Octopus DAO February 2024

Published in

Omnity Network

9 min readFeb 19, 2024

On February 8th, the Octopus Network community gathered for its 18th community call.

Looking back at the first month of 2024, Octopus had a promising start. One notable update is the progress of $NEAR restaking, which has now entered its formal and stable operation with the publication of an audit report and optimizations to the protocol rules. This opens the door for more appchains and restakers to join this bilateral shared security marketplace, further enhancing the network effect of $NEAR restaking.

Adding to the excitement, we announced the development of Omnity, a groundbreaking cross-chain protocol specially designed to fit into the modular blockchain landscape. This protocol will be built on the ICP platform and will be the first fully decentralized cross-chain protocol. Omnity is scheduled to launch at the next Bitcoin halving event and will first enable cross-chain transfers of Bitcoin tokens, starting with the highly anticipated new Bitcoin token standard, Runes.

Core Team Updates

Louis, Founder

Last month, we finished the auditing report of $NEAR restaking and published the report. Additionally, we made some optimizations to the protocol rules. From now on, we can say that $NEAR restaking has entered its formal operation. The protocol rules will remain stable in the foreseeable future. Moreover, since we have eliminated smart contract risks through careful auditing, I believe it is time for major NEAR holders and the NEAR community to get involved. Therefore, we will shift our focus to business development activities. Hopefully, the restaked $NEAR will increase in the coming months. We will also resume conversations with potential appchains. As you know, this is a bootstrap process and there is a chicken and egg problem. We need more restaked assets to provide a certain level of security and attract appchains. Similarly, we need more appchains to provide restaking rewards and attract more restakers. Once this feedback loop occurs, the network effect will be established.

And we have noticed that there are some unpleasant things happening inside the Ottochain community. We are keeping a close eye on what’s going on there. Even though we do not have deterministic power or much influence over the Octopus Nation, we are a stakeholder of Ottochain. We tried to bootstrap $NEAR restaking by providing incentives from the Octopus treasury. And I thought about building the first appchain as a dummy one without any function, and then all the restaking rewards will be just for bootstrapping. Then a group of people from our community made a proposal to us that they would like to build a general-purpose appchain, and I thought, why not combine these two goals together. However, the interests of the Octopus community and Ottochain are independent. I hope your judgment on Ottochain will not impact your decision on $NEAR restaking since economically, they are not related. When you restake to Octopus, and even if you run nodes or delegate to someone who runs a node for Ottochain, you will receive rewards in $OCT token. Additionally, any malicious or unintended slash will be filtered by Octopus DAO. So it’s up to Octopus DAO to decide whether or not to execute slashing events. Your restaked $NEAR will earn $OCT tokens, and the slashing risk will be protected by $OCT holders or the Octopus community. So economically, your risk and benefit are not related to Ottochain.

One more important job we are working on is Ominity. We have published the lite paper and also launched a Twitter campaign to engage with the DFINITY community and announce this brand new omnichain protocol, Omnity. It will be built on the ICP platform and will be the first 100% decentralized cross-chain protocol. Our team, especially the development team, has been working hard on it since we plan to launch it at the time of the next halving of Bitcoin, which is about two and a half months away. During that time, the entire attention of the crypto blockchain industry will be focused on the blockchain halving. Additionally, the new Bitcoin token standard, Runes protocol, will go live at that point. I believe it’s a great time to start Omnity. We will support Bitcoin token transfers from the Bitcoin network to any execution chain, especially Ethereum Layer2s, for fast and cost-effective trading. And the entire process will rely purely on ICP smart contracts, with no off-chain components needed.

And since we see so many Ordinals and BRC20 tokens have been issued on Bitcoin, the fact tells us that Bitcoin will be used as a general-purpose settlement chain. But who will be the execution chains for Bitcoin? I think any fast finality execution chain with great DeFi facilities could be an execution chain for Bitcoin. And it’s not necessarily secured by the Bitcoin network itself because the common user will not care about it. What they care about is whether the chain is safe enough and whether the cross-chain bridge is safe enough to protect their assets, and whether the chain has great DeFi facilities to fulfill their trading requirements. So that’s why I think the perfect cross-chain stack plus EVM Layer2 will be a great combination for Bitcoin asset trading. It’s more competitive and has a big advantage over the so-called Bitcoin Layer 2.

We will start from Bitcoin token, Runes, and then BRC20, potentially others, and then we will expand the execution chain from Bitcoin to ICP itself and Ethereum. And also on the execution chain side, we are talking with some potential partners and whoever can build DeFi infrastructure and has the ability to attract liquidity could be our execution chain partner. So this is still a two-sided market and there are obviously network effects there. And by onboarding more settlement chains and more asset classes, it will be attractive to the execution chain and vice versa. So this is our plan on how to bootstrap network effects for Omnity. And during the process, we expect we can get help from the ICP community since they welcome our participants. Hopefully, we will be one of the most noteworthy or dominant ecosystem projects in ICP.

Julian, Head of Development

Last month, we completed the following main tasks:

We made several changes to Octopus 2.0.

To balance the number of stakes among validators, we introduced a tiered commission fee. The validator with the highest amount of stakes will have a commission fee of 20%. The commission fee will decrease linearly based on the amount of stakes. We have displayed the commission fee of each validator on the UI.
If a validator node does not generate blocks normally, its UI will display a red “unjail” button. You should check the node and fix any issues. Then, click the “unjail” button to notify the chain that your node is back to normal. During this period, you will not be able to earn appchain rewards.
We have reduced the unbonding period from 21 days to 7 days, allowing users to withdraw their assets in a shorter time.
Once a validator has performed the unstake operation, all assets will be automatically returned to the validator and its delegators after the unbonding period.

2. We have uploaded the audit report to our GitHub.

3. We have completed the detailed design for Omnity and have implemented prototypes for 2 out of the 4 components.

Vivi, Head of Media & Community

As the head of media and community, I’m eager to share our endeavors over the past month:

A significant highlight was the release of the Omnity Litepaper. We conducted marketing efforts to amplify its visibility, including:

We published news releases across various platforms, including Hackernoon, Blockbeats, and other notable media outlets, in addition to our own channels such as Twitter, Medium, and WeChat.
We organized a Twitter Space event titled “What is the endgame for modular blockchain interoperability?” We invited several Chinese devs and researchers in the cross-chain field to discuss this topic and shine a light on how Omnity leverages ICP to achieve unique capabilities.
We made some updates to our website to feature Omnity prominently. I encourage you to visit our site and read the Litepaper, if you haven’t already.

Regarding $NEAR restaking:

We collaborated with Linear for a cross-promotion on Twitter. As the leading LSD protocol in the NEAR ecosystem, LiNEAR will be launching $bLiNEAR to unlock liquidity for $NEAR restaking. This is a big plus for us. We anticipate further collaborative promotions following the token launch.
We are engaging with NEARWEEK to organize a series of activities aimed at boosting $NEAR restaking awareness within the NEAR community. These activities include publishing articles, hosting Twitter Spaces/AMAs, and networking with $NEAR validators.
Furthermore, we are collaborating with Token Insight to publish a comprehensive research paper on Octopus, scheduled for publication in April.

In preparation for the upcoming EthDenver event, I have personally produced a promotional video. Our team is also collaborating with the NEAR Foundation to execute several campaigns related to this event.

Last but not least, the media team also helps with Community Call from organizing, hosting, reporting to promoting it. All the participants will receive a special NFT as usual.

Sheldon, Ecosystem Development Lead

The ETH Denver event should be really exciting. We’re doing some prep for that. Like I mentioned in the community update last month, there is gonna be some media coming out. We know that right before EthDenver, there’s a swell of momentum, and SporkDAO knows us like Vivi was saying, so we wanna capitalize on that by getting in front of the NEAR community and talking about Omnity and the $NEAR Restaking benefits that have recently changed and that have been pretty competitive. There’s been some questions recently about comparison for APY compared to other products in NEAR, so I’m going to be working on a tweet thread for that. And I’m very happy to be supporting DAO Planet this year. DAO Planet is a community-based organization that is officially supported by SporkDAO in EthDenver. They are present at EthDenver, but also they’re designed to be a side event for developers, for builders, for founders. So it should be very exciting to get in front of them as well. And yeah, looking forward to the materials put together. Of course, if you’re heading to EthDenver, please come find us. We will not have a booth this year, but we are still bringing some swag. And of course, we’re happy to support the NEAR Protocol, and we’ll be spending some time with them while we’re there.

Cesar, Social Media Manager

I am Cesar, I am in charge of Octopus Socials, and today I’m here to share what’s been going on in the Octopus community team over the past month. So quick update, last year it was just Nasrul and me handling our social media channels, but in this new year we officially welcomed Hanna, Mandala and Pia to the team. Now all of us together manage Octopus presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Telegram. These new additions to the team are crucial for us so that we can cover the new products of Octopus this year, Octopus 2.0 and Omnity.

Now let’s talk about what we have been doing in January. We have been busy creating content across all these platforms, focusing on Octopus technical updates, important announcements, and community activities. We have made more than 30 posts with a big focus on restaking, answering questions, highlighting benefits, and providing helpful guides on this topic. We even hosted a special Twitter space just for restaking. We also made sure to let you know about the reduction in the undelegated period in Octopus 2.0. And finally, we introduced you to Omnity, a significant step in our multichain journey. Engaging with the Difinity official account on Twitter has been productive, and we have seen some growth in our followers, especially on Twitter, after introducing Omnity to our community. Also, we have been collaborating in the Twitter space with some key people from the ICP ecosystem on February 1st.

Looking ahead to this new month, our main goal is to ensure that everyone understands the benefits and solutions that Omnity brings to the blockchain space. We want our wider community to recognize the potential of this new protocol, and we hope it brings some cross-marketing benefits within their robust ICP ecosystem.

Community Call #19 — March 8th, 2024

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–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.