Octopus DAO April 2023

Octopus DAO Community Call #9 — April Reports

The ninth Community Call was conducted on 8th of April with the summary of updates from development, community and media team respectively for the month of March and from idea to paper. Octopus Network founder, Louis Liu presented a detailed presentation on Octopus 2.0, bringing his vision to life. The teams are currently working on the execution plan for Octopus 2.0 which includes NEAR Restaking and Adaptive IBC.

Community Call #9

The Community Call is divided into two parts:

1. Core Team Updates:

-Founder — Louis Liu

-Head of Development — Julian Sun

-Head of Community — Aaron Ting

-Head of Media — Vivi Lin

2. Open Discussion Q&A — We welcome fact-based discussions 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 Liu, Founder

At the beginning of this year, we announced that we were planning Octopus 2.0. I’m pleased to say that we have now finalized our plan for Octopus 2.0. Meanwhile, our engineers, media team, and community team have all begun working hard on the execution plan for Octopus 2.0.

Octopus 2.0 = $Near Restaking + Adaptive IBC. I believe this provides a clear definition of Octopus 2.0. But before delving into Octopus 2.0, let’s take a step back and review our ecological position in the NEAR ecosystem.

NEAR has a comprehensive infrastructure to embrace as many Web3 developers as possible. The core is NEAR sharding blockchain with unprecedented scalability and usability, being around by Aurora for EVM execution, Calimero for enterprise use cases, Pagoda for startup facilities, and Machina for decentralized storage. The recently introduced Blockchain Operating System(BOS) unifies the Web3 user experience and provides developer tools to build.

Octopus Network is an essential part of NEAR infrastructure, which was designed to serve application-specific blockchains, aka appchains. The Octopus Network provides shared security, interoperability, critical utilities, and community support to appchains. After two years of improving the current architecture of Octopus, the time has come for a major upgrade. The next-generation Octopus Network will embrace the latest technology and target a broader market.

The first part of Octopus 2.0 is $NEAR Restaking, which will become Octopus’s new shared security supply. Currently, the $OCT token is the exclusive collateral asset to be staked for ensuring appchain security. People may ask us why not use $NEAR directly. The reason is that NEAR has its own layer one staking mechanism, which provides around 10% annual return, a very generous reward, in my opinion. Suppose Octopus Network uses $NEAR as the staking asset. Either appchain rewards are not attractive compared to layer one staking, or appchains must dilute their token heavily to satisfy stakers. Neither case is optimal for Octopus Network.

Several months ago, we learned about restaking from Eigenlayer. The emergence of the restaking primitive has proven to be a delightful surprise for us. It can harmonize the two-sided market of shared security and resolve our dilemma. We can’t wait to incorporate the restaking mechanism into the Octopus protocol. A smart contract named Restaking Base is under activity development and will bring restaking to the NEAR blockchain.

After it goes live, any $NEAR holder can choose to deposit their $NEAR token to the Restaking Base contract. Then those assets will be delegated to the underlying layer one validator pool specified by stakers. All the layer one staking reward belongs to $NEAR stakers.

Once $NEAR holders have set up some stake in the Restaking Base contract, they can choose to restakte to multiple appchains. Their restaking actions establish contracts to provide security for appchains, in which they pledge to operate nodes for these appchains while maintaining consistent online availability. In exchange, appchains offer rewards to them, often in the form of the appchain’s native token, but alternatively in other formats that stakers are willing to accept. The Octopus appchain rewards will be shared between NEAR stakers and OCT holders according to a predetermined ratio. 70:30 is the ratio on our minds now, and NEAR stakers take the bigger pie. Should a staker fail to fulfill their commitments — such as by misconfiguring nodes, attempting to attack the appchain network, or being unable to maintain a stable online presence — appchains reserve the right to slash the staker’s assets, in this case, $NEAR, as a punishment measure. The restaking process is not that complex. But let’s take a step back. Why restaking anyway? Is it important?

There are a few stakeholders in the system. The first is $NEAR holders. For them, the advantages are substantial. Whereas they were previously limited to layer one staking rewards, the same assets can yield multiple staking incentives, enhancing capital efficiency.

For appchains, in comparison to solo proof of stake, OCT staking, or replicated security, $NEAR restaking presents the most affordable, accessible, and flexible source of security. This is due to the rewards they provide merely needing to cover the edge cost of $NEAR stakers. Moreover, with a modest number of stakers, such as 10–20, the appchains network can be successfully initiated. Furthermore, like the NEAR layer one network, appchains allocate validator rewards to $NEAR stakers. This alignment of incentives between appchains and the NEAR ecosystem fosters heightened awareness and support within the community.

For NEAR protocol, it can internalize more value streams, including appchains and middleware chains. Surely it will make $NEAR staking more profitable. By taking more $NEAR from circulation, restaking will positively impact the supply-demand dynamics. The best part is NEAR protocol; its community does not need to pay a penny.

For the Octopus Network, restaking means more people and more assets will participate in the market of security sharing, making the shared security offering more attractive to appchains — a giant leap to boost the network effect of Octopus.

Viewed from a broader perspective, I think Eigenlayer’s invention will be indispensable to any PoS public chain. Some believe that Eigenlayer represents Ethereum’s most anticipated advancement, a sentiment that has garnered considerable popularity within the primary market. Last month, Eigenlayer raised 50 million US dollars. What Eigenlayer brings for Ethereum, the Octopus Network can do better for NEAR. Without modesty, we can assert that we are the pioneers of shared security between blockchains. Since the mainnet launch in October 2021, Octopus has practiced shared security across consensus domains for a long time. We have unparalleled experience in this field.

More importantly, Octopus Network has no intention of monopolizing or controlling $NEAR restaking. Once we are confident in the functionality and security of the Restaking Base contract, we will relinquish control of the contract and make restaking a part of the immutable NEAR base protocol. Any blockchain that wishes to establish its own security foundation through $NEAR restaking directly can use it without the need for Octopus’ permission or pay any fee to us.

The spirit of a multi-chain network lies within its interoperability protocol. IBC is the most comprehensive open blockchain interoperability protocol stack invented by Cosmos. After working on IBC for almost three years, we decided to set up the NEAR IBC port. From there, the NEAR protocol will connect with Octopus appchains and the Cosmos interchain comprising 50+ blockchains. Imagine how many protocol composition opportunities the IBC port can create for NEAR and Cosmos!

In the coming year, we aim to encompass EVM blockchains into the network, Ethereum, Binance Chain, Avalanche, etc. And there is no reason we can’t expand IBC connections to other blockchains, such as Polkadot and Solana, if demand exists. Essentially, Octopus is trying to make NEAR Protocol an intrinsic part of the emerging Internet of Blockchains.

We are not alone in this endeavor. Many teams are building open-source IBC-enabled heterogeneous cross-chain solutions, with Composable Finance and Datachain particularly noteworthy. We greatly respect their work and mutually borrow from each other’s development achievements. This is precisely the charm of open protocols and open-source software. At the same time, we believe that Octopus is best positioned to expand IBC beyond Cosmos. We’re the first to implement IBC on non-Cosmos blockchains — a feat in progress for over three years. This extended period of technological accumulation has forged a secret weapon: adaptive IBC.

We take NEAR and Cosmos as an example. This diagram shows how IBC connects two blockchains together. Many IBC application protocols exist on each blockchain, such as cross-chain token transfer, cross-chain NFT transfer, etc. Please notice that shared security is also implemented as an IBC application protocol. All these IBC application protocols are employed to serve decentralized applications directly. Beneath them lies the IBC TAO, which means the IBC framework.

The underlying light clients are the foundation for making IBC the gold standard for trustless cross-chain communication. As you can see, a Tendermint light client is running inside the NEAR blockchain, allowing the NEAR blockchain to verify cross-chain messages from Cosmos without trust in any third party. The same applies in the reverse direction.

Obviously, the design of IBC is exceedingly elegant. However, the imperfect reality informs us that the most potent component of IBC, light client verification, has become its Achilles’ heel. Verifying a typical block header from a Cosmos chain via Tendermint light client costs a vast amount of gas, making it impractical to use in any production environment.

The adaptive IBC design is to replace the tenement light clients with an off-chain verification proxy and a corresponding proxy client on NEAR. The proxy will maintain the consensus state of the Cosmos chain, verify all cross-chain messages and sign it with its own key. Then on the NEAR blockchain, all the thing that the proxy client needs to do is to verify a single signature. Actually, we do the same trick in both directions, for in the direction from NEAR to Cosmos, a verification proxy is even more necessary since there does not currently exist a NEAR light client that can operate on Cosmos blockchains.

People may question the introduction of verification proxies, positing that it increases the trust assumptions of the system, thereby compromising the security of cross-chain bridges. To some extent, I agree with this perspective. However, simultaneously, this is an inevitable compromise. Unlike those centralized cross-chain bridges, we build verification proxies on a public chain, which we call the proxy chain here. The proxy chain ensures that the verification proxies are decentralized and publicly verifiable. Provided that the security level of the proxy chain is not lower than that of the two connected chains, this additional entity does not necessarily downgrade the security of the entire system.

Adaptive IBC is not only about being adaptive to heterogeneous blockchains but also to technological advancement. For example, once a production-ready NEAR light client in Go is available, it can replace the Cosmos side’s proxy client. Once ZK consensus proof is mature enough, the NEAR side’s proxy client may be replaced by a ZK verifier. A ZK prover will replace the verification proxy in that case. Best of all, client upgrades are only matters of governance, be totally transparent to the upper-layer applications. As you can say, adaptive IBC is a future-proof architecture.

The core developers at Octopus are actively working on developing adaptive IBC. We plan to launch NEAR IBC Port Q2 this year, enabling connections to Cosmos chains and supporting cross-chain asset transfers. In Q3, $NEAR Restaking will go live, offering shared security services to Cosmos chains. We hope everything goes smoothly and all NEAR people support Octopus — may the community be with us!

Julian Sun, Co-founder, Chief Software Architect

• Two important projects, Near IBC and Go version beefy light client are still under development. The original plan was for the former to complete core functionality and the latter to complete the test by the end of Q1.But now both projects are about a month late. The main reason for the delay is that both projects need to be tested and validated in an environment involving multiple chains and off chain processes. These components are iterating rapidly. Sometimes it is difficult to find an environment where all components are stable. And there are many bugs. The good news is that we’ve solved most of the problems.
• We completed the detailed design of the restaking base and went through several reviews. The project will begin development after peer review.
• The last thing is that the icp-relayer is being deployed on the testnet for testing. To complete the test, we upgraded a new appchain template based on substrate 0.9.40. The icp-relayer is a prototype of the verification proxy in Octopus 2.0 And 1.0 appchain can be upgraded to icp-relayer to improve security in the future.

Aaron Ting, Head of Community

Currently, we have 74,800 followers. That’s about 1000 less. So we started to see some decline in numbers. But there has been some recent addition as well. And this is from the event that I did yesterday, Bitcoin 101, one of the courses which I used to do a lot for one of the project committees. I think this is a good way to engage with new people who are curious and perhaps do not have the opportunity to learn about the basics of blockchain. One hour course that’s quite useful. I’ve reached out to several other communities as well and there is an interest shown so I’ll continue along this line just to update on what I did in the previous month.

So in Dubai, we have about two weeks of events starting with the EcoX event. The EcoX event is featuring several projects, including a project that is based on film. It’s about #THEFUTUREISNOWFILM — Saving The Future: Eye On Africa — AIBC Gala Awards Dinner. There’s an OG party hosted by Gotbit and DaoMaker in Dubai. And our founder Louis was invited as a panelist for Demo Day hosted by PitchTalk for Near ecosystem on the 15th of March. I also attended ETHDubai and we had a small Octopus meet up with several founders including a few quite prominent Dubai influencers and I have also attended Coffee crypto meet up at a Alibaba cloud, which is a very interesting weekly meetup held in Dubai. And in addition, I also joined an ATOM meetup in Dubai, organized by Comdex, AssetMantle and Hypersign. These are all very good Cosmos SDK projects. And we were talking to them about onboarding them for Octopus 2.0, or finding some mode for collaboration.

We also have confirmed 3 team members of our community management team. And before this, they were considered contractors, but now we consider them as part of our marketing team. That’s Nasrul from Malaysia, Miss Hannah from Philippines and Mr. Osa from Indonesia. You will see all of them quite often in channel and you can expect much more from them in the coming months. So we have also been verified on Twitter. So now we have a blue tick. And we also held a showcase series. So this Octopus Accelerator Showcase series, where we interview the past winners of our star prize. So the second show that was on the Admeta, that’s on the 30th of March, about 100 people tuned in. And we had Aridia Labs on 3rd of April, where 169 tuned in. So we will continue to host this accelerator showcase as we build towards our so called relaunch of our appchain pipeline. And last update, the most recent update from the team that’s building the launch pad is that they have completed the code with the exception of soft cap and hard cap. So this will be a new feature that you will see. And after this, they will find the audit firm and conduct an audit. So the most likely timeline is completion of the coding, hopefully, by third week of April. And the audit should take some somewhere around three to four weeks, because of the complexity of the code. So this should bring us to around end of May, and middle to end of May. So that’s the optimistic timeline. And once the launch pad is ready, then we will relaunch started with UniqueOne. So most likely, we will see IDO in June. And starting from UniqueOne, the best scenario that we can imagine this, now we should have one appchain launch per month.

In addition, there is a meeting with a project called Cubic Infinity. This is a very special project because they’ve been given a grant by Near foundation under the condition that there are five collaborations with Near ecosystem projects. And out of the five two of them should be a technical collaboration. So I will have a meeting with the founder next week. And my proposal is for them to launch an appchain in our ecosystem. What they have is actually a simple minigame where any community has issued an NFT collection for example, a 10,000 NFT collection they’ll be able to gamify it and you know play with each other to win prizes. And this is actually a very interesting proposal because we have a community member who is preparing an NFT collection for the Octopus community. The artwork is anime based and it’s it’s going to take some time because there’s a lot of we’re aiming for a very high quality NFT so you know Islam is going to take some time so hopefully this will be able to match with this Cubics Infinity project and we will have a fantastic game in NFT collection for everyone.

All activities in points:

• Attended EcoX event — #THEFUTUREISNOWFILM — Saving The Future: Eye On Africa — AIBC Gala Awards Dinner — AIBC 2022 http://bit.ly/3mCOzlR
• Joined OG Party hosted by Gotbit and DaoMaker at Monkey Bar, Dubai
• Octopus Network Founder, Louis invited as panelist for DemoDay hosted by Pitchtalk for NEAR ecosystem. Demodayisnear.com
• Attended ETHDubai
• Joined Coffee Crypto Meetup at Alibaba Cloud
• Invited to the “ATOM Dubai” Cosmos Meetup organized by Comdex, AssetMantle and Hypersign
• Community Team members increased to 5 members — addition of Nasrul from Malaysia, Hannah from Philippines and Osa from Indonesia.
• Community Team hosted Octopus Network Accelerator Showcase Series # 2 — AdMeta on 30th March — Octopus Network Accelerator Showcase Series #3 — Aridia Labs on 3rd April

• Octopus Network is now verified on Twitter! The blue tick!
• To speak in a crypto primer for USDFX/ OMARAPAY on the topic “ All About Blockchain”
• Meeting with Cubic Infinity.

Vivi Lin, Head of Media

In the past month, media team continued to support the Octopus team and ecosystem in all the major events with media PR and storytelling, including:

For appchains and appchain candidates：

We have finished producing the storytelling video for the Octopus Accelerator 2022 Winter Star Prize winners: DeepMine, Frac, AridiaLabs, and BlackHistoryDAO. Both English and Chinese subtitle versions have been made and promoted across various media channels. And I’d like to remind you again that Frac and AridiaLabs from the accelerator winter batch have submitted proposals on the Octopus forum to become appchains in the Octopus ecosystem. If you haven’t checked out their proposals, please take a look and share your questions, opinions, or any feedback you may have.

For Octopus：

Octopus global influence

• On March 15th, our founder Louis was invited to participate in the NEAR ecosystem event, DemoDayIsNear, where he delivered a keynote speech on “NEAR Restaking and Octopus 2.0.” During his speech, he highlighted the significance of using NEAR Restaking for shared security and explained the value it brings to the NEAR ecosystem.

• On March 18th, our media team and some core members attended a meetup organized by Chain Tea House, discussing Cosmos 2023 Ecosystem Opportunities. By engaging with prominent Chinese players in the Cosmos ecosystem, we aim to strengthen our presence in the Cosmos ecosystem and eventually benefit the Octopus 2.0 market. Louis also delivered an insightful speech on the current state of shared security solutions. You may have noticed that shared security and restaking have been gaining traction lately. As a pioneer in this sector, we are planning to roll out a video series in the coming months to break down the concept of shared security and the different types of solutions available.
• As I mentioned earlier, the Web3 Festival in Hong Kong is happening next week and Louis was invited to attend and will be giving a few speeches. Our media team has been working hard to prepare branding materials for the festival, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated with on-site news throughout the next week.

Meet Octopus @HK Web3 Festival

Octopus 2.0

We are also working on a video about Octopus 2.0 and a series of videos on shared security, as we are one of the key players in the space. The video will provide a high-level overview of what Octopus 2.0 is all about, with the aim of reaching a wider audience and expanding our brand awareness.

Octopus Annual Party

The Octopus team has held an annual meeting in Shanghai as well — all the members in greater China have come together, to share unity and drive to go forward.

Community call

Last but not least, the media team also helps with Community Call from organizing, hosting, reporting to promoting it. All the participants will receive an NFT, designed by our team’s Leo as well.

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.

Question 1:

What advantage will developers get by building their project on Octopus instead of building it on Cosmos? What next steps does the team plan to take to attract projects built on Octopus 2.0?

Louis:

It’s a critical question. First of all, developers will still build on Cosmos SDK and once they are ready to launch their Cosmos chain, there are several options. Before shared security, developer can only launch their Cosmos chain in a solo POS setting, which means use their native token, staking assets and try to bootstrap this POS security, but it is very costly and troublesome and often take several millions to do that since you need to convince the validators, the communities that your token has a value that worth to lockup to serve your chain. But for now there are several other options. Noticeable one is that you can choose to replicate security from Cosmos Hub, which is great since Cosmos Hub has a billion dollar level security, but the problem is replicate security is about to replicate the whole validator set from Cosmos Hub to an appchain, which means it need to be agreed with most of the Cosmos hub validators. If more than 2/3 of Cosmos hub validators do not support this or do not pay attention, the chain cannot start.

I predict that there will be a few blockchains running on Cosmos Hub that replicate its security, provided they are recognized as a common utility for the Cosmos ecosystem and that this board consensus can bring them support from the Cosmos hub validator. However, for most application-specific blockchains, it is not possible to obtain Cosmos’ replicated security. The second option is to run your appchain as a roll-up, but I do not think roll-up is a mature technology especially for Cosmos chains. Therefore, the third option is obvious — Octopus Network. We are open, flexible, and ready to support application-specific blockchains. Our shared security, which we call “leased security,” is more advanced than replicated security in terms of flexibility. We can host far more appchains than Cosmos Hub. I believe we are in an excellent position to attract Cosmos-based blockchains.

Question 2:

Do Octopus have any plans to pull the quality appchain back compared to competitors like Cosmos Hub?

Louis:

So first of all, I have mentioned the competitive advantage of Octopus over Cosmos Hub. We do have disadvantages since the Cosmos Hub is the Schelling point of the Cosmos ecosystem, and everyone knows there is replicated security and thinks about whether or not to take it, but they have limitations. Our task is to tell the Cosmos developers that they have another option and, in most cases, a better option coming from Octopus Network.

About the quality, I do admit that for now, our appchain quality is not so good. But I think the market could work as a filter for us, and in the next step, we will focus on projects with at least a 10 million dollar valuation in their last round of fundraising. You can imagine that in this bear market, any project that can value more than 10 million shows some legitimacy in this process. So we will try to allocate more resources to pitching and helping the bigger ones. Provided we can have 100 appchains that go live on Octopus Network, it will boost the protocol income and also the $OCT token.

Also, for any appchain that chooses an ecosystem to join or to choose a security resource, the inevitable consideration is ecosystem support. We think we will be part of the Cosmos ecosystem, and the Cosmos ecosystem does not refuse builders like us. You do not need to obey the rules from Cosmos Hub since you may notice some Cosmos ecosystem projects such as Saga Network, who also provide some type of shared security, but they are not considered competitors or enemies from Cosmos Hub or the Cosmos ecosystem. Actually, Octopus is quite active in the Cosmos community now. We organized the first Cosmos developer training in Chinese. I think it’s the first one in the world. We have some good relationships with some very important Cosmos projects and communities, so we think we can be a contributor to the Cosmos ecosystem and also compete on some level with other projects.

So I think it’s not a problem to onboard quality appchains.

Question 3:

What’s the biggest challenge the team is facing right now, did the team have a solution for that difficulty?

Louis:

The main obstacle we face is narrative conveyance, even though we have a plan, are working on it, and have a reputation for delivering on time. We need to spread the word about Octopus 2.0 to the Near ecosystem, Cosmos, and the wider Web3 or crypto community. Vivi, who is in the US, has already started building connections and raising awareness for us. Aaron is active in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Additionally, China has lifted its international travel control, so I can travel abroad this year and attend more events, hopefully including major Near and Cosmos events. We believe we offer excellent service for the Cosmos chain and can maintain a friendly relationship with most Cosmos KOLs. It’s time to spread the word about our project.

Question 5:

Octopus intends to raise more money, capital? If not, why?

Louis:

Currently, we do not have a plan to raise money. We need time to make Octopus 2.0 a reality, which will help us enter the larger market of Cosmos blockchain. Moreover, our Adaptive IBC offering will expand our relationships with many blockchain and ecosystems as it is quite unique for the entire industry. Compared to the value we can create, I believe the price of $OTC tokens is low. If we raise funds in this circumstance, we may lose value for our community. Perhaps next year will be a better opportunity for us to raise capital when Octopus 2.0 is in operation and people have a better understanding of it. Furthermore, next year may be a better time if the crypto life cycle repeats. We hope to raise capital from some famous token funds that are well-known and respected within the crypto community, which can bring us some reputation benefits and endorsements.

Question 6:

Are there two offerings from Octopus V2? Is there any relationship between them? Which market is bigger?

Louis:

Yes, Octopus V2 offers two different services. The first is pure interoperability, which allows Near to connect to many different blockchains. However, $OCT token holders will not capture value directly from all of these IBC connections. This offering is aimed at making the Octopus protocol more important for Near and other blockchains, and making Octopus an essential part of the Internet of blockchain. We can expect increased awareness and reputation for Octopus Network.

The other offering, shared security, will capture enormous value for $OCT holders. Many blockchains have established their own consensus and security measures, mostly based on POS, and some even based on POW. These are bigger markets and can not be addressed by shared security, but they can be addressed with the pure interoperability offering. For emerging new blockchains, the goal is to convince them that Octopus shared security is the most cost-effective and flexible option that they can rely on.

Regarding the second offering, three blockchain projects are showing a strong intention to launch with Octopus shared security, but it is not yet appropriate to mention their names. All of these projects have undergone several dozen million evaluations and have enough capital to support their long-term operation. This is a good start for the business development of Octopus 2.0.

Community Call #10— May 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, May 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/

Octopus DAO April 2023 was originally published in Octopus Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.