Octopus DAO January 2024

Published in

Omnity Network

9 min readJan 14, 2024

On January 8th, the Octopus community gathered for the first community call of 2024, filled with optimism for the year ahead. This was also the 17th Octopus community call.

The year 2023 was a pivotal year for Octopus. We fulfilled our commitments and launched Octopus 2.0, which features $Near Restaking and Adaptive IBC. Since announcing this plan in April, the entire team had worked very hard to make the blueprint a success. Despite the lows and challenges in the crypto industry, we moved forward with unwavering determination.

Looking ahead to 2024, we will continue our mission of contributing to and building the Internet of Blockchains. We would also like to express our deepest gratitude to each and every member of our community for their ongoing support and dedication.

Core Team Updates

Highlights:

The successful launch of Octopus 2.0 in December was a major milestone for us. We have over 650,000 $NEAR restaked so far, and more than 200 delegators and 9 validators — the numbers are growing day by day.
Octopus plans to develop a new cross-chain protocol called Omnity. The official announcement for this protocol is scheduled to be made at the end of January.
The community and media teams are merging into a unified force, led by Vivi. This consolidation aims to enhance our community impact as we continue to grow and evolve as a multichain network.

Louis, Founder

Octopus 2.0 is live. We have almost one million $NEAR restaked to the protocol. It’s not bad for a starting point. We still haven’t finished the auditing report, so to be frank, I don’t expect that so many assets are being put into the smart contract right now. But I think we will publish the auditing report in two or three weeks. After that, the community team will go out to spread the word and pitch various kinds of NEAR ecosystem participants. We have a lot of connections there — our partners, our investors, and NEAR holders who are willing to try restaking to supportOctopus and also NEAR, while at the same time getting these restaking rewards. Currently, the APY of restaking is nearly 20 percent, and once the community knows about the restaking opportunity and recognizes the legitimacy of the restaking protocol built by Octopus and supported by the NEAR Foundation, I think a lot of NEAR holders will jump in, especially for aggregators. It’s quite easy money. The Layer 1 staking rewards remain completely untouched. NEAR holders will be satisfied with a 10% or even 5% increase in incentives from restaking. It’s safe to say that we can leverage a few million NEAR in total restaking by the current incentive level. We are also working on optimizing the rules to increase the decentralization level of the restaking. I think we are the first staking protocol that automatically calculates the delegation commission fee to favor the smaller validator. By doing that, I think we can have a better validator set, more evenly distributed staking assets, and more evenly distributed voting power. It will be a very good option for an appchain to start with. And of course, each new appchain will bring new restaking revenue and attract more validators and delegators. Essentially, this is the network effect of Octopus 2.0. And we are about to see it happen this year.

The other part I want to mention is that we are about to launch a new protocol — Omnity, something like Layerzero or Wormhole. We’ve come a long way to explore the cross-chain domain. The last step is adaptive IBC. We built some verification proxies on the ICP blockchain to optimize the verification cost. During the journey, we found that the ICP platform is much more powerful than we realized before. So we came up with a new Omnity protocol by fully utilizing the potential of the ICP platform and our expertise in the cross-chain domain. This new protocol can guarantee minimized cost, latency, and trust assumptions. Additionally, this protocol is fully decentralized and can be applied to many blockchains. I will not hesitate to say that I believe our new protocol is better than all the existing ones, including the first-tier cross chain protocol.

I want to make one thing clear, although Omnity is a new protocol, it belongs to theOctopus family, so there will be no new tokens issued. We will keep accumulating all the protocol revenue into OCT tokens, so don’t worry about any dilution or any community fork — it will not happen. We have a very good community, investors, and supporters, and as the core team leader, I deeply appreciate the support from all of you, and we will keep working to maximize your interests.

The plan is to make the announcement of this new protocol at the end of this month. We are also talking with some close partners who can help us make the protocol better or achieve mass adoption more quickly. So we are gathering energy, and once we have met all the conditions, we will make the announcement. The developer team has started building this protocol, and it will go live in the first half of this year and begin to generate revenue for all the OCT holders.

Julian, Head of Development

We finalized the code of Octopus 2.0 and launched the Ottochain mainnet. We are dealing with issues we found in our monitoring tools.

We addressed feedback from the community members about our mainnet.

New development work is focused on the frontend. We continue to iterate on theOctopus website. Frequent visitors to our website should notice that there are changes every day.

The remaining development work of the Octopus 2.0 is the cross-chain transfers between NEAR and Ottochain. We have enabled the cross-chain transfers on the testnet, but we have found that the transfer is not stable when there are too many transactions. We have fixed this issue and have been testing it for a few days. We expect to enable it on the mainnet within the next few days.

Vivi, Head of Media

We have some news to share: we are gradually combining the community team and the media team together. I will be leading both teams. Currently, the two teams are working smoothly and in a decentralized way, which aligns with the spirit of Web3. This merging will facilitate closer collaboration between the two teams.

For the past month, our primary focus was on preparing for the launch of Octopus 2.0. This involved a range of activities, including market promotions, media exposure, website updates, and the preparation of documents and operational guides.

First off, I was invited to participate in an AMA hosted by the NEAR Foundation on December 8th. The session provided an in-depth exploration of $NEAR Restaking and shed light on what the NEAR community can anticipate from the upcoming launch of Octopus 2.0.

On December 13, I had the privilege of attending the NEAR Town Hall, where I presented the latest updates on the imminent launch of $NEAR Restaking to the NEAR community.

We’ve published articles about the launch of Octopus 2.0 across various English and Chinese channels. Furthermore, we’re in the process of preparing more articles for publication on English media channels like hackernoon, and collaborating with NEAR Week for additional promotional activities surrounding near restaking.

Our community team members are also doing a great job assisting the whole campaign on $NEAR restaking and all these interactions with the NEAR community.

Our website has undergone updates to better facilitate users to get involved in $NEAR restaking. We’ve also created guiding videos for validators, updated FAQs, and more.

Additionally, I attended several NEAR ecosystem events in Silicon Valley throughout December, sharing the latest updates of $NEAR restaking with them. We’re actively engaging with potential appchains. In fact, we already have middlewares from Near showing interest in utilizing our restaking infrastructure for $NEAR. We will keep you posted when we could share more good news.

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

Hi guys, thanks for joining the 2024 call. So there’s a growing interest in data availability, NEAR is testing above 10 megabytes per second of capacity for DA. Ethereum is currently well below one megabyte, closer to around 0.03, but after protodank sharding, which I believe is EIP-4844, is implemented, it’s supposed to increase to about one megabyte. So that’s an interesting contrast because the Cosmos chains that would consider working together with Ethereum, there are a few of them, but they’re also considering the long-term benefits. Choosing the economic benefit may seem like a short-term gain, but it’s very difficult to justify in a development cycle. So the people I’ve been talking to, who either participate in Cosmos chain operation or develop Cosmos chains or run them in production, have this balance at the moment: there are market forces that draw their interest, but also Octopus Network making these technologies available, specifically adaptive IBC, raises the question of what is the long-term operating cost to be building towards a very expensive known chain that other chains are always going to leg off of anyway, and the goal being to not to settle to the L1 and all this kind of stuff. So there’s an ongoing discussion about what is the right DA solution. Obviously, Celestia is also an option that they consider, but it also processes significantly fewer megabytes per second than NEAR DA. So that is a great draw for Octopus Network because folks who are building appchains have that scope in front of them. Those stats have been verified and tested by different people, so it makes it much more appealing to work together with NEAR protocol, and Octopus Network is the facilitator at the moment.

There are a few more marketing and media side items to look at. We should be making a few appearances. Near at Night has asked us to come back on. We’re looking forward to joining there. We’ll be doing a small giveaway there. I’d like to volunteer some OCT tokens for that. I’m really excited for the announcement and launch of the new protocol. Obviously, we can’t say too much at the moment, but it’s really excellent to keep enriching the multi-chain protocol offerings that we have while continuing to grow the value for OCT tokens and token holders.

Q&A

Q: What’s your appchain onboarding plan?

Louis: The plan for the appchain onboarding consists of a few steps.

The first step we are currently on is providing incentives to bootstrap initial security — the sponsorship we offer for Ottochain.

Now, our aim is to onboard NEAR ecosystem projects. There are several NEAR ecosystem projects that require an independent blockchain and cannot fully rely on NEAR Layer1 security. By working with them and exerting influence from NEAR Foundation, we believe we can onboard all the NEAR middleware protocols to use $NEAR restaking. This will make the incentive of restaking more attractive, as restakers can simultaneously restake multiple chains and enjoy multiple rewards. We believe we can attract a few dozen million $NEAR into the restaking economy, along with a few near middleware chains.

Once we reach a few dozen million $NEAR, the security level will be attractive and legitimate to Cosmos chains. Compared with Cosmos Hub and Eigen Layer, we have our own advantages, because our shared security solution is more flexible and we have much more experience in this field. Also, we have conducted developer training courses for Chinese-speaking Cosmos developers in 2023 and have pitched a few potential appchain teams. Some of them are attempting to raise funds. If they decide to launch their appchain when the market is better, Octopus 2.0 will be their first choice.

This is essentially our appchain onboarding plan for the Octopus 2.0 network.

Community Call #18— February 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, February 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.