The Launch of $NEAR Restaking
$NEAR Restaking, an innovative mechanism that allows staked $NEAR tokens to serve as cryptoeconomic security for decentralized blockchains beyond the NEAR Protocol, is set to go live on December 17. This signifies that $NEAR holders will have the opportunity to restake their $NEAR and earn additional rewards.
On December 13, Vivi Lin, partner of Octopus Network, was invited to attend the NEAR Town Hall to provide the latest update on the upcoming launch of $NEAR Restaking to the NEAR community.
Below is the transcript of this speech.
Vivi: Hello everyone, this is Vivi from Octopus Network. Very happy to join Near Town Hall.
Today I am going to talk about something really exciting — the launch of $Near Restaking, which is the major part of Octopus 2.0. If you remember — we started the upgrade plan at the beginning of the year, and now we are delivering it.
Before I get into the details — I’d like to ask you all to mark the day — December 17th this year, you could stake your $NEAR to Ottochain, to earn extra rewards.
Now for those who don’t know who we are yet — We are one of the key infrastructures on NEAR, designed to serve application-specific blockchains, or appchains, with shared security, interoperability, essential utilities, and community support. The logic behind is straight-forward — when you could customize your decentralized applications with a specific blockchain, you could greatly improve your user experience, and that’s the key to mass adoption.
At the beginning of 2023, we started the Octopus 2.0 plan, which includes NEAR Restaking and Adaptive IBC to connect NEAR with Cosmos.
Now let’s get to $NEAR Restaking — the idea is inspired by Eigenlayer.
The most straightforward understanding would be — like the gentleman from the Ethereum community, who put it this way — you stake $ETH, and then you stake it again. I am not going into all the details about how Eigenlayer works here today — just to show you they have huge support from the Ethereum community.
We are doing something similar with $NEAR for the NEAR community. The Octopus Network team has been working on a smart contract called Restaking Base, which brings restaking to the NEAR protocol.
Like I mentioned earlier, $NEAR Restaking will be live on December 17th. That means $NEAR holders, like me and probably a lot of you watching or listening to the NEAR Town Hall, could restake our $NEAR tokens to earn additional rewards.
More in-depth information about how the process works from the back-end. Once a $NEAR holder, like you and me, deposit our $NEAR tokens in the Restaking Base smart contract, these assets are delegated to NEAR L1 validator pools and all these L1 staking rewards will go to $NEAR stakers without a fee. And then with the Restaking Base contract, it allows $NEAR holders to restake their $NEAR tokens to Octopus appchains as a way to provide shared security. By doing so, $NEAR holders could choose to be validators or delegators with their restaked $NEAR.
As a validator, you basically agree to run nodes for appchains and stay consistently online. As a delegator, you’ll delegate your restaked $near to the validator. Delegators will pay 20% of the staking rewards to validators. As a validator, you have a lot of responsibilities. If any of them, supposedly, fails to keep their commitments, such as messing up the node configuration, attacking the appchain networks, or being offline, the appchains could slash their $NEAR as punishment.
For more technical details, you could take a look at our founder Louis’s article.
Now when it comes to value distribution — for L1 staking rewards, 100% of the restaking rewards from the NEAR protocol will be given to $NEAR holders. When it comes to appchains rewards, 70% will be distributed to $NEAR holders, and 30% will be revenues for Octopus Network, which the team will use to buy back $OCT tokens in the open markets and then burn them.
In most situations, appchain rewards will be distributed in the appchain’s native token. However, the options could be flexible. It’s up to appchain teams and communities to decide how and how much will be paid to restakers. In the case of Ottochain, the rewards will be in $OCT tokens.
Now let’s address the elephant in the room — why restaking? What are the benefits?
There are many. For $NEAR holders, restaking allows you to multiply your earnings when you restake your $NEAR to validate or delegate to appchains.
For the broader NEAR ecosystem — by enabling restaking with $NEAR, there will be more appchains and middlewares to use $NEAR as underlying staking assets, which will increase the value capture for $NEAR.
In addition, restaking encourages $NEAR holders to stake more, thus reducing the amount of $NEAR in circulation. This dynamic helps establish a healthier supply-demand balance for $NEAR.
Further more — a very important point we’d like to make, which is in line with NEAR’s open web mission. The Octopus team plans to relinquish control of the restaking base contract, and make restaking an immutable part of the NEAR base protocol. That means — the restaking infrastructure that Octopus built is permissionless, and any project in NEAR could use it for free to provide shared security with NEAR Restaking.
In fact, we have already had middlewares from NEAR that are interested in using the restaking infrastructure for $NEAR. We will keep you posted when we could share more good news.
For the Octopus community, it is going to be a win-win situation as well, since we will be able to expand our market presence, generate more revenues, and ultimately increase $OCT holders’ interests through the buy back and burn mechanism.
Without further ado, $NEAR Restaking will be live with Ottochain, which is an appchain initiated by the Octopus community. Octopus Network will give away 4 million OCT tokens as a support as restaking rewards to NEAR stakers.
So get involved in the great experience — you could follow our twitter and website for the instructions on $NEAR Restaking, which is coming very soon.
Before I wrap up, we have another great news to share — Secret Network, a privacy protocol from Cosmos, will be the first Cosmos project to use adaptive IBC to connect to NEAR from Cosmos, in the upcoming quarter — marking the beginning of a new era for multichain realities.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. Thank you very much.
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
- Github: https://github.com/octopus-network
- Docs: https://docs.oct.network/
