Building Beyond the Hype — Octopus Network at NEARCON 2022
In the NEAR Future — What’s Happening at NEARCON? (3)
In anticipation of NEARCON 2022, we bring you an engaging interview conducted by David Morrison of NEAR Foundation with Vivi Lin, Partner of Octopus Network. The original event, “In the NEAR Future — What’s Happening at NEARCON?” was held by NEAR Protocol Twitter Spaces on August 10th.
Check out some excerpts below to discover how the Octopus Network BUIDL is going, our upcoming roadmap, and an insight into our plans for NEARCON!
Alternatively, you can listen to the 30-minute evergreen audio recording on Spotify.
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Please introduce yourself and the Octopus Network.
Sure. I’m Vivi Lin, Partner of Octopus Network, and also the host of the “Web3 Demystified” show. I was a TV presenter and producer for Reuters financial TV for many years, covering the financial markets. Then, around 2017, pretty much the previous bull market, I stumbled into the crypto space and went down the rabbit hole.
Octopus Network is one of the key infrastructure projects in the NEAR ecosystem. It is a multi-chain network for launching and running Substrate-based, EVM-compatible Appchains. We believe that applications — the real use cases — are essential to adoption in the crypto space — and that having one blockchain serving one application is the way to go.
So, Octopus Network has made bootstrapping an Appchain affordable and efficient — by providing flexible security, infrastructure support, cross-chain interoperability, a ready-to-be-engaged community, and unlimited scalability.
Octopus Network’s vision is also shared by many partners in the ecosystem, including NEAR. We received funding from world-class VCs like Digital Currency Group, NEAR Foundation, Electric Capital, etc. We are very committed to unleashing a new wave of innovation for Web3 with all our partners and fellows in the NEAR ecosystem and beyond.
What is an Appchain? What are the benefits of an Appchain? Why would you use one?
The idea of an Appchain is to serve one application with one independent blockchain. Appchains are more flexible than smart contracts, allowing developers to customize their applications and thus provide a better user experience.
From my observations, and probably many of you share the same feelings, one of the main reasons we haven’t seen mass adoption in the crypto space or in Web3 might have something to do with bad user experience.
For example, suppose you are building a Web3 application. If you’re building with smart contracts, you can only design your application within the smart contract framework. So, when it comes to matters that could affect your user experience, such as gas fees, speed of response, speed of transactions, there’s not much you can do because you can only optimize your app on that level. The other layers of the blockchain, such as runtime, consensus, etc., cannot be changed no matter what you do with your smart contracts.
Appchains, unlike smart contracts, allow developers to customize their applications in terms of governance structure, economic design, underlying consensus algorithm, etc. In other words, everything can be customized, and you can upgrade your product much easier and cheaper, thanks to the ready-to-use on-chain governance module. So, if you’re building your app on an Appchain, you can enjoy the full blockchain stack without competing with other applications. Probably a similar analogy is Axie Infinity. They use Sidechain Ronin to help with performance, avoid congestion, etc.
What is the cost of bootstrapping an Appchain on Octopus Network?
Octopus Network has made bootstrapping an Appchain affordable and also efficient. Because of Octopus Network’s Leased Proof of Stake (LPoS), we have decreased the cost for an Appchain to bootstrap from tens of millions of dollars (like Polkadot Parachains) to only a fraction of the cost.
In addition, we have funding support for the Appchains in our ecosystem. For the first 100 Appchains on Octopus, each project will be directly rewarded with 100k dollars worth of OCT tokens. And also, the first 10 Appchains will be additionally rewarded 1M in OCT tokens in total by the Octopus Foundation.
Everyone building on Octopus Network will receive technical and development support — and a complete infrastructure for appchains.
Why did Octopus Network choose to build on NEAR protocol?
For us, it’s really an easy choice because we share a lot of synergies with NEAR. NEAR prioritizes usability, and we think that NEAR is probably the most user-friendly protocol out there in the space.
Someone used to say that what Ethereum has promised or planned to do, NEAR has already achieved — like NEAR uses Proof of Stake to secure the network and implements sharding to make transactions fast and low-cost. So, based on NEAR, Octopus and the Appchains in the Octopus ecosystem can enjoy usability, scalability, affordability, high performance, and interoperability with other networks. So, it’s not like we’re building on NEAR only. We can also connect with Ethereum via Rainbow Bridge and Cosmos or Polkadot via IBC.
Also, on a personal note, our founder Louis Liu, when meeting the co-founder of NEAR, Illia, in the early days — They shared a lot of visions in common. So, the human factors matter a lot, the trust — We really like the NEAR team and the communities, and those were also important reasons that we chose to build here, and we are grateful and happy with our choice. We are working with NEAR communities worldwide and just keep building in this space.
Octopus is coming to NEARCON again this year! What are your plans for NEARCON 2022?
Octopus is sending a team — we’re flying in from around the world. We have our Technical Lead, Sheldon, and our Social Media Lead, Luana, coming from the US. And Kelson, our Marketing Exec, works very closely with NEAR Malaysia and is flying from Malaysia.
Besides being speakers at NEARCON to share our stories and exchange ideas with other projects in the NEAR ecosystem, we will have a booth for Octopus. The plan is also to invite the appchains going (to NEARCON) to share their stories and latest developments with the other projects in the NEAR Ecosystem.
We will host side events — there may be something on a boat! We will announce the details on our Twitter when confirmed, and you are all invited!
Please come to NEARCON, check out our booth, say “Hi!” — and join our events! There is so much going on and so many interesting things — we can’t wait.
A lot of great projects are born in a bear market.
Tell us about the current Octopus Network ecosystem. How’s the build going?
Currently, we have five Appchains already live on the Octopus mainnet.
- DeBio.Net is a decentralized biomedical network that allows users to sample and test anonymously.
- Myriad is a decentralized social network that enables users to claim ownership of their content.
- DEIP is a decentralized infrastructure for the creator economy.
- Atocha Protocol is a decentralized P2E puzzle game protocol.
- Fusotao is an infrastructure that allows you to build your own decentralized exchanges and trade securely and privately with zero gas fees.
Those appchains are already live, and around 10 Appchain candidates are building on Octopus right now, just to name a few, like Discovol, a decentralized platform to discover and distribute high-quality content. They will launch their mainnet a little bit later this month.
Plats Network is a community-owned Web3 marketing platform for global users and influencers. They just did a testnet on Octopus Network two weeks ago.
And another one is Portalverse, a decentralized cloud gaming network for open and highly immersive virtual worlds. It allows the building of a peer-to-peer, distributed cloud gaming network that serves as computing power infrastructure for the Metaverse. They just received multi-million dollar seed funding during this bear market, which shows that no matter the market condition, solid projects still receive funding and support and keep building.
And so just like that, there’s so much going on in the Octopus ecosystem, and obviously in the NEAR ecosystem as well. A lot of great projects are born in a bear market.
How does Octopus Network interact with and help the Appchains building on it?
Octopus Network does not have its own blockchain. Rather, it is a set of smart contracts that live on the NEAR blockchain, as a whole as the Octopus Relay. And we have a two-sided market here: the Appchains will pay for the security of their applications with their native tokens to a set of validator nodes. Validators stake our token $OCT to run a node, and the delegators delegate $OCT to their choice of validator. Appchains can decide the amount of security they need to not be in an inflationary situation with too much security for their use case.
So, you can think of the Octopus Network as the link between NEAR and a lot of Appchains. The Octopus Relay enables Appchains’ interoperability with NEAR protocol and Ethereum via the Rainbow Bridge. Additionally, Appchains can utilize an out-of-box IBC pallet to connect with any IBC-enabled blockchains, like Cosmos or Polkadot.
So, that is how we interact with each other in a way. But in another sense, we really support each other in a lot of different ways, not only the financial support like we mentioned, but also the technical support, community support, marketing, and PR support, especially because we are in such an early stage. So, we are basically all-hands-on-deck, supporting the ecosystem as much as we can. And also, all the Appchains within the ecosystem will support each other. They form partnerships and work together in a really healthy way.
What’s on the roadmap for Octopus? What are the top priorities this year?
Our priority has always been to serve the Appchains so that we can help make Web3 happen faster. We envision thousands of blockchains in the future, and most of them will be application-specific. But to be honest, in reality, a lot of them would have little chance of securing a Parachain slot, bootstrapping a Cosmos Zone, or scaling to an autonomous blockchain, so our mission is to help them to build on Octopus with all our support so that they can bootstrap and run effectively with lower cost.
So, we just keep expanding. The market condition doesn’t really affect us. We are really here for the long term as we are the infrastructure.
In other news, we have Substrate training around the world. We also have the Octopus Accelerator program four times every year — one each quarter. We think of this as a base to support Web3 projects and Web3 entrepreneurs. So, if you are building an application-focused Web3 project, please check out Octopus Accelerator. You’ll get all this expertise, mentorship, and financial support — if your project stands out, you will get a grant.
In addition, we will push forward and build the Octopus DAO to achieve DAO governance eventually.
Lastly, we have a major milestone for the rest of 2022 — the final production of the Substrate-IBC module. Our development team is really working very hard on this, and it will eventually enable full interconnection of Octopus Appchains with Cosmos and Polkadot. And I believe that will be really a game changer as well.
So, we have a lot of things to build. And in the meantime, we are interacting with all the projects in the NEAR Ecosystem, which is why NEARCON makes so much sense for us, and we really welcome this opportunity for a big fest of innovation!
Anything you want to shout out?
I’d like to give a shout to two things. One is definitely NEARCON. I hope everyone listening to this can go to the NEAR website and check out the event.
And I’d also like to give a shout-out to our Accelerator Program. If you are building a Web3 project, this is the place to be. You get all this expertise and mentorship. You get a whole network of help — and financial support if your project does well. So, if you are building an application-focused Web3 project, please check out the Accelerator and follow the Accelerator Twitter, so you don’t miss the opportunity.
Just keep building! See you at NEARCON!
To listen to the full conversation, head over to Spotify.
