Octopus DAO November 2022
Reports from Octopus Core Team and Open Discussion Q&A
On November 8th, the Octopus DAO held its fourth Community Call. This call was a particularly lively event with rich community discussion. The Octopus Core Team wants to thank all Octopus validators and delegators who showed up and participated.
We feel optimistic about the progress being made towards implementing on-chain governance, the third utility of the OCT token. The on-chain governance of Octopus Network will be implemented based on SputnikDAO V2 and AstroDAO.
Community Call #4
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
As mentioned in the last call, we’ve greatly simplified the process of deploying validator nodes. Now all you need to do is register on a cloud platform account and make a few clicks on our web app to deploy a node.
We’ve integrated a new cloud provider, Digital Ocean. They have a fixed bandwidth fee per month. So, running Fusotao nodes on Digital Ocean will be much cheaper than AWS. We recommend that the validators for Fusotao use this platform (Digital Ocean).
We’ve also implemented a new feature to batch-claim rewards. You can now claim your rewards from multiple appchains with a single click. For delegators, now you can redelegate your stake to other validators on the same appchain with no waiting period.
We’ve also integrated with an optional fiat onramp service, NEARPay, which would allow appchain users to use fiat currency to buy NEAR and transfer it to appchains. But I don’t know which appchain team will turn on this feature first.
We’ve released the new appchain template Substrate v0.9.30, which the Unique One team is currently testing.
We provided an EVM-Appchain bridge solution for our appchains based on Chainbridge. The Fusotao team is testing it to interact with Ethereum.
We’ve improved the Octopus Relayer to let the user pay part of the cross chain cost. This allows us to use new techniques to increase the security of the Octopus bridge without sacrificing the transfer speed.
The last thing is that we have enabled the Octopus DAO. The top 21 validators by total stakes will become the first council members of the Octopus DAO. I think the first responsibility of the DAO will be to vote on the appchains that are waiting to launch.
Mike Tang, Co-founder, Head of Technical Support
We’ve completed many things over the last two months. I will divide our work into three parts: Technical Support, Substrate Training, and Accelerator Program.
Technical Support
We’ve released a new EVM Appchain Onboarding Guide. This guide covers how projects using EVM can onboard to the Octopus Network easily. It includes three steps: testing in a local environment, testing on Octopus testnet, and launching on mainnet. So, you can refer to this document to test in your local environment.
In addition, many other DOCS were updated including the validator guide, delegator guide, redelegation guide, and asset crosschain guide.
We supported the transfers of the validators and delegators of DEIP so they could transfer them to other appchain projects.
Our technical support engineer visited Vietnamese teams and partners during the Vietnam Blockchain Week Event and gave them face-to-face support.
Plats Network, which is from our Accelerator, is now testing their product on the Octopus testnet.
Gable Network is preparing to launch their product on the Octopus testnet. Now they are testing heavily in their local environment.
We’ve also been providing ongoing technical support for our other appchain candidate teams, such as Dancefit, Horizonland, Yogain, Octan, and others.
Substrate Training
We‘ve finished the third batch of the Substrate Training courses in Vietnam and held the Mini-hackathon. Four excellent teams: TBH, Octavius, team4utxo, and BEAT presented their demo and won the Mini-hackathon awards. And also in Vietnam, we are holding the next Rust language course for the next batch of Substrate Training. There are so many good developers in Vietnam, what a great community.
For Nigeria, we have completed the first Substrate Training course, and held the first Mini-hackathon. The four awarded teams were HUYGA, UZUMAKI, UCHIA, and SENJU.
For Mexico Substrate Training, the first course was finished as well. There were three winning teams who received awards: Pakal, TCO, and Watermelons.
You can see that we are spreading the Substrate developer seeds all around the world and we will continue to do that.
Octopus Accelerator
The Fall Octopus Accelerator 2022 finished September 7th. There were five promising projects emerging as the winners of the Octopus Star Prize who are eligible to receive the 50k in OCT: Abyss World, Dancefit, Gable, Octan Network, and Waldo Dao. Congratulations to all of them.
Currently we are busy recruiting for the next batch: Winter Octopus Accelerator 2022, the last one this year. The application deadline is coming November 11. Orientation Day is November 14. As with the last batch, there are nine lessons in this course and we have a total of nine mentors to assist. So, if you or your friends haven’t registered for this batch of Accelerator Program, hurry to do it. Come with us to learn how to do a startup in Web3.
Louis Liu, Founder
I have two things I want all the delegators and validators to know.
First, I’d like to remind you that we have enabled a feature called redelegation on the Octopus mainnet which means that the delegator can switch to other validators in the same appchain without needing to wait 21 days to unbond and delegate again. You will not lose any block rewards by redelegating. You can always select the best validator — the validator who can represent you in the best way in the community.
Remember that delegation is not all about share of rewards. We’ve fixed the sharing rate, so whoever you delegate to now, you will get the same return. So, please do use your tokens as a vote to show your support to push up the most active and constructive validators among the community.
Second, for validators, you may encounter a situation where you may want to abandon the node of an appchain. Maybe you value another appchain more and want to switch. This is ok. We’ve asked all delegators to leave their contact information, such as email or Twitter. So, please contact them and ask them to redelegate to another node before you draw back your node as it’s the polite way to abandon an appchain node. You must take some responsibility for your delegators to trust you. So, please do it in a polite way so they will not be impacted by your decision.
I will also add that we have changed the Accelerator grant distribution to lower the risk of the Octopus Community. Instead of directly distributing 50k to the winning Star Prize team, we now split the funding into three distributions allocated proportionally based on milestones.
Once a project wins the Accelerator Star Prize, the team will get 20% of the prize. Then we will help the team build on testnet. Once they have MVP on the Octopus testnet and receive positive feedback, we can recognize the team and project as a formal appchain candidate and release another 20%. Finally, when the appchain team has completed development and is ready to launch, and their launch proposal is supported by the Octopus DAO, the final 60% will be released to the team.
Vivi Lin, Head of Media
The media team has continued to serve as the media and PR powerhouse for the Octopus Network ecosystem. We are working very closely with the Octopus community, all the developing and launching appchains, the Accelerator Program, our partners, and our broader NEAR ecosystem partners. Here are some highlights:
Unique One Network
As Unique One Network is launching soon, we created and produced a video with the Unique One Core Team to more thoroughly explain and promote their product to the community. We also conducted an AMA on Twitter Spaces. Our Editor Zan published an in-depth article in English, while our Chinese Writer, MiX, who many of you know, is developing the Chinese version as we speak. As Unique One is launching next week, you can expect to see more promotion from the Media Team.
Octopus Network Anniversary Metaverse Party
October the 8th was the first anniversary of Octopus Network and we had a metaverse party in the Myriad appchain’s metaverse, myriad.town. Octopus Network, Octopus Accelerator & Substrate Programs, Octopus Guild, Myriad, DeBio, Reality Chain, Nester City, DAO Records, and many other NEAR and Octopus Network ecosystem partners and appchains came together.
Louis, our founder, gave a keynote speech which you can enjoy on Youtube. Over 200 members of the Octopus family including validators, delegators, and partners participated. It was a really nice event that lasted 6 hours with live streaming and a variety of DJs and world class musicians.
The media team also produced a promo video on the Octopus Accelerator Star Prize Winners from the Fall 2022 Course. We also have in-depth articles covering the winners in English kudos to Zan, and Chinese kudos to Mix. And we prepared and organized an AMA in Twitter Spaces with Octopus Accelerator program manager Woori Chen.
China Open Source Conference, Shanghai
We sponsored and presented at the China Open Source Conference. David, from our development team, and Jasmine and I from the media team attended. David made a very strong presence with his presentation on the technical side of Octopus, while Jasmine and I engaged the community and attended the booth at the conference.
Aaron Ting, Head of Community
(In absentia, Zan, Editor, reporting)
We’ve been involved in an intense scrum from October focused on the global expansion of our appchain funnel. This scrum begins the first phase of a targeted six-month business development strategy designed to attract and engage quality projects.
While we are dedicated to expansion, we are equally focused on cost-efficiency and consolidation, uniting the Octopus team to share resources in order to be able to continue to build and expand regardless of market conditions.
Open Discussion Q&A
Question 1:
You’ve run the accelerator program for one year, four courses per year, and distributed $1M in grants. But since it’s a bear market, does Octopus have a plan to slow down the Accelerator and save some costs, such as making it only two courses per year?
Louis (Founder):
No, we will continue to award $1M per year and have four courses per year, one each quarter. When Octopus planned for the Accelerator Programs, we allocated enough reserves for that, so we don’t have a problem with the money for the grant funding.
Secondly, especially because we are going into a bear market, a lot of good projects will be in difficult situations seeking funding. So, it’s like we are giving them the most needed help in difficult times. And you can also see it as a type of value investing — snapping up the good projects . When everyone is afraid, now is the time for us to move bravely.
Question 2:
What has Octopus learned from the experience with DEIP. What has it resolved to do moving forward?
Louis (Founder):
We have learned a lot from the process. And we project some appchains will fail anyways since the Web3 space is full of newly formed protocols which are similar to high risk products. Even though we try to lower the risk by carefully selecting out appchain candidates, by providing reliable infrastructure to minimize the technical risk, some appchains will fail anyway. We didn’t expect the first failed appchain to come so early and I will say that we hadn’t fully prepared for that.
So, after DEIP announced they would abandon the existing appchain and token, the Octopus Core Team decided to freeze the appchain bridge and ask all the validators to resolve their nodes. The target of this reaction was to minimize the damage caused by the DEIP withdrawal since the DEIP team abandoned the token which made it meaningless to mine for Octopus validators. We notified our community to stop mining the token and took down the infrastructure. We are temporarily maintaining the DEIP blockchain explorer to assist DEIP community members who still need data.
I think the major experience is we cannot lose the standard of appchain candidates. We try to find promising projects with solid teams who can deliver protocols in a reasonable way with feasible token economics, and are able to gain support from the crypto asset market.
Actually, I still think DEIP could have fit this standard, but even before it started we’ve did have some concern about their token economics — maybe their target was too huge to address and there was no immediately clear value capture for DEIP token, but since it was a solid team coming from Europe and introduced by someone in NEAR, we finally decided to recognize them as an appchain candidate and offered them the voting queue where the Octopus community supported them to join our network as an appchain by token voting.
But it’s a surprise for me to know that only after two or three months they ran out of cash and could not even pay their team members’ salaries. I don’t know what happened since the operation of DEIP is not on the blockchain. We cannot prove anything bad happened there. But it’s a surprise — it’s a shocking event for me. We reacted in a passive way to try to protect the Octopus community.
As Julian has mentioned, we’ve formed the Octopus DAO. We haven’t announced it because there are no privileges or rights that can be executed from the DAO yet.
The first privilege we would like to transfer to DAO is appchain voting. We will use the DAO proposal voting instead of OCT token voting to make more people join the decision-making process, since, you know, the token voting has some costs — you have to lock your tokens, sacrificing block rewards which affects voting turnout rate. By replacing it with DAO voting, we can get more opinion from the community.
And the second decision making process is about how to manage an exiting appchain. It should be decided by the community, not by the core team. So, the birth and death of an appchain will be decided by the community as a DAO platform very soon, in a month or two. I think the DEIP events pushed forward our transition to a community run protocol.
Zan or Sheldon can you speak to DEIP?
Zan (Editor):
This failure of the DEIP protocol has actually given us a good opportunity to address potential weaknesses in both our onboarding and in situations where an appchain might exit without warning. It’s auspicious that it happened early in our development so we can more properly address future proposals to the Octopus DAO and get in front of them. It won’t be the only appchain that fails and I think we all know that. So, looking on the bright side, it’s brought up some of the issues we need to point our targets at.
Sheldon (Tech Lead):
Although I agree with Louis’ framing of DEIP, we were not completely passive in the situation. We did spend a good month and a half reaching out to DEIP, offering different types of support.
The main thing that we’ve stated is that, if an appchain is in trouble, we would give them a minimum of 30 days of support to be able to reinvent their product, their go-to-market plan, etc. And DEIP rejected a lot of this help that we offered. Obviously there was some trouble because some of their team mates weren’t paid and their leadership has taken some actions that are widely frowned upon by the community.
So, I just wanted to express that we were not completely passive in the situation — Aaron, myself, Zan, Luana — we did take specific efforts to try to help the DEIP team, and I want to make sure that in the future, as appchains are sort of “voted out” that we continue to support exiting appchains so that they can be quality projects that leave intentionally.
Part of Octopus Network is mitigation of risk. I feel that’s part of our responsibility here at Octopus, to help manage this risk that is very raw for startups.
Louis (Founder):
I think once we have a DAO with wide coverage, we can take more timely and accurate action to deal with situations like this. As the core team, we feel somewhat weak when dealing with this situation since the decision may be controversial. Once we are a DAO, we can make a proposal — as a whole we can warn an appchain that they need to provide a transparency report, that they need to outline a plan that makes sense for their own community and the Octopus community, or we may take some action as a whole. As a community-owned protocol, all decisions would be backed by the core community.
Question 3:
On behalf of validators, I’d like to ask: NEAR’s hardware requirements are said to decrease in the future when running a validator. So, will Octopus be the same?
Louis (Founder):
We try to define the hardware config to fit the needs of the appchain at its stage. So, we start from a low config and if the appchain grows exponentially, we have to ask the validator to upgrade their hardware. Most appchains need a very low VPS to run, about $30–40 dollars, and even less if you run it on Digital Ocean.
NEAR’s hardware requirement is dropping because NEAR is transforming into a real sharding network. So, each validator only needs one shard instead of the whole blockchain. Our network is different from the near protocol. We are a multichain network — Each appchain will have their own software node implementation.
We try to estimate the configuration to save the costs for the validator, and we’ll continuously do that, but we have committed to the appchain community that we will provide a reliable infrastructure. If we have to increase the configuration to ask for a bigger VPS, that’s actually a cool thing. It means it’s experiencing mass adoption, the appchain economy is taking off, so they need a bigger box to run their protocol and I think the software cost will be easily justified by the token price appreciation.
Sheldon (Tech Lead):
As a contrast, if you look at the hardware requirements for the NEAR validator, even the chunk producer, which is the smaller one most people are looking at, it is still a significantly higher cost than regular Octopus Network validators. We’re basically coaching appchains because they’re launching minimal viable products, so they don’t need very large layer1-scale validators.
NEAR improving into a fully sharded model for phase two is very exciting, but it’s reasonable to note that appchains initially need less hardware. As they mature, you should expect them to need a little more hardware — this is the opposite of what NEAR is introducing with the sharding model.
This doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to run a small computer and make that a validator for the future, it just means that you might need to move to a smaller appchain or a younger appchain in time. I expect it will take more than six months for any appchain to decide to make hardware requirement changes, and of course, enforcing that is a difficult decision because that means that some validators won’t be able to join the set anymore. While I don’t think this is something we need to keep in mind for the immediate future, for the long term I think this is a responsible comment.
Community Call #5 — December 8, 2022
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, December 8 — 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/
