Octopus DAO May 2023

On May 8th, the Octopus DAO held its tenth Community Call. The Octopus Core Team wants to thank all Octopus validators and delegators who showed up and participated.

Last month, Octopus Network made a formal announcement about its 2.0 plan, establishing two critical milestones: the launch of the NEAR IBC Port in Q2 and the availability of the $NEAR restaking marketplace in Q3. Presently, our community and media teams are engaged in the development of strategic execution plans. These plans are not only aimed at advancing the $Restaking narrative, thereby strengthening our presence and impact in the Restaking sector, but also at expanding our influence within the NEAR and Cosmos ecosystems. All these initiatives are part of our overarching goal to stimulate growth on both sides of our shared security marketplace: Cosmos chains and $NEAR restakers.

Community Call #10

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

Louis, Founder

As we all understand, the crypto market is driven by narratives. There were many narratives being told, but eventually only certain ones that truly add value over time prove to be successful. For example, the Layer2 narrative has now been proven valuable with evidence that the total trading volume of Layer2s surpasses that of Layer1s. As a startup team, we should remain alert to new narratives, but we must recognize two key issues. First, the probability of a narrative turning successful is relatively low — perhaps only one in ten narratives will ultimately prove valuable. Second, the Octopus Network team has a unique DNA. We’re not necessarily equipped to chase every trending narrative. For instance, we lack the technical ability to follow narratives like ZK-rollup, Zero Knowledge Proof, and MEV, which have been hot topics since last year.

With our services and technological advantages in mind, we are committed to the narrative of Restaking. Recently, this topic has sparked increasing discussion in the Ethereum community. Eigen Layer introduced this primitive and is undoubtedly the leader in this field. To be seen and recognized as a major Restaking player, we need to engage more closely with Eigen Layer and contribute more to the discussion and promotion of the Restaking narrative. However, there has been limited discussion about Restaking within the NEAR ecosystem, apart from the Octopus Network. This is an area where we need to exert considerable effort. If the Restaking narrative spreads rapidly throughout the crypto world like the MEV narrative, I believe the NEAR community will recognize its value sooner or later.

Octopus 2.0 will be launched in Q3 of this year, which is around the same time as the Eigenlayer mainnet launch according to its roadmap. From a technical maturity perspective, Octopus has its advantages as a shared security service provider. Firstly, Octopus has successfully run the LPoS marketplace for over two years, which has solidified our operational and technical experience. Secondly, Octopus 2.0 is specifically targeting the Cosmos chains vertical, which reduces the overall technical difficulty of our solution compared to Eigenlayer. Therefore, I anticipate that our service offering will be more mature and stable when we launch in Q3.

Our challenge, however, is that our presence in the crypto community is not as strong as we’d like. To address this, our media and community team needs to engage more in the restaking discussion and interact more with top crypto influencers to expand our influence. Our goal is to position Octopus as one of the few outstanding crypto projects in the Restaking vertical, alongside Eigen Layer. We are confident that if we achieve this, Octopus will take off with the Restaking narrative.

There are two sides to our $NEAR restaking marketplace— Cosmos chains and $NEAR restakers. Boosting the demand side, the Cosmos chains, is more challenging. Our strategy involves two main avenues of effort. First, through the Cosmos Hong Kong Accelerator, which replaced the previous Octopus Accelerator and Substrate Training Program, we aim to expand our influence in the Cosmos ecosystem. Second, we will pursue direct business development to onboard more established Cosmos projects on Octopus. This will generate more protocol revenues and, in turn, stakeholders will recognize our value, creating a positive feedback loop that attracts more innovative projects, top crypto venture capitals, etc.

On the supply side, we have $NEAR restakers. Our strategy is to connect with major $NEAR validators to encourage them to restake $NEAR on our marketplace. The good news is that most validators are large token funds and professional stakers, entities with which we’re already familiar and can easily reach. Just last week, I had a meeting with a $NEAR validator. They are keeping a keen eye on Restaking and know well about EigenLayer. I anticipate that major stakers will welcome this innovative approach since staking forms a core part of their business and Restaking promises additional revenue. Our task is to engage them, clearly articulate the benefits, costs, and potential risks of Restaking. The benefits include additional appchain rewards and the cost primarily revolves around IT, both of which are quantifiable. As for risks, once they understand our mechanism, they can manage them effectively.

So, technically, I am confident that we can prepare the $NEAR restakers for the Restaking marketplace by the time we launch in October. I will push for progress on this front. Our journey won’t be without challenges, but we are ready to give our 100% and hope for the best.

Julian, Head of Development

The most important thing the development team accomplished last month was improving the design of the restaking base and completing the design of the LPOS market contract. One use case of the restaking for Octopus 2.0 is to provide security for the appchains. It requires users who participate to stake a large amount of NEAR tokens and run a validator node. Many users only have a small number of assets and do not want to run nodes themselves. The LPOS market allows such users to participate in restaking as delegators. According to this modification, we have also improved the design of the restaking base. These two contracts are core components of Octopus 2.0.

The development work of the dev team last month was focused on Near-IBC, and we are currently working on implementing ICS-20 fungible token transfer. We expect to complete the development of Near-IBC and begin testing by the end of this month.

Another development we worked on was integrating the Tendermint light client into ICP. This component is part of the verification proxy in Octopus 2.0 and can be used to verify cross-chain messages from Cosmos to Near.

The last thing is that the development team collaborates with the media team to develop a GPT bot. We hope that this bot will help us answer questions from the community about Octopus 2.0.

Aaron Ting, Head of Community

The community has grown significantly over the last few months with a slight decrease of 70 followers for the past month. As of 3rd May 2023, Octopus Network has over 62.3K followers on Twitter, 3993 members on Discord, 800 followers on Medium and 7629 followers on Octopus Network Official group on Telegram, totalling about 75K followers. The community’s growth has been relatively stable with the number of followers remaining consistent for the past four months.The Octopus Network community team continues to actively promote community engagement and cultural content to build and nurture the community.

Community team has been actively engaging with the community through various channels. We have been making progress on several fonts. For example, we have been actively posting on Twitter and organized a survey in the Telegram group, rewarding those who provided feedback on Octopus Network. The feedback will be used to inform the Strategic Marketing Plan which is currently being drafted and is expected to be completed this month. We conducted a personal interview with survey participants to collect data for the plan with rewards set to be sent out soon.

The team has also been active in attending events and conferences with Aaron attending the Web3 Metaverse event in Johor Bahru and Octopus Network being present at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival 2023 with NEAR Protocol and Cosmos. Octopus Network was also one of the sponsors for the Crypto & Web3 Networking Iftar Meetup in Istanbul on 14th April.

In addition, the team hosted a $130 giveaway event for Octopus Network’s multi-chain connectivity which had about 192 participants tuning in. Another significant activity was the creation of the brand mantra, OCT = Optimize, Create, Thrive, to reflect on Octopus Network’s core values. This mantra empowers users to optimize their operations, create new and innovative solutions and ultimately thrive in the decentralized ecosystem. Optimizing operation is a critical component of any business and for blockchain infrastructure platforms like Octopus Network, it’s important to provide fast, secure and scalable solutions that enable users to optimize their decentralized applications. Creating new and innovative solutions is also a crucial aspect of blockchain technology which is known for its potential to disrupt traditional industries and create new opportunities for innovation. Thriving in the decentralized ecosystem requires a combination of optimization and innovation and focus on building and nurturing a thriving community.

The team has also launched Octopus Guild Reborn which is an extension of the community engagement program. The guild has 14 founding council members, mostly comprising ex-core team members and ex-ambassadors. We are currently in the process of planning, including the community chain and will expand participation from the community later this month once plans are finalized. Regarding launchpad, the audit found three non-critical issues that have been fixed and the team is waiting for auditors to issue the final audit report. The Launchpad team will continue to work on the final UI/UX, with a target to launch in June.

And Community Team continues to host the 4th Accelerator Appchain Showcase Series, which featured Deepmine, a P2E(Play-to-Earn) social economic strategy game set in an ever-expanding Sci-Fi Metaverse. Attendees were given the opportunity to learn about Deepmine’s game design, uniqueness and development directly from the team behind the project.

Jasmine, Media Team Member (Filling in for Vivi)

Last month, the Media team continued to support the Octopus team and ecosystem during major events through media PR and storytelling.

Our primary focus last month revolved around promoting our events at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival and the official announcement of Octopus 2.0 by Louis during this festival. We covered everything from booth material preparation, pre-event hype, on-site coverage, and the post-event followup. During our Hong Kong trip, we were invited to participate in four major events. First and foremost, the NEAR side event, where Louis delivered a keynote speech on Octopus 2.0. This was the first time we officially announced our 2.0 plan in detail to the public, and we received a lot of positive feedback. We’ll continue to promote our 2.0 message to the NEAR, Cosmos, and broader crypto communities. We published the text version of this speech in both English and Chinese. Additionally, we co-hosted a Cosmos meetup in Hong Kong, bringing together many Chinese Cosmos builders and international friends, including Cosmos OG Zaki, Keplr and Osmosis co-founder Josh Lee, and many others. Louis delivered a keynote speech at this meetup as well, themed “NEAR will be a Cosmos Zoon soon.” Wherein he laid out how our adaptive IBC bridges will enable interoperability between hundreds of DApps on NEAR and the Cosmos ecosystem. We also compiled an article based on this speech. Besides that, we have also participated in two cross-chain panels, you could find more details about that in our monthly report. Beyond these events, we were pleased to meet many partners, former Octopus accelerator members, and of course our community members. Overall, this trip was quite successful. It provides us with a perfect opportunity to share the finalized Octopus 2.0 plan. Our influence in the crypto community and our relationships with the partners were enhanced further. And Thanks to Mix and Cesar’s collaboration on social media coverage during this trip, we were among the top 5 most influential projects in the NEAR ecosystem that week, according to LunarCrush’s statistics.

Another important thing I’d like to highlight is the Cosmos Chinese developer training and the launch of the Cosmos Hong Kong Accelerator, or you can call it CHA. As you may know, we aim to engage more with the Cosmos ecosystem to onboard Cosmos chains for our 2.0 marketplace. So, late last year, we co-organized the first Cosmos Chinese developer training with other Cosmos builders and venture capital firms. The training went very well, and we already got some potential appchains for our new marketplace. To further our impact in the Cosmos ecosystem, last month, we launched the CHA in collaboration with two long-term partners, IBCL (the most active Chinese Cosmos community) and BIANJIE AI (a renowned blockchain company in China and a Cosmos ecosystem contributor since 2016). Genesis members for this initiative include venture capital firms Waterdrip, ND Labs, and two Cosmos projects, Forble and Likecoin. This mission of Cosmos Hong Kong Accelerator is to foster the prosperity of the Cosmos ecosystem in the Asia-pacific region by providing developer training, hackathons, community meetups, fundraising and more. We hope to make it the most influential accelerator in the Asia-Pacific regionas, and in return, it allows us to engage with a bunch of projects from the Cosmos ecosystem and to have them use our shared security and interoperability service. And the good news is the second batch of Cosmos developer training which is organized under the name of CHA is coming soon.

On top of that, the media team continuously works to increase Octopus’ presence in the crypto space. Our team leader, Vivi, has always been very active in the crypto community and social media. Last month, she was invited to host a Twitter Space on the topic of the opportunities that arise from combining Web3 with chatGPT. She also speaked as a guest at another Twitter Space about WomenInWeb3 on April 12. In addition, You might have noticed Vivi had a lot of interactions with influencers from the NEAR ecosystem and also Eigen Layer’s founder Sreeram on twitter last month. In the coming months, you can expect to see that we are gonna have more interactions with them through video interviews and Twitter Spaces, to promote Octopus 2.0 and the Restaking narrative together.

Last but not least, we are planning a brand update for Octopus 2.0. Currently, we are optimizing our website from visuals to text, and we are collaborating with a community member to create a series of 3D animations that will better convey our brand image. We’ll keep you updated on the progress and welcome any suggestions you might have.

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.

Question1:

I understand that infrastructure is very important and appchains are a good direction to solve many issues of dapps. However, I haven’t seen any appchain running on Octopus for too long. I wonder how much longer we have to wait. Looking at Aurora, even though they are downtrend, they still have many dapps developing and running during this time.

Louis:

It’s true that the number of appchains running on Octopus has not met our expectations. One reason for this is the slower-than-anticipated growth of the Substrate chain ecosystem, which has even experienced a decline in the number of Substrate chains over the past two years. Conversely, the Cosmos ecosystem has recently been thriving, with many outstanding teams opting to launch their own Cosmos chains.

The key lies in adapting to the shifting market landscape. That’s why we introduced Octopus 2.0 to extend our shared security services to Cosmos chains, implement NEAR restaking to bolster the security of this market, and construct adaptive IBC bridges to enhance interoperability. By taking these steps, we will strengthen our capabilities as an infrastructure provider, allowing us to onboard and accommodate more appchains in the future.

Question2:

How to expand influence in the Cosmos ecosystem? I feel like Octopus Network is not very well known on the Cosmos side.

Louis:

We have been actively engaged and contributing to the Cosmos ecosystem since 2020. Two and a half years ago, we received a grant from the Interchain Foundation (ICF) to develop Substrate IBC, also known as ICS10. To date, the ICF has accepted six out of our seven milestones. We once coordinated a team of Chinese translators and took the lead in translating the IBC specification document. Last year, we proposed the ICS12 (NEAR IBC), which is currently under development. In addition, we are constructing adaptive IBC bridges with the goal of making IBC a truly universal cross-chain protocol. As you can see, we have made many technical contributions to the Cosmos ecosystem, and in order to further our influence, we are seeking to engage more with the Cosmos community.

Late last year, we co-hosted the first Cosmos Chinese Developer Training, and just last month, we launched the Cosmos Hong Kong Accelerator (CHA) as one of the three initiators, along with four other genesis members. Our aim is to promote the growth of the Cosmos ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region. The CHA will replace the previous Octopus Accelerator and Substrate training program, which were operated solely by us. We believe that collective power is much greater than individual effort. As the CHA develops, we anticipate our influence within the Cosmos ecosystem to grow accordingly.

To be honest, the Asia Cosmos community has been somewhat isolated from the American and European communities. However, we are making concerted efforts to bridge this gap. We invited Cosmos OG Zaki to attend the launching ceremony of the CHA and he also expressed interest in the upcoming second batch of Cosmos Chinese developer training. We are optimistic that CHA will bring us more opportunities to interact and collaborate with top Cosmos projects and influencers, ultimately enhancing our presence and influence within the Cosmos ecosystem. Furthermore, the media and community team is aligning their objectives to better support and advance this goal.

Community Call #11 — June 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, June 8th–12:00 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
• 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
• Accelerator Program: https://accelerator.oct.network/
• Github: https://github.com/octopus-network
• Docs: https://docs.oct.network/