In this episode we welcome James Ross, the founder of Mode Network and former co-CEO of Hype. James shares his journey from the London FinTech scene to the world of blockchain, with a focus on DeFi that was ignited by experiences with regulation hurdles. His unique blend of traditional go-to-market strategies and on-chain data analysis brings a fresh approach to Web3 marketing.
James recounts the evolution of Hype, a leading Web3 marketing agency, which scaled from a team of 30 to 180 during the bull market. The discussion explores the distinct strategies that set Hype apart from its Web2 counterparts. You'll get a glimpse of the workings of a Web3 marketing agency, from innovative hiring practices to resource allocation during market shifts. James' insights into these strategies are sure to be a valuable lesson for marketing enthusiasts and budding entrepreneurs alike.
The conversation then shifts to Mode Network's focus on incentivizing developers and aligning incentives to share the network's success with users. James delves into the security challenges and strategies employed to encourage growth, the potential of meme coins and NFTs on Mode, and the implementation of a referral network within the protocol. This insightful discussion offers a unique perspective on the evolution and future of Web3, making it a valuable listen for anyone intrigued by DeFi and blockchain technology.
In this episode we welcome James Ross, the founder of Mode Network and former co-CEO of Hype. James shares his journey from the London FinTech scene to the world of blockchain, with a focus on DeFi that was ignited by experiences with regulation hurdles. His unique blend of traditional go-to-market strategies and on-chain data analysis brings a fresh approach to Web3 marketing.
James recounts the evolution of Hype, a leading Web3 marketing agency, which scaled from a team of 30 to 180 during the bull market. The discussion explores the distinct strategies that set Hype apart from its Web2 counterparts. You'll get a glimpse of the workings of a Web3 marketing agency, from innovative hiring practices to resource allocation during market shifts. James' insights into these strategies are sure to be a valuable lesson for marketing enthusiasts and budding entrepreneurs alike.
The conversation then shifts to Mode Network's focus on incentivizing developers and aligning incentives to share the network's success with users. James delves into the security challenges and strategies employed to encourage growth, the potential of meme coins and NFTs on Mode, and the implementation of a referral network within the protocol. This insightful discussion offers a unique perspective on the evolution and future of Web3, making it a valuable listen for anyone intrigued by DeFi and blockchain technology.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Crescendo Go To Market podcast, and in today's episode we have James Ross. He's the founder of Mode Network. He also was co-CEO of Hype, which is probably one of the biggest Web3 marketing agencies out there. So, james, why don't you give us a quick intro as to what you're up to and a brief intro to your roles in Web3.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here and I can kick off by telling you a little bit about my background. So the start of my career I worked in FinTech in London, worked for a number of different companies and had some success there and then, in around 2016-17, got into crypto Ethereum via Reddit I think I was reading a load of posts from Rune, from Maker, a load of posts from Vitalik. I studied economics so I was quite interested in economic theory. I had started seeing some stuff around blockchain and, yeah, basically it was like, oh my god, these are the smartest people I've ever come across, especially Vitalik. So that kind of hooked me in and I started buying Ethereum in 2017 and started participating in various ICOs for financial applications and started investing via Ethereum token sales and I think I made around 50 angel investments so far in the space and I've been focused on working with DeFi applications through like 2019-2020.
Speaker 2:Then I started up a small consultancy to work on go-to-market strategy for DeFi teams. I sold this to Hype and joined Jake, the founder of Hype, to grow that out, and at the time I was there, hype grew from around 40 people to 150. And we worked with a lot of leading layer 1s, layer 2s on their growth ecosystem and more general go-to-market strategies. So that was a really exciting time. I think we're one of the first groups to be running like multi-million dollar marketing campaigns for protocols, which was really exciting. And yeah, I left Hype a few months back to focus in on mode, which is an OP stack, layer 2. It's like the on-chain cooperative. We're using a lot of game theory. We're using a lot of product knowledge that we built up over the years to essentially develop an L2, which is very focused on helping applications and developers grow the ecosystem and it's also focused on users kind of in friendly competition, growing the chain together. So yeah, I'm sure we can dig into that a little bit more later on.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting. And when you were working finance, what kind of roles were you working in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so originally I went into an investment banking grad scheme and I lasted I think like five and a half months. It was pretty tough. It wasn't really for me. Then I went to work for a startup bank and focused on finance for kids. So it was giving kids between the age of I think like eight and 12 bank cards for the first time in a restricted way. So kids kind of learned about using digital money, not crypto like digital money, just like using bank cards and stuff. It was fun. It was a pretty successful start. It ended up selling to one of the large banks in the UK.
Speaker 1:Awesome, and I guess the reason you got really very attracted by crypto and Ethereum originally did the finance background have a lot to do with that, or what was the reason that originally attracted you to the space?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was working on a project in 2015, 16, with some friends where we were building out savings accounts and the idea was that these savings accounts would move your money to different savings accounts around the world and optimize interest rates for you. We were pretty naive at the time and, yeah, we kind of, and it was going quite well. The MVP was built pretty solidly. Things were looking quite good. We looked to try and get it regulated and saw that the path for us as a group of guys in our early 20s was actually going to be very difficult to get this properly regulated. So at that time we were also looking at other ways we could build interesting fintech applications. It was a real wave of really interesting fintech stuff being built. At that time, revolute was just gaining traction in the UK, monzo another challenger bank so yeah, that kind of led me and the team into crypto. Some of the team carried on building out that financial application and I went and focused in on crypto.
Speaker 1:That is so interesting. So basically, we're trying to build out Trap5 products and realize that you essentially wanted to build a yield product and realize it's a pain in the real world. So, that's kind of what attracted you to D5.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, we were doing some kind of like yeah, I guess it's like gray area stuff. In our MVP, we signed into people's bank accounts for them using like different bots. So we had built a load of different bots which would essentially sign into people's banks and move their money around to different accounts for them. You know, it's like a test and when we showed this to, yeah, the kind of regulators and the experts in the fintech world, they were pretty, pretty alarmed by how we were kind of getting around the rules. So maybe it was a good idea that, yeah, that was just a test product, just an experiment, and, yeah, the rest of the team went on to build some really interesting products that loaded like banking data and used a lot of the new banking APIs that emerged.
Speaker 1:That is awesome. And how did you get involved with basically, hype and Web3 marketing, because you started out with building products, with investment banking and building products, and then how did you get more into the go to market side of things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was always more on the marketing side and the business side of the projects I worked on. I did a little bit of product stuff but yeah, I was mainly focused on business and go to market. And yeah, after spending a lot of time, you know investing in crypto teams, I saw that there was a huge gap with you know, the knowledge around go to market. I also saw that, like marketing Web3 crypto products is very different, requires a different understanding of the marketing landscape. There are different metrics, there are different KPIs. The fact that things are community driven also changes the way you market crypto products. So, yeah, I started to.
Speaker 2:As I invested more, I saw more and more teams needing help and so I started to get involved and then set up a small consultancy. Part of the consultancy was looking at managing different positions. So we're doing data analysis on different yield farms to understand when would be an optimal time to join a yield farm, when would be an optimal time to leave. Looking at the different people that had LP positions, looking at that on-chain data, trying to understand what their behaviour will be. Would they, if the asset drops 10%? How likely is it that they'll leave the yield farm like pull their liquidity. If it increases 10%, how likely is it that they'll leave? Have they voted in governance in the past? Do they use tokens in the way they're intended, or are they more financially motivated? So, yeah, I started doing a lot of this and then got quite deep into that, but yeah, at the same time was working with a lot of protocols on just giving them ideas, things that might work, and yeah, started taking our clients on this go-to-market side of things.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So it's basically a mix of you know. You're obviously doing the traditional go-to-market in terms of what's the message, et cetera, but then you're also looking at the on-chain data to really figure out okay, what are my customers like, what are they responding to and how can we really make this kind of work right? Because I kind of feel like in crypto, go-to-market isn't just like, it isn't just marketing, it's product, it's everything, it's the incentives that you have. So you kind of combine everything into one essentially approach.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. And yet, maybe just to mention as well, there was like a period in early 2020, I think it was where I met a guy called Rick Burton who was working on a wallet called Balance. It was one of the first DeFi wallets. I went with him to Stanford Blockchain Conference. Defi was just becoming like a term. So I remember people were complaining, they were arguing about whether it should be called DeFi or Open Finance. There was like a big debate and they had, like you know, you had like people from DYDX, compound Dharma, which was a wallet and savings product, all arguing about whether it should be called DeFi or Open Finance.
Speaker 2:And yeah, from here I went to work with this guy, rick, for I think a couple of months on his DeFi product balance. The market was super small, but that kind of really got me interested in like the potential of DeFi. I think about this time it's about $150. It was pretty low and yeah, I felt like I was kind of one of the only marketing people left in the industry. A lot of people left and yeah, it was a weird time, but yeah, that's when I really got the bug for like helping teams out.
Speaker 1:Got it and how did that end up into you basically joining Hype. What did that journey look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I've been running this consultancy called Agency X and I'd actually met Jake, the founder of Hype in Berlin. He was living in Berlin and I was visiting Berlin and we went for a coffee. We realized we'd kind of been trying to solve the same problems. We'd both been working with some similar teams as well. Then a mutual friend of ours was launching a new options protocol product and, yeah, we both worked on the campaign together, like my consultancy and Jake's team. I was very impressed with them and, yeah, we worked on a couple more projects. Then Jake had another startup that he'd built up in the bear market called Port, which was focused on developer tooling and that was being acquired and yeah, so Jake went to work on Port and, yeah, I came in to kind of help grow Hype as the bull market was kicking off and in full swing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good time to get into it, and I guess at that point, how big was the Hype team when you joined them?
Speaker 2:I think it was around 30 to 40 people yeah.
Speaker 1:And how big was it? Maybe during the bull market?
Speaker 2:I think we got up to like 170 people, maybe 180. I don't really remember the exact numbers. But like I spent, I mean, I would say, 60% of the time on hiring during that period, we were taking on a lot of large clients and, yeah, we were really aggressively hiring, so much to the point that we acquired a recruitment agency Because we realized we were spending all our time hiring. So we should probably just acquire a recruitment agency to help us with that.
Speaker 1:Wow, that is crazy. And what are the biggest lessons you learned while hyper scaling that fast? Because that is extremely aggressive growth, especially for a marketing agency, and I'm curious what your experiences were with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think there are a couple of things that are unique about hiring. Everyone's always saying, wow, there's so many people, what are they all doing? And it is kind of like makes sense, what are they all doing? And the answer to that is that marketing agencies are pretty resource intensive, right Agencies? In general, they're mainly a function of people's time, so you're charging out services based on the people you're using and the time they're putting into various tasks and, for example, with a server-side community management, it's extremely resource intensive. If you're managing 30, 40, 50 different communities at one time, you need a very big team to be able to do eight hour shifts and cover all those communities and be really on hand, and there isn't really a way to get around that. A lot of people said why don't you use AI? Why don't you use automation? Blah, blah, blah. But when you're expected to give like a super high level of service, you have to have a well-trained team. You have to have someone on hand at all times. So we know, like crypto is 24-7. If something goes wrong in the middle of the night, then there needs to be someone there who's experienced enough to handle the situation. So, yeah, a large amount of the team was on the community side, and then we also had, yeah, a significant amount running across all the different resources.
Speaker 2:We built up a big creative arm. So that was one thing that me and Jake discussed before I joined was that now is the kind of time to bring these big brand, I guess experiences or big brand campaigns to crypto. And we brought on a really amazing creative director called Lee and started to expand the creative team quite aggressively and started to do, yeah, a lot more video and motion. You know stuff that you would see big creative agencies in New York and London doing for brands like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. So we started to do that and, yeah, there was a huge appetite for that in the market at the time and we were competing against these Web2 agencies for these projects and we were often winning because, you know, the founders could talk to us about DeFi and say, hey, we're launching a DeFi fund with these seven you know projects and we'd be able to. We'd probably have a pre-existing relationship with everyone you know that was working together on this. We'd understand the technicalities. We'd understand the different language we need to use. We'd understand restrictions around ways, things we can't say, things we can. So that was a pretty big advantage.
Speaker 2:And I think, yeah, scaling out an agency is very much focused on how you scale your services and the structure of your teams. So you can scale like one service and really try and like be the best of community, or you can scale like the best creative and you can try and be the best of creative. But often when you're working with crypto teams, you need to have a range of services you can provide them, because marketing is quite a holistic thing. Like all teams need to talk to each other and work together to push like the project forward in general. And you know most campaigns we run would have a social element. They would have. So you need like to be good at have someone who's great at Twitter. You need to have a creative element for, like a campaign, you need to have a community element.
Speaker 2:So we had great heads of departments for all those different services and then they were tasked to like grow out their teams. So you know, as work was coming in, we would maybe say to the creative team hey, we have three or four huge projects they're like in the pipeline, so it makes sense for you to start, you know, hiring some more creative directors, and then you know the head of creative would go it's just a game of resource allocation and that's. Yeah, that can be pretty tough, but when the market is, you know, growing, it's much easier to hire people and, you know, give them work and make sure that everyone's got enough work. Then, when the market is obviously moving the other direction and you have to, like, you have to manage resources the other way, that's a much more tough job.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, I agree 100%. It's like that aspect of scaling an agency is that you kind of have to. You're balancing, you know, the side of getting sales and also improving ops and hiring people at the same time. And it's like this balancing act and I guess, like the way you guys did, it is because you had these department heads who are all very, very good. They could hire their own people. So you, as the CEO, you're probably able to be just like, okay, we need more resources here, and then they go off and basically build out that team.
Speaker 1:And I think that's a really strong approach to scaling an agency, because you know, if you're just one person trying to hire everybody for different services, it's very difficult. But also you have to be at a certain point, right like, you can't hire those type of people until you're at a certain amount of revenue, so it's almost takes a lot of time to get to that point. But yeah, that's all like extremely impressive. So, to follow on from that right like so it sounds like with hype you guys had a huge amount of success, something that you know you probably are the best at. And, as as time went on, right, why did you decide to go check like, basically check out different business models and eventually settle on mode and what is mode?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, over the years I spent a lot of time with founders of L ones and L twos helping them build out the ecosystem, thinking about different strategies to get developers to build on, like, build out applications, different yeah, different kind of approaches to how to build our community, to support our ecosystem, how to build our user base. And I started to get more and more interested in thinking about what, what's missing, where, where it gaps in building our ecosystem, and I started to see that like a big issue was around resource allocation. And you know the best, the best L ones out twos, or the fastest growing that I've seen in this market, have been the ones that have been like super aggressive with BD and developer acquisition. Two good examples of that would be like Salana. On the developer acquisition side, they were running huge events, hackathons, being really aggressive at getting developers funded to build on Salana, and then you look at a project like Polygon. On the BD side, their team is really excellent. They've been very aggressive at making sure that they can strike big deals and bring significant, significant brands from the crypto world and the non crypto world now to their blockchain to essentially fuel growth. So I've been thinking about that a lot.
Speaker 2:I was thinking about that a lot. I was speaking to a friend, jimmy, who's a founder of ocean, and we were sketching out different ways that you know, you can incentivize developers. And we were looking at the way that L twos essentially make a lot of revenue from sequence of fees and thought about how, you know, sharing that revenue with developers could be a great tool and a great feature of a chain to, yeah, bring, bring more developers to the ecosystem with these incentives. I also looked at like what can to have done Archway phantom I wrote a piece about that on my blog that it's a really cool growth hack to essentially have continuous cycle funding developers. And then also we looked at like what have been the most successful user acquisition channels in crypto, and referral networks have definitely been one of the most successful, and so thought about how to build that into a ecosystem as well into a protocol.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, mode is essentially an OPS stack L two that's designed to grow. It's kind of vague, but like it's designed with this model that all developers can deploy and they'll start earning revenue and users can refer others to the chain and they'll start earning revenue. And it's essentially like how can we align incentives so that if you grow mode you'll earn a share of the success of mode. And yeah, we currently on public test net. We've been on test net for around, I think, two and a half months, nearly three months, and we are going to be launching main net soon TM, but in November.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's such a new and unique approach and I find it refreshing because, like you said, a lot of L ones and L twos they don't really seem to understand growth, or they seem to understand growth for certain applications but not for other applications. Like I have noticed that a lot of the new L twos that are popping up or the new L ones that are like very, very technical, they all say that hey, we want to bring on gaming studios, but I haven't heard a single single gaming studio founder actually talk about those chains, because they just don't know how to speak to those game developers. They kind of think that they're speaking to defy developers who are much more technical, while the average game studio developers, you know, basically understands blockchain at the level that maybe a retail investor does. Right, like they're not. They want to build games. They don't necessarily want to be PhDs and cryptography. So I agree there's a huge problem with how a lot of these new chains and ecosystems are acquiring developers, or at least the developers they claim they want to acquire.
Speaker 1:And this is probably the first approach I've seen where, from first principles on the protocol level, you literally are incentivizing growth. So question for you so let's say you know you recently had bad on base meme coin that absolutely took off. What if bad released on on mode right, like if there's a meme coin and there's like a meme NFT collection, whatever, and just results in a huge amount of network activity, does that app gain? You know, basically a large portion of sequence sequencer fees. How does that work? And I'm just curious how you, how you think about that in terms of the cinematic, like things that happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that. So the hardest thing obviously with a new network is bootstrapping it, and memes can be like meme coins can be a pretty effective way to bootstrap base. Saw this when they had the bold token launch and everyone rushed to bridge to buy this new bold meme token. So yeah, in this case sequence of fees would be shared with the person who deploys the smart contracts of the token, but also like the exchanges, so if people are exchanging through one of the exchanges on mode, the exchange will earn the sequence of fees or share the sequence of fees from that transaction.
Speaker 1:Interesting and how does the referral aspect work? So if you refer developers or you refer users, or how exactly does the referral portion of this function?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the referral network works via links to the bridge. So if I sent you my link and you click through to the bridge, you bridge some funds over to mode, some ETH, and you start using mode, I will get a proportion of all your transaction fees for forever. So we're also thinking of this as a retention tool, because, you know, if I send out my link and a load of people bridge to mode, I'm going to be earning some fees. It might not be significant, right, but the fees are in ETH, which is quite cool. We know ETH is looks like it's going to be growing significantly over the next few years, hopefully. So I mean, as a user, I want to check back, I want to, you know, see if I've earned fees. So it creates quite a nice retention loop that I'm not sure many other chains have.
Speaker 2:And this is something that we really want to achieve with mode is that we want mode to be like a destination. We want mode to be a place like that you can come here of like what you're doing on the network as a user. You can see how you know you're, you know, showing your link has actually helped grow the network. You can see what kind of traction you've been driving. I think that's really cool. Then on the developer side, you could the same like as a developer. You can see your smart contracts from your dashboard. You can see how much. You know how many fees have run through those. I think that's really cool as well.
Speaker 1:Awesome and I guess like, let's get to the tech stack. You guys are building on the OP stack. What was the reason behind that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the OP stack is pretty interesting. So I've been speaking to the optimism team for a while and, to be honest, the OP stack from my perspective is the most production ready stack to use. So base is obviously using OP stack and you know that's technical to cool. Team is amazing. We've seen quite a lot of other chains pick up on OP stack and so, yeah, for us we looked at like other possibilities and the OP stack, yeah, made the most sense because we can quickly move something to production. Now we were. We've been building out the products for mode for three months now and we're ready to go to mainnet.
Speaker 1:Got it and in one of your presentations that I saw recently, you mentioned that mode is the Shopify of L2s. Could you tell us why?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're trying to. We're trying to position mode as, like a Shopify approach to growth versus a AWS approach to growth. Aws is obviously extremely successful, but they are, you know, a service for developers to use, and the way they, you know, do that is by giving developers, like, the basic tools to get everything spun up very quickly. And then AWS doesn't really help much more than that, but it does, you know, web services extremely well and other functions, trying to give the entrepreneur everything they need to be successful.
Speaker 2:So there have been stores that have built on Shopify that ended up IPOing, and Shopify's approach is how can we make it as easy as possible for an entrepreneur to build out a business which is going to go public? Well, how can they build out a store which is going to get the most revenue? So that's meant that Shopify's decisions around that haven't necessarily been focused on being like the best store builder it's. They've been focused on how can we make this the most useful platform For store owners. So they've added, like they spent a lot of time with how they think about payment processing. They spent a lot of time with how they think about Integrating marketing tools.
Speaker 2:So you know, if you run a shop. You can quickly start running Facebook ads with a few clicks of a button, and that's how we want to think about mode most dashboards for developers. We want them to be able to deploy the applications quickly but then have a lot of support with all the other tasks which developers find difficult, right? So back office tasks are pretty complex in crypto, so we're working with doubt tooling startups like hedgy. Then growth and analytics is pretty difficult as well, so we're going to be integrating tools like spindle Safari, hype lab for Advertising, so developers will be very quickly able to, you know, get up and launch campaigns growth campaigns as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is interesting because I think where Shopify did really well is it started out as a solution for essentially small to medium-sized businesses, right, anybody who wanted to get into e-commerce but necessarily didn't have a huge team to just build up a custom web store right. And because of that they were able to grow so rapidly. And, yeah, they're probably those Enterprise stores which initially did not really. You know, they built their own solutions. But even now you look at Shopify and there's a lot of enterprise customers that use Shopify plus and I think this is a great analogy, especially if you just make it easy for devs to, you know, build out products quickly and Just get them spun up and be able to really rapidly iterate an experiment.
Speaker 1:I'm curious if what you think about. So one of the big issues I see in web 3 is that Security is like this really slow process where you have to go through multiple audits and they take like a couple months and then they come back to you with a bunch of fixes and you fix them, get another audit. I think that's one of the big roadblocks is do you have any thoughts on how that could be accelerated or improved? I?
Speaker 2:Think that, yeah, there's. You know, security is a huge, a huge importance to every project and yeah, unfortunately, there aren't really any shortcuts there. We can look at different kind of monitoring systems. We can look at having close Relationships with certain auditors to support projects that come and build on mode, like we'll be able to get them audits done quickly. But yeah, there's really no, no easy solution and yeah, it's something we have to take extremely seriously. We can always, you know, support projects that want to run on test net, so there's not real money at stake. Maybe they want to test like a game and we would say let's do an experiment on test net and, you know, maybe someone's going to try and break it there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is difficult because things in production, obviously when the stakes are higher than incentives are higher as well. So it's a it's a difficult problem to solve. Right now. We're, yeah, we're working with different auditing firms, you know, form partnerships so we can support projects that want to deploy to mode with grants for security audits. But yeah, unfortunately, right now there's no easy solution to that and yeah, we have to just encourage teams to take security Extremely seriously and support them as in any ways we can.
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah, that's definitely one of the the key things where I think there's definitely gonna be a lot of innovation in the next couple years in terms of security, tooling and whole process around that. So we'll be interesting to see how that turns out. And yeah, how do you see, with this new revenue share model right, how do you see it affecting, like developer incentives and how they approach building a new project?
Speaker 2:Developer incentives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in terms of the revenue share model. How do you see that as compared to like traditional grants?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think it needs to run in combination. So you know we, if you're a developer and you deploy, deploy contracts to mode and people start using those contracts, you'll start earning fees. I'm not sure if those are gonna be crazy high to start with. You know, it might be a couple hundred dollars a month, it might be a couple thousand dollars. We're not quite sure yet. That's like to be seen, but this is like a great proxy for us to give further rewards and further grants.
Speaker 2:If we see a developer team deploys to mode and they're starting to get some initial traction, they'll start earning fees and you know, we can potentially look at how we can support them to scale that further. The key thing we wanted to do with fees is give developers a way to start earning immediately, because a lot of feedback we got from devs was that some of the grant processes are really really hard to go through and Developers are kind of bored. But they don't want to apply for 10 different grant schemes across 10 different chains. They want a quick way to start trying to earn and yeah, so this is kind of our solution to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah that makes sense, but will you guys still be doing grants as well, or would it just be the revenue share?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we will be doing grants and, but we'll be focusing these on growth. So the grants will be between 10 and 25k and we expect the teams to be spending this on yeah, growth campaigns for launching, on mode.
Speaker 1:Got it, got it. That makes sense. Actually, I can see that. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense and and Sorry, and one really interesting question that I have is how do you view bots in the ecosystem? Do you see them being a major issue, since you're sharing Sequencer revenue and other growth and referral incentives, like you know? Do you see people like basically referring fake wallets or referring bots or bot networks?
Speaker 2:and yeah, just curious about that so it's kind of like, as it stand, it's pretty civil proof because you know You'd be paying a dollar in fees to get like 20 cents back right in fees. So If you had like a big bot network you wouldn't be earning money. But potentially if we add further rewards or further incentives on top, then yeah, I think there definitely could be a risk of people trying to civil it. We've got a few different ideas for how we can reduce like the attack factor there. But yeah, it's a very hard problem right now for developers with sequencer fees. We're probably gonna kick off with a whitelist so we have like a no hundred or two hundred applications they're a whitelisted to yeah, receive sequencer fees. We also might just open up to everyone. We're not quite sure on that yet, but we're testing that the moment on testnet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that totally makes sense, Especially what you said about you know if, if people refer each other, they only earn a percentage, that ends up being a net sum for the ecosystem. Very, very interesting. And yeah, james. So I'm curious when can people find out more about mode and building on mode? And are you guys also, you know, is there any opportunities for VCs to get involved or Community members to get involved? Just curious how different people can reach out and learn more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm Jay Ross, treacher on Twitter, and Our Twitter for mode is just mode network. You can feel free to DM me if you're yet keen to hear more about about what we're building or want to be involved in any way. And, yeah, if you're wanting to get involved with the community, then yeah, I'd encourage you to check out the mode Twitter. We often have like campaigns running that people can get involved with. We're running a load of growth experiments. We're trying to get creative. We're about to kick off an experiment on friend tech, so that could be quite interesting for people who want to get involved. So, yeah, awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds interesting. So thanks for coming on to the podcast and, yeah, best of luck with the launch of mode and really looking forward to seeing what you guys do in the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Really appreciate the opportunity to chat to everyone here. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and everyone. If you are listening on Spotify or Apple or wherever, give us a rating and if you're on YouTube, give us a subscribe. And Looking forward to the next podcast, cheers.