Octopus Network Mainnet Launch Keynote Speech — Louis Liu, Founder

“Hello everyone, good evening, morning, or afternoon, depending on where you are. Today we are gathered in a wonderful metaverse, celebrating the launch of the Octopus mainnet together!

As you may have heard, we chose today for the birthday of the Octopus Network because October 8th is World Octopus Day. If you are familiar with octopuses, you will know that they have an exceptional degree of intelligence and learning ability. You may have even wondered, as I have— Why haven’t octopuses built a civilization? The answer is simple — octopuses do not have sociality.

An octopuses’ parents die shortly after their birth. They don’t know their siblings and have no friends. Although they have a strong curiosity and can learn to acquire amazing skills, octopuses live their lives alone. I feel sorry for octopuses, but feel lucky as a human being.

Human beings’ success is due to their sociality. In short, we collaborate. The developmental process of civilization is none other than the evolutionary process of collaboration.

Today, crypto protocols built on blockchain technology have opened the gate to a new era of collaboration. Internet users are not restricted by region, race, nationality, or even language. We can skip Internet platforms and traditional middlemen, and transact and interact with each other directly.

As the coordinator of transactions and interactions, decentralized crypto protocols are not committed to maximizing extraction. Rather they are committed to returning as much of the economic value created by transactions and interactions as possible to the protocol participants.

In order to restrict crypto protocols from being controlled and abused by individuals or minorities and becoming new tools for “rent-seeking,” we encode economic rules — namely the distribution principle of rights and interests on distributed ledgers, or blockchains. The idea of “decentralization” means to be owned by the community and resistant to control by a small group of people, no matter the amount of rich resources, wealth, or computation power they have.

But I want to remind everyone that blockchain technology itself cannot resist centralization. It only provides the feasibility for communities to do that. Only under the condition that the community actively and continuously maintains decentralization can the crypto protocol stay away from the other end of the polarity.

This brings up a more basic question, what is a community? In my opinion, a community is an institution formed spontaneously for a common goal. As long as you agree with the goal of the community, or even part of it, and participate in some form to help realize the goal, you are a member of the community.

The goal of the Octopus Network community is to build an appropriate Web3.0 infrastructure and incubate hundreds if not thousands of Web3.0 applications in the form of blockchains, which we call appchains for short. If you buy $OCT tokens just for short-term profit, and you don’t care about the goal of the Octopus Network, then I am here to make it clear — You are not considered a member of the Octopus Network community.

As the co-founders, we designed a basic path to achieve the goal. The core team members gathered for this goal and path, followed by investors, appchain teams, validators, ambassadors, and others who participate in various ways. There is also the co-founder of NEAR Protocol, Illia, and many others from the NEAR team, who played a key role in the birth of the Octopus Network. I am deeply grateful to all these people.

I believe that the strength and wisdom of the community are much more powerful than that of mere individuals or teams. So, I urge everyone here to stay active!

If you happen to be a developer, why not create a great Web3.0 application with your friends? The Octopus Network Accelerator will help you realize your dream. Even if you are not a developer, you still have tons of ways to stay active.

Speak out your thoughts and suggestions, participate in testing, find some Web3.0 application teams and tell them that Octopus Network is their best stage. Actively participate in voting, staking, and validation for Octopus appchains. Become a user of the appchain that you feel is interesting and has merit, and help that team build their own communities.

I sincerely promise here today that Octopus Network itself will become a crypto protocol that belongs to our community. Today is the birthday of Octopus Network and the starting point of the process of decentralization. The Octopus Network will take about three years to gradually realize comprehensive on-chain governance, hand over the rights of resource allocation, executive staff appointment, and protocol upgrade to the community.

Let us be octopuses with sociality and become a part of a new human civilization based on community-owned crypto protocols! Thank you!”