Octopus DAO February 2023

Octopus DAO Community Call #7— February Reports

The Octopus DAO held its seventh Community Call on February 8th, with the main topic of discussion being Octopus 2.0. The broad outline of Octopus 2.0 has been established, but there are still many finer points to be decided.

Octopus 2.0 = Octopus 1.0 + (Eigenlayer+Lido) for NEAR + Cosmos SDK appchain + a series of IBC bridges.

The Octopus core team will continue to consult with relevant parties and the community to refine the Octopus 2.0 plan.

Community Call #7

The Community Call is divided into two parts:

1. Core Team Updates
2. Open Discussion Q&A — We welcome fact-based discussions (and even challenges) from the Octopus community in both English and Chinese.

Below are reports from the Octopus Network Core Team, followed by Open Discussion Q&A.

Core Team Updates

Julian Sun, Co-founder, Chief Software Architect

• We are preparing release appchain template 0.9.30–1.
• UniqueOne will upgrade to this version next week and plan a mainnet launch time.
• beefy-go(an implementation of substrate light client) is in the testing phase. We expect to complete the core functions of this project by the end of February.
• The near-ibc is halfway done. We can start to initiate the IBC connection in dev env now. This project is expected to be completed by the end of Q1.
• Doing some technical feasibility verifications for the new design of Octopus Network.

Aaron Ting, Head of Community

The objective for January is to engage the community and increase non-tangible factors such as having more fun, cultural contexts, and the overall content for the community. So we’ll be running a lot of contests. We started with some flash contests in the group. And later we expanded to various social media platforms. We managed to increase the number of participants in our Telegram group from 6,000 to roughly 8,500. And we have a new contest going on. So if you’re into memes, then this would be a really cool time to create some fun content for the community. Also, feel free to suggest if there’s anything that you can think of that’s fun.

We also have an engagement of 250k on Tik Tok. We’re very new to Tik Tok and trying something new. The way it works right now, just simply now everyone is on multiple platforms, but your people tend to not be on all the platforms. So it’s the responsibility of the project to reach out to where the crowd is, and try to engage them there. So you’re going to see a lot more of that.

We have achieved the number one trending search on CoinGecko for the first time. It has to do with the price recovery which actually applies to the whole crypto space, not only to $OCT. However, I think $OCT had quite a decent boost during this time and that’s a good sign. It means a lot of people are still paying attention to $OCT. And also we have a couple of parties that came to us who wanted to buy more $OCT tokens through OTC desks.

We also hosted an Accelerator appchain showcase for FRAC, a real asset fractionalization platform that fractionalizes real world assets and makes them accessible to small investors. It’s obviously a very interesting project. And we also understand that they are working very hard to launch this appchain on the Octopus Network. So hopefully, in the next couple of months, we are seeing enough progress from them to allow them to do that.

Additionally, I’m also working with a community member on the NFT Project. Why NFT project? NFT is a cultural thing in crypto space. There’s a lot of NFT projects that’ve been launched, and there’s so many of them looking for a chance to engage. And I believe that we have several requests from NFT projects to engage with them. But again, Octopus is not an NFT project, even though we have a community. So I think it’s the right time to start Octopus that works in a community NFT project, so that the NFT project members and anyone could be involved. It could be a team member, it could be someone for the community, but there should be sort of like a core team behind this NFT project. And this Octopus NFT project will be able to engage with other NFT projects on the same level. So what we would like to see is probably not only one but different art styles. The first one is probably going to be more anime-centric and we’re working on character-based artwork right now. But the second one could be more sci-fi cyberpunk, and the third one could be more realistic or from a certain culture and stuff like that. We’re hoping to see the launch of the NFT project, if not at the end of this month then the beginning of next month.

Vivi Lin, Head of Media

We’ve put together a very in-depth report to look back at 2022 for Octopus written by Mix in Chinese. You will have a great understanding of what happened in the Octopus ecosystem from infrastructure, governance to global influence.

In order to continue to grow Octopus’ global influence, we have never stopped.

Octopus Global influence

1. On 28th December last year, our founder Louis Liu was invited to participate in the Golden Tea Awards Ceremony hosted by BlockChain Tea House and delivered a keynote speech on “The Road to the Mainstream of Web3 Games”. It was an excellent and insightful speech on Web3 games. Mix did a great job putting it together and published the article in both English and Chinese.
2. On 5th Jan, Louis was also invited for a Twitter Spaces panel hosted by NEAR on the topic of “Multichain Web3 Infra-Create without Limits” last month. The guests include NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin, AURORA’s co-founder Alex shevchenko and Amos Zhang, founder of MetaWeb ventures. As an important infrastructure built on NEAR, Octopuswill keep playing a bigger role in the NEAR ecosystem by capturing more value for NEAR, and connecting more appchains to the ecosystem via Cosmos SDK and IBC.
3. Louis was also invited to participate in another Twitter Spaces panel co-hosted by 0x499 and Binance Live On 17th Jan to talk about NEAR’s sharding technology and how sharding technology empowers Octopus Network. The media team also helped promote this event in Octopus’ big family.

Octopus Accelerator — the base camp for Web3 projects

We had meetings with the Octopus Accelerator Winner stars one by one last month to learn more about their updates and upcoming plans. Regarding the story-telling videos featuring the five stars, it’s in the final production stage and will be published this month. And as I mentioned in the last community call, even though the incubator project is on hold, we are still going to continue our communication with the Accelerator stars and to check on them to see how they are doing and whether they need any PR and marketing strategy support.

Chinese Cosmos SDK Developer Training

The Media team, mainly Jasmine, has played an important role in organizing the Chinese Cosmos SDK Developer Training with some long-time friends and partners including HashKey, Bianjie AI, Cosmos China, IBCL, Wanxiang Blockchain Labs. The first batch of this training program started last November and successfully ended with a mini-Hackathon on 12th January. We sponsored the winning teams with 2,300 USD worth of $OCT tokens. We will continue to carry on the Cosmos training in China to facilitate the birth of a thriving and meaningful Chinese Cosmos Developer community and then benefit from it.

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.

Louis Liu, Founder

What I’m gonna share here will most likely be included into Octopus 2.0 but not 100% guaranteed, since we are still in the process of this strategic planning practice. But I think it’s better to keep transparency if we have confidence in what we are talking about. We have hosted a few internal seminars and had some discussions with our stakeholders and researchers from the token funds that have a big stake in the Octopus Network. And we will expand the discussion scope to include NEAR foundation, other ecosystem projects and some closely related blockchain researchers which can help us to refine our Octopus 2.0 plan.

During this planning process, we keep asking ourselves two fundamental questions. The first one is, does Octopus Network create value for Web3 in a meaningful way? The second is, if yes, how can we scale out this value creation process that is embedded in Octopus protocol and community?

For the first question, I am 100% confident that the answer is YES. I think most of you have noticed that more and more people join the camp of multichain, they believe the future will be multichain, and application specific blockchains have become more popular than they were when we started Octopus Network. So we are a few years ahead of the mainstream crypto community to realize the critical needs of multichain and be prepared for this upcoming multichain future. And since there will be hundreds of, if not thousands of appchain emerge, they need security and interoperability. And Octopus is born to serve the needs that provide security and interoperability to appchains. So we are on the right track.

So the problem is how to scale and maximize our value creation for appchains and also for our community. Octopus Network provides two fundamental services to appchains: security and interoperability.

Security leasing

For the security part, we try to bootstrap two-sided markets to make appchains can easily lease security from an existing community that’s ready to to validate any legit appchain project. On the other side, we try to involve a lot of people who are enthusiastic about Web3 and ready to provide validation services to appchains. So this is a two-sided market and we want to expand both sides and then the network effects of this two-sided market will grow.

• For the providing side, I think the most limitation is the collateral asset. We have defined that in Octopus Network, $OCT token is the exclusive collateralized asset for security leasing, but it seems that it is a major restriction since $OCT token is relatively small in the crypto cycle even in the NEAR ecosystem. We have only a few thousands of $OCT token holders and only a small part of them have joined this security leasing market. We are inspired by a new project called EigenLayer from the Ethereum community. It’s a staking protocol particle that can provide security guarantees to any middleware or layer2 protocols that want to leverage the economic security of Ethereum. This project is very hot in the primary market and they are raising $50 million in a Series A funding round. But think about it, we have been working in this direction for more than two years, we have built a market for appchains from zero and now we have five live appchains and a few more are ready to join. So I think Octopus Network has finished the most difficult part of the security leasing market and now we can learn something from EigenLayer to expand our security supply and economic supply. So we plan to present a new $NEAR staking derivative. We may call it $reNEAR which means restakable $NEAR that will replace $OCT as the exclusive staking asset for Octopus Network. By doing that, we can expand the security supply from $OCT holders to $NEAR holders. Also, our financial interest will be tightly aligned with the whole NEAR ecosystem, and we expect that we will get more support from the NEAR foundation. In addition, this new practice will significantly decrease the staking cost for appchains. There are two parts for staking cost. One is the IT cost because validators need to run a note and maintain the node. But the bigger part of staking cost is asset costs since you need to lock a big chunk of crypto asset which will lose liquidity in this period of time. Since $NEAR token is a bigger crypto asset than $OCT token, its volatility is smaller than $OCT token, then option cost will go down with price volatility. So by replacing $OCT token with $NEAR token to be the collateral asset, the asset cost of staking will be significantly reduced.
• For the demand side, we will expand our service to Cosmos SDK based appchains. Since last year, Cosmos has gained stronger momentum compared with Substrate. We have seen a lot of innovation and newly emerging projects in the Cosmos ecosystem. We also have a close relationship with the Cosmos ecosystem, and as Vivi has mentioned, we co-hosted the first Cosmos SDK developer training in China with some active ecosystem players in China. We hope to deepen our relationship with the Cosmos ecosystem and try to onboard some Cosmos SDK based appchains to Octopus Network.

Interoperability

Octopus core team has been working on substrate-IBC for more than two years. And we are sitting on the edge of expanding IBC interoperability outside the Cosmos ecosystem. I think it is a valuable capability that will benefit the NEAR ecosystem and other ecosystems like Polkadot, Ethereum, and others. Therefore, we will expand our interoperability offering beyond appchains. We plan to build some bridges between NEAR, Cosmos, Polkadot or Polkadot parachains. And by expanding the interoperability offering range, we hope more and more blockchain developers and programs will recognize Octopus Network as an important infrastructure for the whole blockchain world and also for the NEAR ecosystem. And some of the cross-chain bridges may rely on economic security, and if they do, we can leverage our own security leasing market. So essentially, except the cross-chain transaction fees we may charge from the bridges, we may also benefit from the security demands from these bridges we are about to build.

Besides Octopus 2.0, we will continue to try to decentralize our operations. Octopus core team plays the role of gatekeeper for the appchain onboarding process. We selected appchain candidates and recommended appchains to be launched on the Octopus Network. But now we have Octopus DAO, we have a pretty active community, and we have a forum to exchange ideas. I think it’s time to let the community decide which appchain we should support. From now on, the decision to launch the new appchain will be left to the Octopus community. Appchian projects that have passed the audit from the core team should explain their value proposition, token economics, and all other details of their projects on our forum. And then they need to submit a proposal to Octopus DAO. The DAO will decide whether or not to accept this appchain project to be launched on Octopus Network. It will leverage the collective intelligence of the whole community. We firmly believe that this collective intelligence will be more smarter than the core team and it’s an essential part of decentralization.

Open Discussion Q&A

Please note: The Octopus Network Forum is now open at forum.oct.network. You are welcome to register, express your views, and discuss community improvement suggestions.

Question 1:

Is there a schedule for staking $NEAR?

Louis:

As I mentioned, we’re still in the strategic planning phase, and we need to figure out a lot more details. So let me have a guess, we may enable the $NEAR restaking feature in Q3 this year. This is the best informal guess we can give for now.

Question 2:

NEAR is making three NEPs right now. And they’re talking about them a lot. And I’ve been drawing user’s attention to those NEPs because I think they’ll be very helpful for implementing IBC, not just provisioning but implementing in total. If users from NEAR ask us about IBC plans for Octopus, I’m guessing that they’re in parallel. Is that right?

Louis:

IBC is a set of protocols and it may have multiple implementations and instances to facilitate bridge. Our plan is to implement IBC framework which can host many types of light clients to verify external blockchains. And Octopus will run a NEAR-IBC instance. And this instance will be connected with many blockchains that are willing to leverage our work. We know that some other teams are walking on this field. I think it’s a great thing for both of us since it’s an open ecosystem and the work from one project will benefit the others. So it is healthy competition, and we are always willing to cooperate with all these builders from the crypto world.

Question 3:

Will there be limitations on Appchain onboarding, concerning bandwidth after the core audit from DAO?

Louis:

This is a wonderful question. As of now, bandwidth for auditing is not a bottleneck. Since we do not have that many appchain candidates and the DAO decision-making process is new. And I think the bottleneck in the short term would be the DAO participants. We need to involve our community to know how to investigate and make a judgment of appchian candidates. Maybe in the long run the auditing bandwidth will be a problem, but I think we still have time to do optimization. Since the auditing is for some security guarantee, and once we have more knowledge about what could go wrong for appchains, we can optimize this auditing practice and essentially expand the bandwidth.

Question 4:

Are we going to be seeing multiple appchains come onboard?

Louis:

We definitely hope that there will be multiple appchains coming onboard. And still it requires our core team to provide effective auditing surveys and also requires the community to make informed decisions about appchain permissions.

Question 5:

Will there be more Substrate engineering incubating from Octopus like the previous training?

Louis:

Actually we have suspended our Substrate training since we think that the training cost does not justify the benefits we got from this training. We may try to expand our Cosmosos SDK training in the future. The problem with Substrate training is that Substrate is difficult. And it is not that easy to find qualified RUST developers to join the training, and most of the graduated trainees are still not qualified to join Substrate-based projects. So that’s the problem. I think there are probably one order of magnitude more Go developers than RUST developers. We hope that the Cosmos SDK appchain offering will expand our appchain candidates on a large scale.

Community Call #8— March 8, 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, March 8th–13:00 GMT +8

To join:

1. Open the link: https://discord.gg/BEQrN4Ya7C
2. 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
• Accelerator Program: https://accelerator.oct.network/
• Medium: https://medium.com/oct-network
• Discord: https://discord.gg/6GTJBkZA9Q
• Telegram: https://t.me/octopusnetwork
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCkMYDmXdgjCBTBggSEAy0ZQ
• Github: https://github.com/octopus-network
• Docs: https://docs.oct.network/