Octopus DAO January 2023
On January 8th, the Octopus DAO held its sixth Community Call. This call was a significant event as Core Team Refactoring for Octopus 2.0 has just been announced. The Octopus Core Team wants to thank all Octopus validators and delegators who showed up and participated.
In order to adapt to the fast-changing environment and survive the crypto winter, Core Team Refactoring for Octopus 2.0 was initiated in late December, 2022. Twelve core team members have left voluntarily, including 4 from the marketing, the development and tech support team respectively. The remaining members will continue to work toward our mission of participating in the development of the Internet of Blockchains. Octopus 2.0 will be built with IBC & NEAR as two cornerstones and more details will be announced in Q2.
Community Call #6
The Community Call is divided into two parts:
- Core Team Updates
- 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
The most important task in December is to keep the network running stably during the handover. To achieve this goal, we simplified and refactored several sub-projects, including submitting several PRs to ibc-rs and Substrate and more using appchain indexer for complex functionality. We refactored the project Substrate-IBC as a Substrate pallet and committed it upstream.
In addition, we implemented the NFT cross-chain feature for EVM appchains.
Now the Octopus DAO supports creating a proposal to modify the minimum staking requirement for delegators and validators. Any council member can create the proposal.
There are also two projects in progress. We implemented the POC of tee-relayer and NEAR-IBC. I will report more progress next month.
Aaron Ting, Head of Community
What we’ve seen over the last year, especially the last quarter of 2022, was that the demand for appchain tokens has dropped, which means the potential market size has been reduced. Also, we start to see that enterprises are definitely increasing interest in launching an appchain. So towards the end of last year, we’re very active in networking, through our network of advisers, ambassadors, and of course our team members. We roughly had about 20 people worldwide. And all of them are able to gain leads and to basically engage in business development, so that we can engage with more projects and more companies. So this is something that was going on. With the announcement of refactoring, we have to make changes.
A few of the marketing team members decided to leave through the Voluntary Separation Program. The Ambassador program will be put on hiatus until Octopus 2.0 is unveiled. BD activities are canceled to cut traveling expenses for the time being, but only to the extent where we’re not pursuing new leads. There are some leads that are existing, and we’re still engaged in trying to convert. New strategies will be implemented to ensure the next deployment fits the market’s needs.
I’ve been involved in community chat more and more frequently now. We welcome more suggestions and proposals or any inputs from the communities to incorporate it into the coming Octopus 2.0.
Vivi Lin, Head of Media
Media team has been the most stable in terms of personnel, we have the whole team staying, continuing to serve the whole Octopus ecosystem as a powerhouse with media and PR with strategies such as content marketing. We might even expand our responsibilities going forward and I will update you all in the near future.
In December, since the building did not stop, we’ve supported the Octopus team and ecosystem in all the major events with media PR and storytelling, including:
For appchains and appchain candidates
Abyss World is the first 3A-level Web3 game incubated by Portalverse, the cloud game protocol of Octopus network ecosystem. Abyss World revealed its official trailer for the first time. Our media team helped with promoting, storytelling and the PR strategy.
Octopus Accelerator — the base camp for Web3 projects
Even though we are cutting costs, we continue to support appchains and build in that direction. Octopus Accelerator 2022 winter successfully concluded in December. We wrote an in-depth article to introduce these five winning projects in both Chinese and English, and we are in the process of making a very in-depth video to promote the project. So going forward, even though the incubator project is on hold, we are still going to continue our communication with the accelerator stars project and to check on them to see how they are doing and whether they need any PR and marketing strategy support.
Octopus Network Global Influence
Our founder Louis Liu was invited at the end of the year to participate in the Golden Tea Award Ceremony hosted by BlockChain Tea House and delivered a keynote speech on “the road to the mainstream of Web3 games”. We are compiling the speech and about to publish it and share it with the community both in English and Chinese.
Also, we hosted a Twitter Spaces with the theme of “what to expect in 2023? Web3 and crypto” and invited several industry experts from NEAR ecosystem and other investors to reflect on the past year as well as looking ahead. And after the session, we also wrote a recap article and published it on our medium channel.
Octopus Network Community Call
Our media team is also putting our efforts into organizing the community call and designing the NFTs for the participants. And those who participates in the entire session today will receive an OCT-CC#6 NFT.
Louis Liu, Founder
I think through the overview session and the updates from three team leaders, everyone at least roughly knows what’s going on in Octopus’ core team.
Octopus Network Refactoring
We stopped some core operation programs in the last month, including the Substrate training program, Accelerator program, and Ambassador program. Twelve great members left the core team through the Voluntary Separation Program and I would like to take this chance to express my appreciation for their contribution. I believe their capabilities are qualified for any Web3 or Web2 organization and I hope someday we can work together again. Mike, our co-founder and a long-time friend, is one of them. He was the technical support team’s leader and our number 4 member. He was also a board member and he actually supported my proposal at the board meeting.
Why Refactoring?
Even if the action may appear sudden to outsiders, I have been thinking about it for a few months because we need to adjust to the rapidly changing environment. We started Octopus mainnet on October 8th, 2022 and two months later we launched the first appchain DeBio during which the crypto market peaked, but then the bear market began and continued. Our strategy was to onboard newly borned appchains to our network. This strategy may work in the initial phase of the bull market, because at that time the newly borned Web3 projects keep emerging and they need to choose their tech stack, the ecosystem they will be building in and decide which infrastructure best fits their needs. But things are different in a bear market. Even if we expand our presence in the appchain developer community quite rapidly by business development, Substrate training and Accelerator program, we found our appchain candidates are in trouble and the space is hard for them to raise a considerable amount of money to support their operation. So I think this is not good timing because most new Web3 projects will die out in the coming year or two. Therefore, we can’t waste the resources from the Octopus community to keep onboarding appchains but lose them in a short period of time. If we do that, the resource will be wasted and Octopus will not get a second chance to ride the wave. So that is why I decided to make this refactoring. And thanks to all core team members and the board for their support.
Things Unchanged
Octopus will keep the commitment to all partners especially appchains. Our infrastructure is stable, the service is unchanged, and we will not abandon our appchains. And also, we will still try to onboard new appchains but the criteria will more focused on their financial status. So we need to make sure that the appchain project can self-sustain during the bear market. And the second thing that hasn’t changed is Octopus is still working on more generic and powerful interoperability based on the IBC and NEAR ecosystem. We’re still a critical piece of NEAR infrastructure offering. Based on these two Cornerstone, we’re gonna figure out the Octopus 2.0 plan with the only aim to maximize the interest of OCT token holders and the Octopus community.
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:
If the bear market continues for another two years or more, will Octopus’s capital reserves be able to handle it well?
Louis:
We have enough capital reserves to support a two year operation or even more, but we need to take care of our financial situation, since a big chunk of the asset reserved for Octopus are $NEAR or NEAR related assets. And we don’t want to sell those valuable assets when the market panic, so we will try to keep most of these assets in our treasury and support the operation with the stablecoins. That’s why we do need to lower the operation cost. But once again, this is not the only reason we do the refactoring. We try to improve efficiency and maximize the value of OCT token which will bring benefits to our community. So that is why they need to be very cautious on the cost.
Question 2:
What is the estimated time to finish NEAR-IBC?
Julian:
We just finished the proof of concept of the NEAR-IBC and still need to implement the integration tests. So, I think we can complete the whole project in Q1.
Louis:
Yes, the development work will finish in Q1 according to the current plan. And we are expecting the IBC will be enabled in NEAR mainnet in Q2, and be ready to connect with any IBC enabled blockchain, including Cosmos, Polkadot and others.
Question 3:
Currently building DAPPs on Layer1 like Solana, NEAR, BSC is quite cheaper than appchain. That’s a barrier for DAPPs wanting to build appchains on Octopus Network. So what does Octopus Network have to do with this problem?
Louis:
It’s a great question. I stated in my blog that appchain is great on performance, usage cost, customizability and on-chain governance. But all these advantages come with a cost, that is appchain protocol have to pay their validators to ensure the security of this dedicated blockchain. I don’t think it is a problem from the moment we decided to do this appchain infrastructure. I think the key point is lack of proper application build on appchain.
We all know that dYdX selected appchain stack and migrated from Ethereum because they value the performance and low usage cost other than composability and the uniformity of the tech deck. So this is totally a voluntary choice. It isn’t that Cosmos convinced dYdX to build on the appchain. It is decided purely by the dYdX team and we all know that they are among the best Web3 Application teams in the whole space. So the appchain team should know what appchain tech stack fits their needs best and the cost comes with it and then make their own decision. To be honest, we always try to persuade our partners to think about it again. Why do you need an appchain? Why not build on Ethereum or NEAR directly? We will not push them blindly to our infrastructure.
Question 4:
Why is the Octopus Network explorer not able to search all the wallet addresses from each appchain by holders?
Louis:
Since there is a bridge between appchain and NEAR, a significant part of appchain tokens will be bridged to NEAR and you may also want to know the holders of the NEAR based appchain token or wrapped appchain token on NEAR protocol. On NEAR side, now you can use NEAR BLOCKS to check it, and on appchain side, we will try to add this feature as soon as possible.
Question 5:
Is there any new development in the business development of appchain?
Louis:
One big change is that security leasing will not be the criteria we establish cooperation with appchains. We will also work with appchains in the Cosmos or Polkadot ecosystem, helping them build bridges with NEAR and between themselves. The premise is that these projects should be more established with relatively mature communities and can survive the bear market. That is to say, we will expand meaning partnerships with more appchains, rather than just focusing on newly borned appchain projects. Although they lease security from Octopus and bring us revenue, the problem is that most of them won’t be able to survive a bear market. So our strategy is to create value and make Octopus useful to other projects first, and then consider value capture of OCT tokens.
Community Call #7 — February 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, February 8th–21:00 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
- 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/
