KuCoin Labs Incubation Program I — The Incubation Thesis in Obscuro and OCTO

Recently, KuCoinLabs Season 1 Incubation Program has started. As the incubation program runs steadily, KuCoin Labs is featuring and analyzing one by one the 8 best performers selected in the coming weeks. This week will feature the privacy Layer 2 project Obscuro and the Gamefi project OCTO.

Obscuro

Obscuro is a decentralised Ethereum Layer 2 Rollup protocol designed to achieve data confidentiality and prevent Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) by leveraging hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). The use of confidential computing techniques coupled with economic incentives allows Obscuro to retain the performance and programming model simplicity of Optimistic rollups, and on top of that attain confidentiality, short withdrawal periods, and address MEV. As the first fully privacy L2 on Ethereum, Obscuro can reuse the existing tools of Ethereum ecosystem, and be 7 times faster than other L2 solutions on Ethereum. Meanwhile, Obscuro has made a huge innovation, which can be demonstrated by its revelation period to meet regulatory requirements and by a new consensus mechanism called Proof Of Block Inclusion (POBI).

KuCoin Labs’ opinion towards Obscuro

The entire founding team of Obscuro comes from the core founding team and engineering team from R3, a famous fintech company based in London. This has strengthened our confidence in Obscuro’s engineering capacity. Since 2015, Obscuro team has been involved in crypto industry, the team members used to be one of the organizers of the first ETHLondon, Ethereum and Avalanche developers and work in various big financial institutions, such as Morgan Stanley and UBS. What made us impressed was that the team has been working cohesively for 5 years and delivered Corda chain, which has been adopted by DTCC（ US Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation ）. Moreover, they also won prize at Ethereum hakathon, accumulated a plenty of experience as advisors from blockchain start-ups and are well-connected with big financial institutions and obtain insights from regulatory perspectives.

According to the comparative analysis of mainstream privacy technologies, we believe that TEE has strong advantages in commercial and massive privacy computing processing.

Source: KuCoin Labs Research

The Obscuro team has more than 5 years of experience in TEE operations, and is based on Intel SGX to build comprehensive privacy, including client privacy, which can be linked through Azure, IBM, Alibaba and other multiple links. TPS in the current environment reaches 40000.

In addition, the POBI mechanism created by Obscuro team fully guarantees the writing of Layer 2 transactions on Layer 1. POBI is based on a fair on a fair lottery and synchronisation with the L1. It solves, among others, the fair leader election problem, which is a fundamental issue that all decentralized rollup solutions have to address.

At present, the number of applications for Obscuro Testnet has exceeded 20000, and the number of developers for Testnet has exceeded 1600, gradually forming an ecosystem with a decent scale of community. In Obscuro’s road map, the team also focused on community governance and incentives, ecosystem construction and expansion.

KuCoin Labs Incubation Program I & Obscuro

By providing an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible VM, deploying existing contracts to Obscuro with minimal change may be possible. Obscuro keeps all transactions and the internal state of application contracts encrypted and hidden, and so provides a credible solution to MEV. These two advantages of Obscuro make it a solid foundation for MMORPG types of projects, which require high degree of privacy. Gaming developers can leverage Obscuro to run hidden maps, to prevent every move and whereabouts of every prize be known in advance and to embed more diverse NFT in-game economy to eventually deliver a game that is infinitely composable, interoperable and duplicable. We believe the technology that Obscuro employs will deliver both absolute privacy and trust to gaming to further enhance the popularity of blockchain gaming.

During the KuCoin Labs “the Astro” Incubation Program, Obscuro has established deep conversations with mentors from various background worldwide and also obtained valuable information and experience from the incubation cohort projects in gaming, NFT and Metaverse segments from the following aspects: ecosystem growth, partnership growth and expansion etc. These benefits will be highlighted in Obscuro’s subsequent growth.

OCTO

In the field of Gamefi, KuCoin Labs focuses on betting on teams with long-term development potential, high game playability, high innovation, and clear business models and revenue logic. OCTO, with its products and strategies that match the investment thesis of KuCoin Labs, has successfully stood out in the highly competitive Gamefi track and was selected into the “The Astro Selection” incubation Program.

OCTO is a community-driven hyper-casual Play-To-Earn game hub that aggregates various games on the OCTO app, now available on IOS and Android. By playing games on the OCTO app, players can play and earn money from mobile games on the Solana blockchain and EVM chain. OCTO currently has more than 3 million users and they have played more than 50 million games. OCTO’s mission is to be the first to drive WEB3 to achieve million-level user growth through a casual game center aggregator.

OTCO itself is also the first Gamefi project to effectively release a dual reward system based on a competitive economy. On the OCTO platform, players can not only win the economic rewards of OTK tokens by challenging the leaderboard rankings, but also win gold coins during the daily participation in the game. Gold coins can be exchanged for virtual assets and physical assets in the mall of OCTO partners Items or community rights, etc.

OCTO is also an important service provider in the NFT playground. Relying on an experienced technical team, as well as mature economic models and business logic, OCTO can develop exclusive games for NFT communities in a short period of time. Holders of NFT can use their NFT in exclusive games to engage in a series of activities such as battles and social interactions, while enjoying the rich returns brought by the double reward system.

At present, OCTO has reached strategic cooperation with blue-chip NFT projects such as Degenerate APE and ABC . The game “Drop Out” in cooperation with Degenerate APE and the game “Origon” in cooperation with ABC have been launched on the OCTO platform, which provide more traffic entrances and usage scenarios.

KuCoin Labs believes that OCTO has long-term development potential. With OCTO’s initial achievements, KuCoin Labs assists OCTO to better discover areas for improvements. By participating in “The Astro Selection” Incubation Program operated by KuCoin Labs, OCTO has received extensive advices and one-on-one precise guidance from our well-known mentors in the fields of technology and tokenomics, and will continue to provide strong support in terms of marketing, community building and partnerships.

🐦 Twitter : @KCLabsOfficial

🌍 Website : https://www.kucoin.com/land/kucoinlabs

KuCoin Labs — Incubation and Research

By rebranding and restructuring KuCoin primary market investment and research arm in 2021, KuCoin Labs diversified and intensified investments at very early-stage of projects and helped more BUIDLers achieve sustainable growth and success in the decentralised world. Since 2022, KuCoin Labs doubled effort on Web3 start-up incubation. Gathering internal and external top experts and partners in different project development segments and offering bespoke advisory service within long-tail strategical partnerships.