Mode: OP Stack for Hypergrowth - James Ross | Superhack Summit

foreign [Music] we're going to be welcoming James for everybody who's not aware mode just went live uh in the last week or so so this is uh op stack hot off the presses um so we're really excited to have James join us in just a minute here um to chat about the work that they're doing at mode um so we've got James here so I'll add them into the chat uh but yeah welcome James back to chat about uh mode and and the work that you guys are doing uh on the op staff with them pleasure how's it going everyone going well awesome add it off to you perfect so yeah thanks for having me I'm James I'm the founder of mode and I'm going to tell you a little bit about mode I'm sure some of you already been hacking on it which is awesome um yeah we can get a little bit deeper into it today so mode has no P stack L2 designed for hyper growth what does that mean that means that we're trying to design a blockchain ecosystem that directly rewards users developers and protocols the great Network sorry there's typo there um it's built an OP stack for easy application development there's growth mechanics implemented the protocol and product level going to go through that uh Network sequencer profit distribution as well through contract secured Revenue which I'm going to explain it's been launched by a team of growth experts um who have built some of the largest blockchain communities and ecosystems and in the past so let's go so mode is kind of found on the principle that right now block space is very much commoditized um there is essentially a lot of blog space and there isn't enough applications um there isn't enough growth in the application and user layer to fill that blog space so for the average person um using a blockchain or using an L2 especially it works quite well okay fees could be lower there are certain optimizations that should happen but it works quite well um so the real challenge now is not in incremental Tech improvements it's in building ecosystems that have deep liquidity clear incentives for developers and applications and can bring applications that have product Market fit and a growing user base what we've seen are noticed that a lot of ecosystems um have launched recently they've done a very good job of Building Technology but they haven't effectively allocated resources to solve the challenges that need to help l2's and ethereum scale um so that's what we're trying to focus on how do we design a blockchain an ecosystem that helps yeah helps everything grow and that do and grow so yeah as mentioned Mode's been designed by a team responsible for bringing thousands of developers millions of users to web 3 and kind of three of the key elements of mode of three of the key things uh that we're focusing on mode is efficient incentives resource allocation integrated growth tooling to scale apps and enabling developers success so let's dig into those so right now um l2s are earning considerable profits um I tweeted this out I think yesterday or the day before and we've got quite a few views quite a lot of discussion um it's the profits from July from arbitrim optimism ZK sync so you can see that they're all pretty profitable um the profits come from the network sequencer which takes transactions rolls them up and sends them to the L1 about half of the transaction fee maybe 60 percent that you pay on arbitrimp optimism um is going to the L1 gas costs and the other half is Network profit so these profits currently um go to different places uh for decentralized networks they usually go to the Dow um for projects which are backed by companies they'll go to uh the company that's running the sequencer um one corporate display mode is that we believe that sequence of fees or sequence of profits should be distributed to those who grow the network especially the developers that grow the network and we think they should directly be distributed not through a dow and not through a company the reason is I know a lot of people have probably applied for Grants from Dallas um it can be sometimes they work well and they're very effective at allocating resources sometimes governance can be slow cumbersome it can take a long time to um get paid out or get uh get resources to build and then centralized companies it's often not the best idea that you know we're completely relying on centralized companies holding large amounts of money so let's dig into contract secured Revenue so contract secure Revenue enables mode to share profits with Developers developers that build on mode will own a proportion of transaction fees from the contracts they deploy and this is done by a CSR module which we based on kanto's designs Kanto was the first blockchain to really take contract secure Revenue seriously with the founder of Scott Lewis and has like the inventor contract secure Revenue we think it's awesome um and we want sequence of profits to go straight to developers and the percentage of sequence of profits that will go to Developers is going to be decided by the mode growth Council which is type of delegated governance Council and sequence of profits that does get will be paid in if they'll be claimable each week um and we're experimenting with different ways for developers to be able to claim sequence of profits um one of them is by holding nfts and basically a signing contracts those nfts um there's a few other things we're playing around with this is going to launch on mainnet and the real reason why we believe contract secure revenue is going to be an awesome Innovation for the blog change theorem how to ecosystem is it makes building predictable if you have um if you deploy an application you have a hundred users and you earn 100 that's great because you know that if you can scale um your application 10x or 100x you earn 10 times or 100 times more profit from the sequencer so that's kind of cool and that enables developers to make Forward Thinking decisions enables them to invest more and that's where we think it's going to be a nice feedback loop for developers building a mode um so yeah at the end of the day developers will get directly rewarded for growing the Network online foreign looking at is how can we have an integrated uh growth tooling Suite um to scale applications so in web 2 it's become pretty common that Developers will deploy to certain amount of sun ecosystems sorry certain platforms and they'll be like a suite of tools so when you deploy like a known app to I still the Apple store they're like hundreds and hundreds of really great tools you can integrate and to get insights uh for example you can plug in advertising through Facebook and you can do direct app downloads and you can get your first 10 000 out downloads pretty quickly you can use HubSpot for sales you can use Google analytics there's loads of stuff that enables developers to scale the applications very quickly and we want to try and take that approach with mode so over the last say 12 months let's say yeah two two years 12 months there have been a load of um apps that have basically emerged um that help projects grow so I you can't really see the slide I think it might be quite small but their spindle there's Guild there's 3rm there's galaxy there's addressable these are all apps or like plugins tools services that um applications can use to help grow so for example spindle is a web free Analytics tool it helps developers understand their users I'm an attribute certain actions to wallets so you might run a campaign on Twitter you can see that a load of people if you're using spindle you can see that a load of people have come from that Twitter campaign and the posited or started trading on your exchange you're probably going to do more Twitter stuff um Galaxy helps you scale communities guilds as an awesome tool to essentially help like reward communities for certain out chains and addressable is a web free advertising tool that helps you advertise to people that have wallets so the example and like what we're kind of basing our platform strategy on is Shopify so Shopify was awesome but it wasn't the most awesome um in store Builder it was pretty good but there were other better options and it also wasn't the first but Shopify really focused on how to build a platform for people to grow their store it was bringing in a lot of different Services applications that helped stores grow and kind of do all the manual back of this stuff into that into that platform via their own app store and yeah it was really impressive of just building a platform for shop homeless to become successful entrepreneurs with many of those entrepreneurs grounds built businesses which IPO and essentially that's the goal of any blockchain is to have successful applications on it that will scale and yeah maybe become bigger than the blockchain itself or at least yeah Vine user numbers um start to really grow next slides so yeah part of that um platform approaches to enable developer success and yeah for mode this means we want every developer who builds a modes succeed recurring revenue from contract secure Revenue as a part of that on every developer to be paid proportionally to how much they grow the network we can have this developer dashboard which should help who developers understand more about their applications and about their users um we're going to be giving away grants from ten thousand to a hundred thousand for marketing and growth support and we want to support projects that launch on mode and also want to launch across the super chain ecosystem so we're happy to support anyone um if you plan to launch on mode and everywhere else as well So currently we are in public test net um we'll be in public test now for probably four to six more weeks and uh where are they so there's lots of opportunity we've built some projects internally ourselves Bridge mm we're working on the dashboard the referral Network and the contracts care Revenue module projects were looking to support include Bridges dexes with like cool kind of animations amm style decks especially lending protocols some experimental defy stuff uh marketplaces nfts nft fi uh I think I think in the science spell it's like nft D5 staff I think that's really cool we really like that as a team Unchained games and other fun stuff like AI we want to yeah really help anyone who has cool ideas um and maybe is really talented but doesn't know how to get those ideas out into the world uh that's what we're here to do like we're here to help you get your first hundred thousand and more users um and you grow your project across yeah l2s and across ethereum um so here's a little bit about mode governance this is I think fairly different from what other projects focused on um with Trying to minimize governance as much as possible through the mode dial and the Dow will really focus on a few things and a couple of those are around well a couple of the most important are around the parameters on how much revenue goes to users who refer others to grow the network and how much sequence of fee Revenue goes to Smart contract Developers um that's pretty much yeah mode and it would be cool to uh yeah answer some questions um so yeah Let's uh yeah let's jump in some questions I'm happy to answer them from the uh the chat here or maybe someone's to jump in hey James how you doing car tech I'm doing great thanks so much for after that overview I think we trusting and see a lot of these types of uh kind of being given out and uh tried on the op Stacks though thanks for kind of covering this uh we'll um we have a cup one question from the audience really is likely coming in but to everybody on a live stream if you have any questions just comment in the chat and I'll be able to relate them and ask those questions to teach directly I'll kind of start off with like the one we've already received as you were getting uh which is one kind of common criticism we've seen here is effectively trying to understand like how does this mean uh what does this mean for developers and how they should think about double in contrast because in a way this creates an incentive for you to not write captivation code well Ryan is that is that at odds how do you know kind of square that how do you think about that and uh and so making sure that people are writing good code and not reading lock uses databases yeah so I think like obviously Every Chain is competitive right so if you write if you're if there are two people building the same product and one has high gas fees than the other one people are probably going to use the one with lower gas fees so I think in theory it's a problem but in reality when if you're building an exchange if you have like contracts aren't optimized then someone else is going to build the same exchange with contracts that are optimized and people are going to use that um so I'm not sure how many contracts that haven't been optimized for gas have been successful I don't know but uh yeah yeah well that's fair but I think I guess we're also talking about now like uh difference of like maybe one magnitude rate like somebody might pay with a hyper optimized transactionally cost a tenth of a cent but you can also write an efficient version that costs like one cent and uh to somebody in the US that may not make a difference but uh it could mean a significant portion of someone's spending power if you're in a whole world that does not rely on us to nominator currency so uh the question becomes well yes if this was a Mainland deployment of course uh you can notice that dollar value difference in transaction fees but at the same time uh on on L2 transactions you already have the 10 200x Improvement but it could be that or it could be ten thousand or a thousand X improvements and um I think the question is kind of interesting but uh any other comments we can go into that if not all I'll ask another one um yeah I do think it's super interesting and yeah I'm I'm yeah I think should it make you optimize your contracts to make them competitive yes should it make you spend considerable amount of time to make them completely optimized um yeah I'm not sure yeah apparently and one other question we have is as mode how are you thinking about making it easy for developers to understand what this contract secure Revenue here is like does that mean there's going to be additional libraries or ways to query this on directly on chain or manage or see uh examples of what a good practices how should somebody get a good understanding of what this means yeah so we're building out a developer dashboard right now and that dashboard will give you an insight into the contracts you deploy and the transaction fees that run through and the percent of profits that you'll receive very contracts to curb Revenue um we so Kanto originally came up with an idea to have an nft you can mint an nft you can assign contracts to it um and then that and that nft is actually transferable so you could in theory sell that nft um this is also true for remote uh talking about Kanto but we're playing around with some similar designs right now we're thinking of making the nft non-transferable um and yeah you can you'll be able to get a sign some contracts to that you can uh I don't know decide to donate that each maybe we're trying to make it flexible but um it'll be very visible for developers through an interface oh that's typical how well what happens in a world where uh somebody loses access to their keys or uh if some contracts are not available you want to destroy who they're the private key that as the the ability to uh to upgrade or redeploy and uh how do you kind of think about well how I guess what is a good way of developer to think about these things yeah I think the best way is that you'll be able to assign new contracts to an address so if you have to upgrade a contract you can reassign it if it needs to be reassigned um but yeah and your your address should uh your main address you're using uh should hold an nft which will be where the contracts Revenue will go so you have to obviously keep that extremely safe um that's how to think about it right now awesome um I don't think there's any other questions coming in uh that are not easy to look up uh lookable on on your top speed so I'll leave it at that let's uh other than that I mean if there's anything else that you have uh like I can just maybe think of like one or two questions that I'm curious about it's just overall like um what made you get excited about this as an idea like what was your motivation to do this and uh and especially do this thing on dob stack yeah um so I've been working the space around five years um I originally was uh just so Angel Investing and um spent a lot of time building uh growth tools and spent the last two years working for the largest growth marketing agency called hype um and during that time I went with a lot of big ecosystems uh creating like BNB chain up around Affinity um flow polling on and quite a few others and yeah I saw like a lot of great things happen when it comes to Resource allocation um and I saw uh some you know difficulties with Dows and as you know for developer I think the most important thing is that you can have predictable Revenue doesn't have to be a lot but you want to know when you do something you're going to get rewarded um and I really like that uh contract security Revenue gives you some predictability um I previously had a company we ran and advertising and you know you can spend you spend money and you see where your return on ad spend is and you decide to scale up or cut it behind that's quite hard to do when you're a developer in web3 because you have to put a lot of effort in up front and the reward can be very variable maybe deploy an application that goes crazy or maybe deploy an application that gets a huge ground in three months or six months or maybe nothing happens but the idea is a contract secure Revenue you can start to deploy some maybe lightweight applications so you can have like 100 bucks when 500 bucks um and see if that can help you kind of bootstrap and grow so it's just some yeah an alternative funding model I really like the op stack because um I think it's very much aligned with ethereum's values and I like that the community around it is yeah super focused on how to scale ethereum um building with OP stack is also fairly straightforward like I would say I'm semi-tech um you're working yeah let's dig into that because um this whole thing is about building an OP sector hackathon today's Summits and uh and understanding kind of how you can effectively think about uh creating your own universe that's still consistent with the other universes uh when did you kind of get this idea to build this thing when did you kind of make the decision so we got a p stack and cut from a timelines to standpoint like how how easy was it to kind of get started or see that all of your requirements that you met and uh and uh kind of curious on that and then I have a couple questions about the launch process that Solitude from the last one yeah awesome so um I started to get interested I've been like watching optimism for a long time um I was uh I was an investor in synthetics in Haberman they were I think one of the first contracts to deploy to optimism so um it was really cool to see how they kind of were rebellious on the ecosystem really early on um and yeah when uh op stack was kind of announced I was really interested to see how it would work then I think in March um we started to hear about bass um that was going to deploy that was really interesting looked into it and yeah it just kind of made sense amongst a lot of other Solutions because it's production ready which not many other uh kind of outside world of skating Solutions are right now um and I wanted to get I see this as a good window of time to launch a project because the market is fairly steady um and there's not as much noise as there was like a year and a half ago so I think it's quite nice time to launch and focus on yeah growing in a good community and ecosystem right so um what was the the most challenging piece so we're watching any of his stack in any uh pointers or others who are thinking about the same that they can either save time on or avoid some mistakes for any advice um I think that you you have to figure out a lot of what you're doing by yourself so there are there's lots of good documentation um there's a good Community but I still think you do need to really just figure out by yourself um building software trial and error there are I mean we're we're pretty early in our journey so we haven't had too many like big hiccups I expect there will be when we launch mainnet um yeah we have that we have a good team so now yeah uh or some of these things obviously that we can just complain to fix the dark water or is it more about and you think about structuring something long-term well effect that maybe for adding CSR here you have to uh think about making we need more engineering changes to how the stack is structured and and that was an easier obvious compared to someone else's required we're just launching a chain yeah I think if you're if you're going to run the uh maina uh a p-stack configuration then it's it's very straightforward um it's more an infrastructure challenge to make sure that if you get high throughput on the Chain like how rpcs has everything supporting that um and yeah we're working we're working on that right now we have a good partner for a conduit so that's great um I think that yeah we're gonna we've had some challenges with like uh deploying Foundry but I think that's been fixed so if anyone's trying to do that you can do that now um uh yeah that's kind of yeah the biggest issues we've had so far amazing uh we also asked you one last question from the audience coming in um can you apply renting or multi-cigi AP protocols or proposals and uh or or kind of evaluated that or did you end up uh coming up with a new standard for how modus incorporating these things um we haven't come up with a new standard yet so yeah we'll run on here peace okay got it and uh maybe I'll ask this same question to uh to the person ask this question uh what's the IP that you're referring to um quiz on and uh and we'll make sure that it's the same one or like a different one and uh kind of it could be just gave your comments too but uh that's a big thing you know he's flat out is it just an implementation underneath and then changes or are you also the proposals oh for contract secure Revenue yes um yeah we do plan to we do plan to build it out um and propose it as an EIP but initially we we're going to test ourselves for a little while um and yeah we are say two to three weeks away from deploying it on the test net um for people to start to see within the dashboard um that working and starts to be able to assign uh contracts to yeah for contracts secured Revenue so yeah we'll definitely try and push it through but um it can be added as a module it doesn't necessarily need to be like a protocol upgrade um initially sorry could you explain that I'm not sure I followed the the stairway it won't affect like the it won't have to go into the the open stack Mana configuration it will run as a module like separately oh got it okay and you have to flexibility to do that I I actually did not realize uh we should type the flexibility as it comes through the you know the fees come off the sequencer um which is a centralized part of the stack so but that's on the settlements and the sequencing to magnet but that's not controlled by the mode chain is correct um the revenue will come through by the mode but from this not as its heat being sequenced so this is a post sequence yeah and then you have the ability to claim it is that correct or yeah exactly oh I see okay so that a lot of things because you have a pod at the end of the day that you have a lot of clings on and then people are able to kind of manage what this would look like and you have to change the actual uh code base to uh to incorporate this which uh uh I think I am in radical person sure cancel attitude so it we'd added a bit more engineering complexity exactly exactly well James I want to thank you so much for for taking the time to walk us through a lot more specifics of how you get excited about building moan and what it means for somebody to consider the UK stack but also super cool and hopefully we'll see a lot of people kind of test it out and break and suggests a lot of good things remember that goes well hackathon and uh getting you all ready for me thank you so much really appreciate um yeah being able to speak in front of everyone thanks so much awesome well thank you so much