right around 2011 stumbled into Bitcoin, very, very surface layer stuff, nothing too crazy, but that was like the initial kind of exposure, if you will. And not until about 2014, 15, did I start to take it a little bit more seriously. I did a lot of soul searching and advertising, just learning a little bit more. formally about what marketing is all about. And in 2015, I joined a large agency called Ogilvy and Maither. This agency brought a ton of different clients. I focused predominantly on finance and tech to start, but then in the first six to 12 months, quickly switched over to crypto brands. This is right around when the ICO boom started, I would say, or maybe right before it. And, um, I actually got close with a few other partners and we ended up starting a side consultancy at Ogilvy for crypto brands. And so that was like really the first kind of foray as a crypto marketer. And right around 2017, 18, basically one thing led to another, but we had a lot of success with our clients. A lot of us wanted to be on the client side is kind of the summary of it and myself included. And so I was living in Brooklyn at the time. Consensus was. just about to be founded, I think was just founded right around when I moved here. And got really close with some of the early consensus people. And that's kind of how I stumbled into AirSwap, was hired as a head of marketing. I was there for about a few years. We ended up getting acquired by Consensus right before COVID. And then subsequently was hired as the head of marketing for Avalabs, the creators of Avalanche. And was doing that for about four years. so just quick stat there is I was the first marketing hire. Patrick Sutton was the comms lead at the time alongside me. We grew that team out to about 50 people. We were about like 10, 15th employee and we got to about 300 at its peak and kind of tapered out around 250. So really great exposure to kind of the midsize and also arguably a larger size organization. And, and then this past summer in July joined EECO. as the head of marketing as well, CMO as well. And so just to continue on that effort to see if we can do the same thing as we did with Avalanche. That's a great story. didn't know that you had started a music publication. Do you still do music today? I definitely do as much as possible. I think I'm more of a consumer these days. I mean, you can see kind of in the background, this isn't a Zoom background, but this is a real background. I try and mix as much as possible. I produce as well, but I haven't really gotten too much into it. And I was a photographer in the music industry pretty actively for about 10 years. So that was like the, I would say after the publication, that kind of closed down in around 2015. just kept doing photography gigs and it wasn't my full-time job, but it was something I loved. And so did that on the weekends. I probably did like one gig, one or two gigs a month, I think was probably what I was at. And then at one point I actually couldn't do it anymore just because of time, but still really love photography nonetheless. You know, it's really interesting how we come into crypto and we bring our varied experiences. And it's cool that, you you have a background in music and crypto people love parties and there's always a DJ there. And I'm sure you brought some of that to bear as, know, when you were at Avalanche and you, Avalanche is I think known for throwing really great events. And I'm sure you were behind a lot of that as well as your team. I didn't know your team became so large. 250, that's a large team. Yeah, I would say in, in when I, even at the time I thought it was a little large, but you kind of have to scale quickly to play the race a little bit. So I think it was not too crazy. There are other companies that went into like 400, 500, even thousands, I know consensus back in ICO cycles went to like 1500, I think from like 200 head count, which, um, and then dropped back down and kind of did a lot of the push and pull there. Uh, the marketing function. I think the interesting learning here was the ecosystem starts ecosystem as a definition started to fragment very quickly. What I mean by that is blockchain started to validate more use cases as avalanche started to grow. That was kind of the time where DeFi was already in like second, third generation, but then NFTs was coming in. Then all of a enterprises were getting warm again. And then gaming was kind of a brand new category. And most projects, most blockchains tried to tackle that as one holistic ecosystem strategy. As we know in any industry where you actually start to look at those things, they're vastly different industries with vastly different audience segments and even builders and on the B2B side. And so I think what ended up happening was you had to scale out for each subs category. And I think we did it right. It just then all of sudden you now have basically like a holistic marketing function. divided into like five, six different pieces, because now you have small teams having a directive of growing out the sub vertical of the ecosystem, not the holistic ecosystem, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of companies that are in kind of the mid to late stages are doing that. I guess the open question, I don't know the answer. I wonder if there's a more efficient way to structure that. But we also put kind of like the marketing channels as a horizontal capability. So you had shared services on each, across each sub vertical. And so you basically had kind of like this kind of cross-hatching type org structure, if you will. Yeah, think from my experience, think a lot of organizations, a lot of crypto projects wish they could scale like that, where you could have shared services across verticals and have those very specific verticals to focus on the specific industry and the, because each one is very different. As you mentioned, different audiences, different themes, different really ethos and persona. and being able to serve them well, you kind of need a dedicated team, but that's really difficult for a lot of teams to scale like that. I want to go back to your time at Ogilvy. David Ogilvy is a master of messaging and positioning. What are some things that you take from your experience there and have applied into crypto? When I joined Ogilvy, I joined a program called the Associates program. It was a rotational program, pretty competitive rotational program that lasted about a year. And you got to try three different divisions of the company. That was amazing for me because I knew I wanted to be in a strategic role, not so much like operations or account management, but I didn't really know what was out there beyond my own personal experience through the publication, which was like a choose your own adventure. not really super structured and Um, the, the first rotation I actually ended up joining was Ogilvy red now called Ogilvy consulting. So it was very much in kind of like the, uh, management consulting camp, but also the advertising camp. And so was able to see really how these consulting for shops go beyond just brand and marketing, which was super helpful for me to just kind of see the other side, right? I'm just in this ad ad world, um, so to speak. And so it was really great to see what, what it looks like. very far out beyond something that I could do in advertising. And then think the other component was brand strategy. Brand strategy I tend to find is like the glue that holds everything together. Some people have analogies like it's a brand house, so it kind of keeps the foundation together. It's like the roof or whatever. It's very core to your marketing strategy. Most people would not disagree with me on that one. And when you think back to... the music publication or even I worked at media shops and a few others. Those are like different pieces of marketing as a stack. There's deploying media strategies on traditional channels like radio out of home, things like that. Also on this flip side, I worked at BBDO for an internship for social media. so social media, learned a lot about consumer facing social media platforms did a bunch of work for brands like Splenda and Diageo's portfolio. And so you're seeing all these channels, but again, there's no like apex, there's no glue holding it together. And so I think one thing of many things I really loved my time at Ogilvy actually learned incredible amounts. I was just a brand strategist machine, if you will, brand strategy machine where I'm just pumping out decks for these clients. And I think that really helped me get to ideation and solutions really quickly. Um, and then really also understand process. I'm a person of process and I really, um, grew up with that type of background. My, both my parents are Japanese and I always kind of credit it to that type of upbringing a little bit. Um, but I think when it comes to professional process, it was also super important for me to see how teams worked over and over and over and produced really high quality results. If I had jumped into startups immediately, I don't know if I would have had that brand background, nor that kind of process. that I really needed to really excel. And I really credit my capabilities today to a lot of the kind of foundational stuff I learned at Ogilvy. That's really cool. One of my, and I could be mistaken in attributing this to David Ogilvie, but one really great example of messaging that I love is in one of his books, he gives the example of the messaging around weight loss. Like I lost weight, you know, that's great. And then he adds the emotional aspect to it. I lost weight, but now my wife thinks I'm attractive again. It's like, Wow, like almost give you chills on your back. That is so powerful. And that kind of example is we're clearly missing a lot of that type of emotional messaging that captures an audience. And I also want to go back to what you said about brand, but like, how could we have more of that type of messaging in crypto when we're dealing with infrastructure while it's really highly technical subjects? The simple answer is people don't think about that, that kind of David Elgolby lesson, if you will. Even, even I've been kind of in, the trenches really just like in my own head and, create a concept pretty happy with it, walk away for a few hours or days even come back. I'm like, wait, I totally didn't even abide by, you know, David Ogilvie's solution or so many different ad marketing people have said this over and over and over. It's not like an uncommon insight. There's this interesting thing I think that happens where if you have hyper technical concepts, it's actually really hard to find that value, especially if you don't have product market fit. And so I think people all of a go, well, the value must be that the blockchain is fast. It's like, well, that's definitely better than getting into the weeds of, you know, TPS and whatever else, but that's still like in the commoditized messaging world of crypto, where everything is supposed to be fast post Bitcoin, how are you going to differentiate yourself? And so I think that's the challenge that really makes it so that kind of complacent messaging strategy does not work as well anymore. And I think people are waking up to that and think One of the things too, as an industry is like, what is, what are blockchain applications actually achieving for you that kind of like weight loss? So then my wife finds me attractive kind of unlock. And sometimes with these hyper technical things, it might have to be pretty broad for you to just go into the market and then find the more specific value proposition. So could be as simple as if you're a L one blockchain and your primary customer or L two doesn't matter. your primary customer or on-chain developers will understand the developer's problems really, really well. And then you'll be able to find that value proposition. Maybe it's something like, you know, we're so easy that you can actually deploy your application within a day, which means you have more time to build your application and not worry about infrastructure or something along the lines on the flip side where it could be something like Um, the blockchain that never goes down and therefore your users will be extremely happy with the experience and will, won't be frustrated and won't bounce from your product, something like that. Obviously those are like very technical ways to describe it, but, um, and yeah. where a lot of blockchain projects kind of they they missed that next part of so that and and You know it you could deploy something in one minute so and then so that I think that's that next part and if if if projects think more in in Along those lines and think about that next emotional capture like what could be? Really emotional from the the perspective of the target customer and really capture their attention and interest and give them, you know, and a lot of developers, you know this, they need help in communicating in a way that attracts other developers. And we are all emotional creatures, even though we're in a highly technical industry. It's really tech, it's the emotion that captures your attention and interest and honestly devotion, you know, and so let's go to brand really quick. I loved how, and I followed the Avalanche team right when you joined, and I noticed right away, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I noticed changes right away to the website. And I believe that was all you were doing. And I noticed the focus on verticals and use cases. On the one hand, a very B2B approach, yet it really worked. I remember going to the Avalanche site and knowing exactly where I was, where I, and as I went into each vertical, I remember it's like very, very focused on the messaging as if I were a gamer or as if I were into DeFi. Tell me about like what happened internally that any discussions or conversations that or any pushback you might've had as you as you kind of work with the Avalanche team to make that transition from what it was. And I don't remember what it was before you joined, but I just remember the, wow, this is different. Yeah, no, definitely, definitely made a bunch of changes. And I think it was in phased kind of steps. And the first phase was what I mentioned earlier is let's just do a holistic audit. What's the strongest value proposition? What's the product strategy? How do we want to go into the market? What are the business goals that we're trying to achieve? When we before, so I joined in June, 20, 2019, I think, or right before mainnet. This was like six months before mainnet. So we had a token sale, then we had mainnet launch, then we had building out the ecosystem. So it was actually a great time because the product wasn't out yet. And so we can actually do a little bit of brand building pre-launch. The, we, we tallied a bunch of the value propositions internally. And the strongest one was transaction finality. Transaction finality can happen in under one second and in a C where there was, you know, L2s that didn't settle transactions in anything close to that or even other chains that were trying to do that. But it was more like a couple seconds, not just under one second. We had that right to win. Maybe not so much these days, but we had that right to win at the time. The second piece was one of the strongest convictions that we had was EVM to lean into the supply that exists for Solidity developers or within the Solidity kind of realm. And so when you think about those things, We talked to a bunch of different Ethereum developers and luckily I was working in the Ethereum space with an AirSwap and prior to that, even at the agency for a long time. And so I had a lot of really great developer friends who build in prominent projects to just ask, what is your biggest pain point? What do you love about Ethereum? What do you hate about Ethereum? All these different things to really get into the emotion. I'll summarize like a few things I remember. One of them was support and resources at the time was not great. And it's like, it's so simple, right? All these people want to do is they want to build things, but they're not going to just go at it alone because it's a huge, hugely complex problem. And they need resources, tooling support to help them. Number two is speed of the chain. Of course, I think was like the thing that we were able to rival against. And, uh, I think the last piece, if I recall correctly, revolved something around just ownership of the stack because most people, when they deploy on Ethereum, they have to conform to whatever is existing globally. But with Avalanche, we were pushing what is now called L1s, but subnets where you can actually customize your own blockchain. And those were then interoperate in this kind of like network of blockchains, right? And so there's flexibility is a TLDR on what that really means. If you combine all those concepts, what does that do for developers? Well, this blockchain is truly something that doesn't shackle you to some sort of standard or doesn't prevent you from having a high performance application. And so we came up with a brand strategy with that was kind of tied together with a tagline that said create without limits. And that was the North Star. How do we enable people to create without limits? And then we obviously make that real with like, you know, with gaming, it's like, you know, these games can perform and they don't have to conform to the standard of a permissionless protocol for, for, enterprises. wanted more permission chains and they could actually still benefit from the performance and, whatnot that Avalanche is able to provide them. And so you can kind of adapt each one. And you asked about what were kind of the discussions. Well, the first focus was DeFi mostly cause it was kind of the only option, but the other convenient piece was. finality is something that finance people understand. Most people do not understand what finality really means except traditional finance folks back, back kind of in like five, 10 years ago, maybe now a little bit more because blockchain has gotten bigger and so has payments. And so the cell was much more, much easier to say, hey, you know the transaction that takes T plus two, T plus three? Well, imagine if it just takes one second. that's basically an instant conversion right there because then people go, well, that sounds fake. Can we believe in really? Yeah, sure. Sure. We can just show you a deployment and you can actually test yourself. And this is kind of how it works. And so that was really how we started to take on a lot of, um, new business. And the strategy was to then take as many projects from Ethereum who were frustrated with the Ethereum experience and saying, Hey, it's actually the grass is greener over here. And so don't think we ended up necessarily. like taking them outright per se, but I think they started to deploy multi-chain. And so we promoted this campaign called Avalanche Rush. That was like the first kind of catalyst brought Avalanche to, think like 10 plus billion TVL at the time valued in US dollars. And it was really because you had these chains realizing, Hey, like as much as we love the ethos of Ethereum, we can't sacrifice performance. That's like a fundamental product problem. And so I think they were hedging and they didn't go fully into Avalanche. Most of them, a lot of them did, or some of them did, but not all of them. And what we saw, I think in the first year of Avalanche is you saw a lot of traders. You can verify this on chain, take assets from Ethereum, bridge it to Avalanche, settle it on Avalanche, and then bring it back to Ethereum. And so they started to use Avalanche as a settlement layer for Ethereum basically, kind of like how L2s are positioned. And people were willing to do that because the bridging cost to go back and forth was significantly cheaper than congested gas prices on Ethereum. So that was also like within the context of blockchain, really good validation from a product market fit perspective. And I think the pushback last point is the pushback that I think I remember receiving was. I don't, think there was this disagreement that we needed distinct strategies for each vertical at the time. And it was like, well, people should know that, you know, transaction finality beats everything. But it's the thing that you said before. We are hyper technical hyper, uh, technically literate individuals as professionals in industry. But at the same time, we are still human beings who still latch onto emotion and you are still inundated by a thousand and one lines of messaging that tell you that they're fast. Like I have a. I have a deck up right now because I did a brand competitive for someone recently and not going to name the brands. probably look it up, but there's the fastest L1, the first real time blockchain, a high performance Ethereum L2 powered by whatever this VM is. The first blended execution network, a network of inner woven roll ups. These are like matter of fact statements. How do I even discern which one's which? I looked away from the screen for two seconds. I actually can't even remember which one is which. And that to me is fundamentally the issue that I think we're all trying to solve as marketers in the space. I love everything you said and I want to switch topics now to Eco Protocol and talk a lot about the work that you're doing there. Now as a brand builder and you've built brands in other blockchain projects and now with Eco, would love your thoughts on your approach to building the Eco brand. It's relatively new. you're building brand awareness for this really interesting product. And so I guess I'd like to talk about two things. The stablecoin market in general. It's a very large market with clear product market fit and an equal role in that. Before I begin, let me just read this just to give the audience a sense of how large this market is. This is from Castle Island Ventures. They wrote a report on the stablecoin market. Visa one, It's a large survey of 2,000, believe, respondents. It's called the stable coin, the emerging market story. Yeah, from like late last year, sometime last year. Yeah. I'm just going to read it verbatim and then maybe use that as a jumping off point. There are over 160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today. This is as of September 2024. Over 20 million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public blockchains every month. In the first half of 2024, stablecoins settled over $2.6 trillion worth of value. Stablecoins offer considerable advantages relative to the existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability properties, fast settlement, and ability to self-custody and native interoperability. So it's a huge market. It's fast, you can settle quickly, and there's clear product market fit. Now let's talk about ECO and what you guys are doing there. Maybe for the audience who aren't familiar with ECO protocol, tell us what it is. describe eco to, I don't know, let's say your mom. Like, how would you describe eco? The best way to start there would be ECO is simply something that can be integrated by on chain applications. So I think, I think that's simple enough for my mom. My mom's pretty well-versed in this stuff actually, but it allows any application to accept stable coins, regardless of compatibility. That's like the full stop explain like I'm five. If I wanted to go a little bit deeper, I would say The compatibility expands into network differentiation, asset types. There's, you know, dozens of stable coins at this point. If you're an application, you need to, you need to bootstrap liquidity for every single stable coin. And you also need to make sure your app is compatible to those networks before you're able to even accept any of those funds from users. And so if you have eco in between, it acts as middleware. And it's a simple integration, and it does the heavy lifting effectively. So from the user's perspective, you can come to an application. You don't need to worry about network. You don't need to worry about RPCs or anything. And you just connect to the application with ECO basically in the middle, and then you can spend your stablecoins, whatever you may have, so long as the network has liquidity for it. That's the user experience. And then the developer benefits because they no longer have to scale out their team or the team rather benefits because they don't need to scale out the development team. And they can just integrate these types of like eco or any type of middleware in between. I think user experience is, something that has become a really hot topic in the last, I don't know, probably like since the ICO times, because I think what people realized is the pitch decks overshot. the promise of the product and the delivery of the product. When you, I remember like early ICO days, you'd see a ICO video and you're like, great, that's, you know, something that's going to remove intermediaries and do all that. And it's an amazing powerful application. And then you sat down and you try to use it and you, had to download a whole node. You had to download some weird thing called Metamask. You had to have eth... which was confusing. You then had all these coins that existed. And so we kind of jumped the gun a little bit just because of this technology is permissionless and it's open and everyone can have access to it. And then the UX didn't really quite have its time to be able to catch up. And that's what I think brought the market back down. another commentary I would add is stable coins is interesting because stable coins didn't really become popular until probably like tether started to get popular through like remittance usage and all that. And then also circles and Coinbase launched their, their USDC as well. And that started to add a little bit more legitimacy, but you recall in, in the ICO phase, was a maker Dow had die or single sided die at the time now they have multi-collateral die. There are bunch of other projects. course, then in the last cycle, there was Terra Luna and a bunch of other things. And so there was actually shocks even in the Stablecoin system because there was almost that SBB issue with Circle because they had deposits or they had funds in a not SBB, sorry. SBB, not SBB. And they had deposits there and also non crypto people who were like, wait, this thing isn't like. Even the asset-backed stable coins are a little bit dicey. And so maybe I might not enter that same thing with the algo ones that scared everybody away because of Tara. And so I think it kind of had a dip a little bit, but fundamentally nothing really has changed so much from a technology perspective. All it is, is a lot of human error that's involved that kind of created these shocks in the system. So I feel like we're going to continuously have these shocks here and there. especially as new stable coins get issued. But I think we're going to normalize that out and we're going to be get a little bit smarter to not make those same mistakes. And so I think we're kind of in a steady growth period. And I just checked right now we're at 200 billion, according to Artemis, when it comes to total supply of stable coins, and we're still we're just continuously beating all time highs. And so my my kind of conviction on that is I think we're going to have a steady growth of the stable coin market for the next few years as we hopefully get into this very bullish market that we're about to get into, in my personal view. No, I fully agree and all the data points that way. And especially with the change of the regulatory posture in the United States, I just think that's gonna just really put the gas on the fire in the stablecoin space and it's just gonna be so large and continue to grow. Going back to the Eco product, if we go to the eco.com, eco.com website, Tell me if I'm mistaken. So the first page, one click, full send. And so this feels like you're speaking to the persona here is someone needs to send a transaction. Second page, protocol for stable coins. Now you're speaking to app developers, or every app could potentially use ECO as the middle layer to send payments or send transactions using stable coins. Next page, attract liquidity, simplify UX, supercharge revenues. Now you're talking about the features of this protocol. in the full stack upgrade for transacting on chain. And so now you get a little technical and then that's it. I love the website and it's clear you have your fingers all over this, your fingerprints all over this. So using that as a backdrop, tell us about the eco product and how you envision building the brand and growing it. The main component of Q4, so we unveiled to the world that the Eco Protocol is our focus as a product and a protocol on September 1st. And so the clock started then, and we then started to brand build. We adjusted the brand strategy just ever so slightly, almost on a monthly basis as we started to learn more from a validation perspective when it came to conversations with prospective customers. conversations with investors, all these types of conversations we're obviously having all the time. I think the thing that remains unchanged is our kind of North Star. Our North Star is we're here to accelerate how money moves on chain. Right now, the promise is that, or in blockchain broadly, the promise is that, hey, money should move much more quickly and more efficiently, but how come that hasn't really come to fruition yet? or as it should. And that's because of a lot of the mistakes we've made as an industry, a lot of the UX issues. There's also lot of fees, ironically, in between now, because that's just how these protocols started to evolve. And of course, they're probably going to get simplified over time. But we're saying, hey, well, we actually have the fastest path from stable coins to on-chain apps. And that's what we're going to enable. And theoretically, this could also expand to other service offerings and other... other products as well. And that's what I think about when it comes to brand strategy is do we have something that gives us enough room to be able to grow into and then potentially if we need to, if it's either a pivot or a new product under the suite, we'll be able to embrace that product very easily so we're not doing a whole overhaul where we're convicted on, we have conviction on like one niche and that's obviously not as flexible. And when you looked at the website, The website was built in-house. just quickly needed to get the messaging up. We actually have a new site coming out probably in the coming weeks. It'll be very simple, similar to this, just a little bit more focused on the developer and kind of teasing out some of the nuances that are purposefully left out in this current site. And then when you really think about how you bring this brand strategy to life, you need to make sure you have consistency and narrative repetition throughout all channels where your customers are. That's really the simple formula. There's nothing that crazy that we're doing that other people could not do. I think the criticism I have with some other teams or maybe, maybe not teams, but just, or maybe that not so much criticism, but I think the gap that exists in the industry is to have subject matter experts on every single channel or some individual to be able to do that. It's a, it's a unicorn. You're, you're not going to have that. But I think from my background, I grew into it as an executor first, then kind of became senior more and more. because I've predominantly in the last 10 years have been in more or less startups, I've always had to stay lean. And I love the execution side. think longer term, I don't know how much I could be doing like the one person marketing team or the five person marketing team or whatever. I don't know how long I could be doing that, but for now it keeps my skillset sharp. And I learned so, so much. And so if I need to scale it for Avalanche, it's a perfect example. I scaled that out, hired all these experts underneath me and I could talk the talk. so the hiring process was much more direct and increased the chances of success. But then also I think there's this willingness to learn. There's like a two way street just to keep the kind of the toolkit again sharp. So I think last piece would be to really... look at these channels and set KPIs, OKRs, however you want to measure them to be very aggressive. And you want to employ strategies where you're scaling them and you're working smart, not hard. one example is search. Most crypto, early stage crypto companies do not even think about search. All it takes is having some basic search tool to just analyze what your keywords and how the search engines will kind of index those keywords. And then start creating content optimized for those keywords. And when you start doing that, that's just beating against the same beat of the drum, rather than being kind of, uh, not in sync. And so you're already doing that in full force motion and you can actually continue to do that. And it's not about, again, like creating more content than the other person or your competitor. It's just simply about leaning into the algorithms that exist. You can say the same thing about social media. It's not about. tweeting the most it's about how do you craft the narrative and how do you craft the copy to bring the brand strategy together, but also convert and serve as an ad. And then you're maximizing your effort towards the results per post. And if you're doing that, the algorithm will reward you again, because it's saying, Hey, you're creating quality content. When you create content, we also know exactly who to push it forward to. And then it'll just kind of be a virtuous cycle. Hopefully is the idea. And so you can do that with every single channel and what we're doing at eco right now, we have about three ish team members full time and we have technically like five, but we have like a shared kind of services head count. And I just want to make sure that all the digital channels are at 200%. We're probably at like, you know, like 60, 70%. We're at a really, really good pace, but we can still close that margin. So we're about to set, you know, quarterly. Okay. Our is really aggressive ones just as we're turning the page for the new year. Then everyone's going to start to go off to the races and own these channels independently. Um, we've kind of been in a more closed shared team in the beginning. And I just wanted to make sure everyone knew exactly how to do what we're talking about right now when it comes to channel optimization. And then, and then the rest is kind of scaling out whatever other gaps we have. And then hopefully we'll start to see the metrics where we can say, Hey, there are marketing qualified leads or marketing qualified conversions that we're actually now winning because. All of these channels are now working in concert, selling the same dream. And then we all ultimately are able to precisely understand how to convert people because we've taken the time to just set up all those rails since that September 1st date when we unveiled EECO. And that sounds like a really great digital marketing strategy as you're focusing on the individuals looking to make transactions with stablecoins and then also applications. As you think about your channels, it feels like you're seeing some success inbound for potential partnerships with applications as well as individuals. What about any outbound efforts? Are events part of your strategy? Maybe hackathons, et cetera? They are definitely part of our strategy. think outbound is still pretty conservative at this stage. I would say we'd probably ramp up maybe like mid-year. Our goal is to launch on main net sometime in Q1, Q2. So we're just being as lean as possible. And I don't know if we still really found our exact stride, but we've gotten really close. And so we know our general audience target. We know the messaging. That's been great. Now it's all about Well, how do we actually multiply these results as quickly as possible? So we, we, again, when I said we have a little bit of outbound, we're doing a little bit of events. did last quarter, we did DevCon this coming quarter, we're going to be doing ETH Denver. Really it's less about, it's less about like brand awareness and converting, I would say is not really our goals at this stage. It's more about. Trust establishment and then also like mid funnel brand awareness, not like top of funnel. Um, and so we're just trying to get people who are. In our networks who have large spheres of influence who can validate that, Hey, we're a legitimate team. Um, you're, seeing like things that on, on the digital side, you're seeing a lot of changes in the marketing since I joined where we're putting people in the team members front and center. Why? Because if you see the eco logo all the time, You're never going to know who we are. Number two is with the digital strategy, how do we size up the opportunity with those values? We're experimenting with so many, so much different, so many different pieces of copy that position the value proposition in slight nuanced ways. And some do really well, some don't. And that's when we start to figure out, okay, that might be it, that might be in, we'll, we'll push that out to, to broader channels. And I think the last component is really just understanding how to set the seeds for the early developer community, because that's really the rocket ship in my opinion. That's what we did at Avalanche. We over-indexed on developer community, not just like a discord with a bunch of people in it. Like how do we actually measure a really, really qualified developer versus maybe like a mid-level qualification versus like maybe unqualified? And then how do we actually attract mostly the qualified folks in our ecosystem and then how do we also provide value beyond just eco and how do we provide value hopefully led by marketing. If we're able to do that and we have a really healthy ecosystem of developers where when I say healthy ecosystem, it's basically we ask them to do something and they'll most likely do it. That's like the bar that we're trying to set. and so I think this new year is really about shifting focus from like making sure we have channel capabilities and foundation building. to switching over to, now is the time to start attracting developers. When someone asks, what kind of developer are you looking for? We can say, hey, it's this person who is about this age range, this socioeconomic background, and has these problems and is trying to solve this with X, Y, and Z. That specificity is what we need. And hopefully there's kind of a homogenous theme from those values or those kind of qualifications. So then we can start to expand the pie a little bit more. I want to come back to something you said that I think I want to double click on you. You mentioned something about copy and how you as a team, you're discovering what small nuances in copy and what works and what doesn't. How are you testing that in the market? The copy just is, think social and Twitter is probably the best platform to test copy because you can put something out and the life cycle of a tweet is no more than like a few hours. And then you can really see how well it does or not. And so I think I always recommend to anybody in crypto, especially to use that as a testing platform. I think another one is more traditional internal validation, key stakeholder validation, like get that in front of those people. And what I want to do, especially with like the developer strategy I was talking about is we'll likely have a campaign. We'll probably have a sub header underneath the accelerate how money moves on chain kind of North star. And then now you're going to start to see the sub the segmentation that we already saw when I was describing what we did back at Avalanche with some of the key ecosystems. And then from there, what's the most simple way to validate that? Let me get a hundred developers who don't even know eco or don't care. to know about eco or maybe even knows eco well and cares about it, like all types of diversity. And when it comes to the developer profile and then just send them concepts, be like, how does this resonate with you? They'll tell you they'll be super honest. They'll be like, this sucks. would never do anything with this. Or this is super confusing or this doesn't solve my problems at all. And hopefully we'll get both product validation and communications and marketing and copies, copy validation as well. Is that a type of testing that you could do or have done at events? And just take a concept to a developer, just a random developer, and then get their feedback on it. yeah, I do this all the time. I do this with a lot of my close friends, even if I'm like, a lot of my good ideas, so to speak, come when I'm online, super late at night after a pretty long day. Funny enough, usually it's never in like when I'm most energized in the mornings. And that's when I'll ping someone and be like, Hey, this is a concept I thought of, or this is a video we put together. What are your raw thoughts? I'm not even going to give you context because that's how most people are going to consume this stuff anyways. And so just give me some gut. gut, um, gut reactions and we'll take that. And I think the, the, the, the key here is spork parsing through the signal to noise from that feedback, but I haven't found too much difficulty there on, on doing that. Cause then what happens next? Well, next you actually then have to test it out in prod effectively. And if it works, it works. If it doesn't, does it. Um, and so you'll find soon enough if the feedback was, was, um, right on the nose or not. Yeah. I want to end with a quote that you said in a recent blog post you published, I believe last week. And then maybe we can, this can be a jumping off point to talk more about EECO, what you guys have planned and what the audience can expect and how they can get involved. know, community building, as you know, is really important in crypto. And there might be some in the audience that want to be involved and learn more. So you said in... unlocking stable coins full potential for the masses blog posts. I believe you published this last week, maybe the last two weeks. You said, but first, just as new infrastructure like digital banking and mobile payments help the US dollar and Chinese RMB grow, stable coins represent a similar opportunity. Again, massive opportunity and eco I think is well positioned. But first, we must ensure that stable coin infrastructure makes the on-chain user experience as easy as possible, streamlining challenges like on-chain setup and app usage and simplifying the transaction experience into a single click. We'd love to hear more of your thoughts on that. I mean, it sounds amazing. And if I were an app developer, that is a clear pain point. know, transacting between applications. And I think in this new world that we're experiencing, we're going to be seeing agents, you know, transacting with each other as well as with other humans and how eco could could play a part in that future world. That whole intention or that whole statement was really focused on, this problem isn't so much the applications. mean, there's also problems there or kind of opportunities there, of course, but we got to start from the pipes before we start to figure out how to remodel the living room and kind of finish the roof and all that. And I think with blockchain, we got ahead of ourselves a little bit. Because we were like, oh great, we have Ethereum, super this world computer will just build on it. And then everything else will sort itself out. And what we realized when you actually talk to developers and not so much the retail side, cause they don't really see this stuff is, there's so much complexity when it comes to building with any type of smart contract language. And there are decisions that were made in 2015 that. Hinder growth in 2024. Um, and there's decisions that. were also made subsequently along the way every single year, every single month since then. And so I think the call to action with this statement was, Hey, as simple as it is, when you say it out loud, it's really the infrastructure that needs to be addressed first for then the house to be able to scale out effectively or the engine has to be rebuilt before the car is able to be performing again. It's like the electric car, right? need a, you need the mechanics for, for, for. the electric car to work before you actually put the bells and whistles on. And the interesting point about this post actually was I was initially trying to answer the question, why stable coins? Like why are stable coins extremely important for us as humans and people of the world? And I started to look at the history of money because one thing that also is true is the cycles and kind of the Ray Dalio mentality of just our existence, is very true. Like there are, in railroads, for example, there are like basically scams, shitcoins, ICOs for railroads, which is fascinating to read into. You can say the same thing about money. And you look at the reason why the US dollar got propped up was because you had fragmentation in the colonies and there wasn't a single asset and you had barter and all this stuff. Same thing with the Rememby. You had a lot of rival regions in China and there wasn't a unified asset. And what was the reason for both being issued? Well, there's a lot of reasons, but one umbrella category is efficiency. And then when people really issued it, well, that's not really where the boom came from. The boom came from when the infrastructure started to become much more efficient, where the digital age came in and brought in much more efficient systems where you can actually now finally have it accessible on the internet or mobile phone subsequently. Same thing with when you think about T plus two settlement that got a little bit more efficient when you had messaging protocols, if you will, like Swift or, or, uh, I think China has their own version. forgot what the name was. Um, but you have all these kinds of like adaptations or, or, upgrades rather of the infrastructure. And it's obviously not directly correlated to a T, but you can start to see growth. And then people started to build on top of it. Applications started to use that. Then middleware started to get in to kind of optimize that infrastructure a little bit. Like Plaid is an example I use all the time when I describe Eco. And so again, it's really just about let's build this from the ground up. And then I think it'll be. even more of a massive opportunity because the rest of the innovation, like with other innovation cycles, can kind of fall into place more appropriately and then scale out the asset classes potentially even more. That's great. I'm really, really optimistic with what you guys are doing. You're, think, in a very interesting space. It's growing, and it's clear that there's product market fit. What can you tell the audience about the community, how they can join and be part of the eco journey? Yeah, I'm going to split it up into two. So if you're not a developer and you're just interested in learning about this or maybe having an application use this because you're frustrated with the not being able to use that application and you have a bunch of stable coins, I think Twitter is probably the best bet for now. EECO at EECO at ECO. You could also look at the website, I think is like fall back just for a little bit more information, just to follow along. There's also a newsletter there, just so you get updates through your email. Just simply put, think those are kind of the venues that make most sense for now. On the other side for developers, you're catching us right as we're trying to start this effort, but we really want to build that ecosystem like you said. I think the venue that we've used in the interim was Discord, but I think longer term we want to have a really vibrant technical audience, technical community. Not just with eco, but just more broadly stable coins or even broadly interoperability or broadly broadly on chain infrastructure, uh, within our forum and forum.eco.com. think actually, let me just, uh, or no, it's a forum.eco. yeah, that's right. Forum.eco.com is the website. We're going to be putting much more technical content out there for eco. We're also going to put non eco technical content there as well, just for. just to start that conversation. So if your developer hop in there, chat with us, we're trying to be as active as possible, you'll catch us there. And then stay tuned. Otherwise, we have a lot that's coming out in the next quarter or so, and then lot more after that. And as always, think what I'll leave everybody off with is if you're interested in connecting with me, I'm on Twitter as well, prettyactive at jayks. Awesome. One more question before we get off that I just thought about as you're describing applications. As you're looking for target applications that you want to, that EECO wants to partner with, are there specific verticals that you're looking to focus on first and or existing applications from other chains? We'd love to hear your thoughts on that. We're pretty broad right now, probably because we haven't really gotten too deep in that, which sub-segment is probably the most vibrant for us. But I think my intuition goes towards early stage applications, mid-stage maybe, who want to be as competitive as kind of the top dogs in the industry and wants to be able to get more users as quickly as possible. Well, if you integrate eco once it's live, you'll be able to accept stable coins from any blockchain and you don't have to worry about again, redeploying your application and managing liquidity over multiple networks. And then also bridging those two, you can just actually have this integration within your user flow. And that solves hopefully most of your problems within the assets of stable. So this is very much a bet on stable coins, but that's not to say that that's where we stop. You can also theoretically scale this system to other unlike assets. But for now, think the focus helps and as selfishly as a marketer, the focus helps as well. So I can actually sell the dream a little bit better. I think once other tokens start to come in, it gets a little bit complex. And right now, the scope is contained somewhat. Makes sense. Okay, we'll leave it off there. Jay, thank you so much. And I'll share in the show notes all of the links to help get the word out for Eco Protocol. Amazing. Thanks so much for the conversation. Thank you.