Octopus DAO August 2023
On August 8th, we convened for our 13th community call, marking another step forward in our journey. The past month proved to be bustling and fruitful for the Octopus core team as we advanced with Octopus 2.0. A sincere thank you goes out to all community members who joined us, demonstrating your unwavering support.
We also want to draw your attention to NEAR’s decentralization effort — The NEAR Digital Collective (NDC) — which is crucial for the future development of the NEAR ecosystem. We believe that Octopus is one of the most important infrastructure projects for the NEAR ecosystem. Our endeavors in $NEAR Restaking and NEAR-IBC will elevate the NEAR protocol’s competitive edge against other prominent Layer1 networks, positioning it at the forefront and establishing a substantial presence within the crypto landscape in the years to come. To this end, our founder Louis will be running in the NDC V1 Governance Elections for a House of Merit seat. We would appreciate your support and votes for the campaign. Please stay tuned for more details.
Core Team Updates
Louis, Founder
Octopus core team is still focused on two main plans: marketing and development for Octopus 2.0. First, We need more blockchain developers, especially appchain developers, to know about the $NEAR Restaking offering, which is a new option to secure their appchains based on CosmosSDK. Additionally, we need the IBC community to know that NEAR will soon join this interchain network. All legitimate protocols and chains are welcome to connect with NEAR protocol through our NEAR IBC port. We co-host and participate in many events to promote Octopus 2.0, both online and offline, and we will continue to do so. I hope our community members keep speaking out to let the major crypto community know about our work and the opportunities it brings.
Besides, we are striving to deliver NEAR-IBC and $NEAR Restaking. Our original plan was to enable NEAR-IBC on the NEAR mainnet this month. Unfortunately, this plan has been delayed a little bit. Blockchain-related issues are always complex, and some unexpected problems keep popping up. I hope our community remains confident in the delivery capability of the core team. We have a good track record, and any delay will only be in terms of mostly months. As you know, some crypto projects cannot meet their commitments.
The second thing I want to bring to your attention is the recent announcement from the UniqueOne team. Sadly, they have decided to postpone their appchain development. We feel sorry for that. However, I want to make it clear that we never withdrew any commitment to UniqueOne. UniqueOne is our long-time partner, and I remember that they showcased their chain prototype back in the middle of 2021. At the same time, we have partnered with Debio, Myriad, and others. If UniqueOne persists on the goal of appchain, they should have launched their appchain and maybe conducted their IDO when the market condition was still healthy. Unfortunately, their strategic target seemed to be drifting, and they pursued some opportunities beside appchain. Even if their work, like Defi and other things, is not directly related to Octopus, we are still trying to be as supportive as possible and help set up partnerships for them. But I guess all these trials exhausted their resources, and when they finally decided to launch appchain and conduct their IDO, some bad luck struck them heavily. The skyward hack happened exactly during the period of UniqueOne IDO. So the team had to postpone the IDO. We have made it clear that Octopus 2.0 is not a replacement for Octopus 1.0, and we will keep the Octopus 1.0 network running. So any Substrate chains are still welcome to join the Octopus Network, but the process is a little bit different from before. Now, the project needs to make the announcement in the Octopus forum and explain the value proposition, value capture mechanism, and use cases to our community there. After that, they can submit a go-live proposal to the forum, and the Octopus DAO will vote on this proposal to decide whether or not to accept this appchain to join the Octopus Network. A few chain projects have made the introduction on the forum, but none of them have submitted a go-live proposal to the Octopus DAO. We are still expecting some projects to do that, and we will help them go through the process.
The third thing I want to mention here is about NDC — NEAR Digital Collective. I have decided to run the election. Let me explain why I should do that and why the Octopus community should show their support. Our work revolves around $NEAR Restaking and NEAR-IBC, and this plan is important for both Octopus and NEAR. The success of Octopus highly depends on the prosperity of the NEAR ecosystem.
When we provide this $NEAR Restaking shared security option to appchains, even if our offering is more cost-effective, more accessible, and more flexible, we need to make sure that NEAR stays relevant in the coming years and does not die out. Otherwise, there will be no serious blockchain developer built on or using our shared security offering or NEAR IBC port. Since the ecosystem’s prosperity and legitimacy are critical factors for the appchain developers when they lack their security source and interoperability counterparty. We are a sub-ecosystem of NEAR, and essentially all of us are concerned with NEAR’s strategy, progress, current status, and future directions.
Maybe many of you are not so satisfied with the current performance of the NEAR protocol. Even if it’s a bear market, we see that some Layer1s still perform better, such as Solana and Polygon, especially Polygon, which has declared its ambitious plans around Ethereum and ZK-rollup. They have taken a very significant position under the spotlight and being noticed by the majority of the crypto market investors and developers. This gives them a strong driving force to boost their ecosystem from different angles. NEAR Foundation and NEAR core team also had done a lot of work, but sadly, this work hasn’t put NEAR protocol in the center of the stage. I am deeply worried that if the NEAR ecosystem was still not on the major stage or even was forgotten by the crypto people, it will be a disaster for them and also for us. NDC is an essential mechanism to turn this and give the community the power to allocate resources that were previously handled by NEAR Foundation. The resource decides where the developer will show interest. I think Octopus is one of the most important infrastructure projects for the NEAR ecosystem, and our efforts on the $NEAR Restaking and NEAR-IBC can help NEAR protocol back into the spotlight and compete with other major Layer1s in the coming years. So I highly recommend you guys pay attention to this and vote for me when the election is on.
Julian, Head of Development
The 3 projects Restaking Base, LPOS market and NEAR-IBC are all undergoing testing and bug fixing. The NEAR-IBC audit is expected to be completed this month.
The biggest progress in the last month is that the components we developed for octopus 2.0 were all in independent testing, and last month we started to connect these components for integration testing. To do this, we refactored the code of verification proxy on Dfinity, made corresponding modifications to the relayer, and upgraded the ICS6 solo machine implementation to the V3 version.
Next, after the integration test is completed in the middle of this month, we will test with the partner team and deploy the NEAR-IBC testnet. According to the plan, the NEAR IBC port will be launched in early August, but now it has been slightly delayed for about a month. We hope that the project can be fully tested.
We have also done some other work in the last month. We have designed and implemented the prototype of Octopus 2.0 portal page, which will be different from the 1.0 style. And we use terraform script to implement the deployment tool for the Cosmos SDK appchains.
Vivi , Head of Media
Media team continued to support the Octopus team and ecosystem in all the major events with media PR and storytelling, including:
Promotion for NEAR-IBC
NEAR-IBC is getting ready to launch, and the audit is a key part. So on July 7th, we co-organized a cool Twitter Spaces event about Smart Contract Audit with BlockSec, our auditing partner for NEAR-IBC. Experts from the NEAR ecosystem joined in to talk about smart contract auditing and how NEAR Protocol’s design enhances smart contract security compared to other Layer1 solutions. We wrote up a recap article in English and Chinese in case you missed it.
Also, our team’s Mix has put together an article based on our engineer, River Yang’s speech in a NEAR developer course, in which we shared the challenges of implementing IBC on smart contract platforms like NEAR and how NEAR-IBC works. If you’re into the technical stuff, I totally recommend checking it out.
Octopus’ Global Influence
On July 12th, I got invited to an AMA hosted by Nearity, where I gave the NEAR community a comprehensive explanation on Octopus 2.0. It was awesome! More than 23k people tuned in.
Also, as mentioned in our previous community call, we’ve been working on a video series to demystify Octopus 2.0. The first episode is live now! In this video, we explained to the audience what Octopus Network is and the basics of Octopus 2.0. And please stay tuned for the next episodes where I’ll dive deeper into the two key aspects of Octopus 2.0: $NEAR restaking and NEAR-IBC.
Our founder, Louis, recently gave an interview with Bnews, a well-known Chinese media outlet. During the interview, he shared his thoughts on appchains, App Roll-up, and what sets Octopus apart from other multi-chain networks. We have translated this insightful interview into English to cater to our broader audience.
Additionally, NEARWEEK, the official NEAR Protocol newsletter and community platform, published an in-depth article about Octopus 2.0 entitled “Octopus 2.0 Promises to Break Barriers Between Blockchains” on Coinmarketcap. We are grateful to NEARWEEK for providing us with strong support and helping to promote Octopus 2.0 within the NEAR and broader crypto communities.
Cosmos Chinese Developer Course
The second Cosmos Chinese developer course wrapped up successfully with a mini-hackathon on July 15th. Our team’s Jasmine had played an active role in putting things together. Each of the six classes from this batch participated in the hackathon, showcasing their Cosmos appchain MVPs. It was amazing to see how they utilized Cosmos appchains to create innovative use cases, such as blockchain games, DID, etc. We hope to see some of these MVPs grow into mature Cosmos appchain projects and eventually onboard them onto the Octopus Network.
Moreover, CHA (Cosmos HK Accelerator) hosted a successful Cosmos community meetup in Shenzhen, China. It was a great meet-up and over 100 people came. Some early-stage Cosmos projects were invited to showcase their work and connect with potential investors. As one of the initiators of CHA, we will continue to work closely with other CHA members to expand the Cosmos ecosystem in the Chinese community by providing technical training, organizing meetups, hosting summits, etc.
Community call
Last but not least, the media team also helps with Community Call from organizing, hosting, reporting to promoting it. All the participants will receive an NFT, designed by our team’s Leo as well.
Sheldon, Ecosystem Development Lead
It has been a relatively busy month, and July was also saturated. If you’re familiar with crypto, you know that there is a kind of fall season that tends to get a little bit busy. There have been a couple of events out of Bali with different talks and presentations in Indonesia that I have been attending. We are also talking to the Coinfest team today. There are a couple of different events where we’re looking to make people more aware of the new Cosmos offering and the new NEAR- IBC offering, along with all the other things we’re working on at Octopus.
There are a handful of different events coming up. I’m very excited for NEAR APAC and Token 2049. In the meanwhile, it is my responsibility to find developers and help educate them about these new things, but also to speak to people who I’ve known for years in Cosmos and make sure they understand what’s happening with Octopus, and to know that Octopus 1.0 & 2.0 are very different products.
I have received overall positive feedback from the majority of my friends and older colleagues in Cosmos. Sometimes you’ll see some of this activity from me on Twitter, but I try to be polite about it and not drag them too deeply into the technical bits when I meet them in person. But these are the kinds of things that we discuss. There has been positive feedback to the $NEAR Restaking security component; the idea that you could access a Layer 1 by staking some of those layer 1 tokens and then bring up a sort of a substitute for an economic zone that provides some liquidity. That is effectively what the Hub does in Cosmos. So this is very appealing to a lot of chains. For example, Evmos is the chain that will be forked for Ottochain, and this entity has more than 20 IBC relationships up and connected there, configured to be able to send money back and forth between many different chains in Cosmos, but only two or three of them really have capital over $10,000 that people are using for liquidity. That means that when people see the Octopus 2.0 solution, they see a new alternative that there’s a possibility that money could be a center received by a larger entity that is also listed on many exchanges, has different levels of security, and has different levels of functionality. So I’m very excited for all that.
There’s a media interview with the author of Croncat coming out, who completed that project first in NEAR Protocol and is now working on the new deployment in Cosmos. So that’s an easy example of someone who also appreciates this value of NEAR and Cosmos products. That’s someone putting some work forward to make things easier for other chains to provide tooling to other chains, meaning that you’re basically a business providing services, but a little more complicated than that because it’s not so linear, right? The profit models in Web3 are always decentralized.
There has been overall very positive feedback about Octopus 2.0. Ottochain is also going to be rolling out this month, and we’re preparing the testnet to make it easier for you guys. So it’ll be easy to try. But of course, we want to try to give you all some activities so you can test it out and see what you think. It’s very fast, it works very well, and I appreciate the support we received in order to get it moving so that we could have an early testnet to show what’s going on with Octopus 2.0.
Lastly, I’m very glad that I have come back into this new title of Ecosystem Development Lead, and I’ll be out for a series of events. So if you’re anywhere in Southeast Asia, you’re welcome to PM me, and we’ll find out where we can meet up. I’m happy to talk to any community member. But, of course, my responsibility is to communicate with developers and try to help us grow.
Community Call #14 — September 8th, 2023
Octopus Network will transfer decision-making power to the Octopus DAO in a planned and structured manner through on-chain governance.
Validators and delegators who have not joined the Community Call private channel, please join as soon as possible so that you do not miss the opportunity to jointly build and govern the Octopus DAO.
Do not miss the next Community Call, September 8th–12:00 GMT +8
To join:
- Open the link: https://discord.gg/BEQrN4Ya7C
- Enter the Discord channel and follow the prompts to verify your identity with your NEAR wallet.
Follow Octopus Network!
- Website: https://oct.network/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/oct_network
- Discord: https://discord.gg/6GTJBkZA9Q
- Octopus DAO: https://forum.oct.network/
- Medium: https://medium.com/oct-network
- Telegram: https://t.me/octopusnetwork
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCkMYDmXdgjCBTBggSEAy0ZQ
- Github: https://github.com/octopus-network
- Docs: https://docs.oct.network/
