EP 40 — Exploring DeFi, AI Agents, and the Future of On-Chain Forecasting with James Ross
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Welcome to the Deco podcast, where we bring you stories from founders and investors in Web three. Before we get started, this is not a financial or legal advice. It's just a conversation about things we find interesting in Web three. Views expressed are our own personal opinions. The co members or guests appearing on the show may have positions on assets they talk about. Alright. New episode. James Ross has joined me today to talk about DeFi, AI, Mode Network, and SafeStore. James has been spending a lot of his time at the intersection of crypto and AI, and, I mean, we chatted before recording
so much for having me. Super excited to be here.
Lovely. Let's start with a little bit of your background and how have you spent your time in crypto and of late, like, AI and at the intersection.
Absolutely. So I've been kind of building, investing over the last seven years. I focus very much on DeFi, financial applications, which can be built in use cases, which can be built with crypto. And, yeah, founded Mode just under two years ago, around eighteen months ago. We launched Mainnet just over a year ago. And, yeah, we very much focused on building at the intersection of DeFi and AI. And that kind of led us down this road to also build out Synth.
Awesome. So seventy years. Right? And you've been an investor, so you probably, like, understand the space not only from, like, the builder's perspective, but also from investor and users' perspective. Like, what led you to consider that, okay. Hey. Like, this is an intersection that I want to build in.
Yeah. So, I mean, I first actually had a an AI startup, like a fintech that was using AI back in 02/2015, and it was very much focused on, like, data analytics and getting insights from people's data and giving, like, smart suggestions. And then after that, I got very interested in Ethereum, the Ethereum ecosystem, and everything which was being built around DeFi. And, yeah, it's kind of gone full circle. It's the last year I've spent most of my time thinking about, like, this intersection of finance and AI. I think AI is obviously everyone knows at this point, it's like a fundamentally world
And so every time there is a new technology outside of crypto or every new primitive, we try to slap, like, crypto onto it. Right? I mean, we have this one nail and hammer and, you know, likely want to hammer it everywhere. But so with respect to this, right, with respect to AI, like, when the traditional web tool companies have been building AI for quite some time now, where did you think that, okay, I mean, this intersection kind of makes a lot of sense? Because initially, for a long time, I used to feel that, you know, this is just another narrative that projects want to catch. And, you kno
Yeah. So, I mean, the way I look at AI interacting with DeFi is through kind of, like, each path stack. So we have the, like, user application, so, like, agent layer. And you can use tools like LMs to help with research. You can use tools like LMs, which will give you, like, different strategies. And you can work with agents that run, like, some kind of autonomous strategy for you. That's one way. Then you have, like, a data layer, which is using AI powered data machine learning models to help you make better decisions. And then we look at, like, the, yeah, the execution layer or, like, the ba
Alright. So this thought led you to start mode. This was around eighteen months ago. So, yeah, like, several l twos. Right? I mean, so many l twos exist. I want to understand, like, what is the thesis or mode network? We can talk about Centaur
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