NEAR Town Hall (July 2021) | Part 3 Octopus Network

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   uh hi everyone my name is aaron thing and i'm the committee director of octopus network so i'm going to give a brief introduction about our project and also some of the concepts behind that's important to why we're doing this project and also some of the participants in our ecosystem some of the app chain projects that we have so if i may i'll just start our team is led by luis liu he's a very famous blockchain advocate in china and he's authors of many books and in fact uh he

2. 0:33

   has uh wrote a lot about you know web 2 and web3 technology and how we're transitioning towards this so the team is mainly based in china right now there's 16 of us and eight of us are our developers and uh the developers are led by julian sun he's our senior software architect and uh michael tang he's a developer our lead developer and also a developer community builder so he built the

3. 1:04

   ros community about five years ago in china and about two years ago he started a substrate community now this is all really important because the substrate community um they have a program where trained over a thousand substrate developers right so um what what is web2 right and web3 right so the main difference between web 2 and web 3 is what we're seeing now with platforms today such as facebook google where um all these platforms are actually company owned so when the company owned

4. 1:39

   obviously their main objective is to make more money for their shareholders and at some point um you know this uh actually collides with the best interests of the users so with the web3 uh platform now we have an opportunity to actually have a community owned internet platform so what does it mean well it means by using blockchain and decentralized governance we're able to create platforms where it is owned by the community where it is transparent and the full value

5. 2:10

   is actually able to flow back to the community so this is a brief chart on the evolution of the web of course web 1.0 was uh in the 90s where we have a very basic uh you know email uh html website which just provides information or mrc then we have a now in the web 2 stage where we have uh you know internet that's more interactive there's a lot of you know content uh being shared um but you know a lot of that is still owned by companies

6. 2:42

   and uh today we're moving into window virtual moving into the web3 phase where uh descent uh what is uh more decentralized uh is private and secure aaron if i if i can just uh uh ask a question real quick to kind of understand where we're at what i'm hearing is that octopus network is the next iteration of internet level development and that the team at octopus is a very senior team that brings a deep amount of experience from the crypto side and then also as you

7. 3:15

   mentioned with the developer advocate has has trained thousands of substrate developers to kind of expedite this this next stage of development to web 3. is that would you say that's kind of accurate for where octopus is at right now that's exactly right in fact the team has helped a lot of very famous leader one projects such as cosmos solana flow oasis platinum and also chain link develop so

8. 3:41

   i would say that they're experts in austrian technology development and yeah and what we're trying to bring about here is uh really uh interesting because of uh just what nier has got to offer being a really excellent scalable layer one and the type of technologies that emerge primarily cosmos with the cosmos sdk and polkadot with substrate technology so what we do is uh you know we did a lot of research

9. 4:12

   to basically identify the elements that uh that actually work you know and uh package them together you know into a new product that would actually you know solve for some some of the issues that we see okay so uh thanks aussie for the question um so yeah so i'll move on to my presentation this is uh some of the web3 internet platforms right uh just to give you a better idea of exactly what's web3 so as you know we have the chrome browser and now we have a break browser uh which is um

10. 4:45

    you know a crypto enabled and now in terms of storage instead of a dropbox and google drive you have a storage storage or ipfs or falcon even and there's uh many other examples which probably i wouldn't get into now so how do we bring about you know this web pre-revolution right um you know it's a very grand term but uh we need actually concrete actions to bring this about so one of

11. 5:09

    these are the four um um sort of like uh you know move prime movers that we have identified and number one is uh movement from d-apps uh to app chain so explain a little bit more about this um and over here we have blockchain interconnectivity and we think octopus is uh one of the best solutions out there and of course we also need a rapid blockchain development if we were to have an ecosystem of thousands and thousands of app chains and

12. 5:40

    um definitely combined with that we need a decentralized uh governance uh big thing so what was the purpose of a project right so in order to accelerate the development of webtree we want to lower the barrier to entry that can be in terms of technology or costs we want to grow the near ecosystem and we want to grow the developer community as most of the developers at the moment are solidity developers and um there's not so many rust and substrate developers but we

13. 6:14

    believe that will change and of course now we want to support uh chain projects right okay so what is octopus so this is what it looks like um on a very high level so we have near protocol as our base layer and octopus relay on top of that and on top of the octopus relay substrate-based blockchains can connect as an app chain to the octopus network so as you can see here i've drawn five but in fact this is limitless this is one of the advantages of having our protocol is that we're not limited by 100 or 200

14. 6:49

    you know app chains we can technically go into the thousands or tens of thousands of blockchain octopus is a decentralized protocol that allows developers to build and launch application specific chains using substrate uh transfer messages and value presslessly across multiple blockchain so what we provide for app chain is uh we provide otterbox security interoperability on chain governance ready to engage community and also one-stop infrastructure now uh we've chosen uh near protocol

15. 7:20

    because uh you know it is highly performant layer one um and it has a very high level security verifies finality scalability and also usability which is uh one of the uh key things that a lot of your one projects uh do not focus on wow so if we can just hold up one second here okay i guess we'll we'll get into some of the details here but there's a lot to unpack with with what we're seeing with what you just shared about octopus network so and i think you'll get into this in the

16. 7:50

    next slide where you're talking about dabs versus app chains but for anyone listening who's maybe trying to get a grasp on the big picture context of what octopus is offering octopus is essentially an app chain platform for uh projects that want to have their own blockchain in a sense but not deployed as a dap they want to deploy that on near through the octopus network and octopus provides them all the tools to do that

17. 8:15

    extremely efficiently and easily while near has lots of baked in benefits for them to to make use of uh as a core chain would that be fair to say aaron more or less absolutely in fact um i would even go as far to say that when we have octopus on near uh that technically uh gives near the capability of something like a polka dot except that you know it's uh the capabilities of near is way beyond

18. 8:40

    what just a simple relay chain which is uh the main function is just to pass the message the other chain can accomplish so that makes for a really interesting combination and as you mentioned before as well there is no limit on the number of app chains that octopus network could potentially host so i think polka dot is is limited i think initially to a hundred up to a hundred pair chains um octopus you said could be

19. 9:05

    hosting thousands of app chains uh running on near but also but through octopus network exactly yeah so there there's some innovation that was um um that was realized when we launched octopus so we do have some differentiation between our technical solution versus polka dot so for example we do not have a collators and uh also you know our relay does not facilitate inter blockchain communication so what we do instead is that we have an ibc palette which is you know a cosmos ibc

20. 9:38

    inter blockchain communication protocol that we use so that app chains can connect and communicate with each other so because of this very special solution that we came up with we're able to scale beyond 100 pair chains and technically at the moment i would dare to say probably in the thousands and potentially no limit i'll let you get on with your presentation but we said in the last presentation that if you're

21. 10:06

    if you're in the near ecosystem you're early to the party with aurora if you're in the near ecosystem you're early to the party with octopus because i think octopus is going to be huge so continue aaron go ahead let's uh let's hear more about what's coming thanks azi okay so one of the key things that we have to um justify is actually why why should we have an app chain over the apps right so uh when you have a d app you have to share the um the bandwidth you know with all the

22. 10:35

    other d apps that's uh on you know uh platforms such as the ethereum but when you have your own app chain uh all that you know uh bandwidth is dedicated only for your application so we see a day where you know many of the popular the apps may have to consider their own app chain in fact we start seeing some of the popularity apps starting to have their own uh chains um so yeah uh then

23. 11:00

    customizability um of course uh when you are at the app you know on um a smart contract platform uh you're bound by some of the design decisions that has been made so when you have your own blockchain you can actually customize uh even the basically or the protocol and you can evolve uh quickly as well um with a decentralized governance the community can decide what kind of uh code to roll even for example if you want to change let's say the block time from six seconds to three seconds

24. 11:30

    that is all possible um when you have your own opt chain uh you can decide on that and there's even potential to incorporate some of the newer technologies that's coming up that can uh you know bring up you know for example your tps speed your bandwidth to you know uh 10 000 or beyond uh there's no limits really and there's a governance on chain it's very important because uh as you can see

25. 11:54

    some of the some of the decentralization elements of a smart contract it's not it's not really there um because you know um yeah because upgradability of a smart contract actually is achieved by something like a proxy contract and when you have a credibility then you know you also have several weaknesses you know um associated with that and also right now especially this is the time where you know uh you know if if anyone is considering to have their own blockchain

26. 12:25

    this is the time to do it because previously in the past if you were to embark on a blockchain project would take you probably you know uh you know over a million dollars and probably you know uh you know a lot of time like one or two years but now you have uh you know cosmos sdk and substrate and because of this uh you can uh develop uh your own blockchain um you know within uh uh quite a short period of time so i've seen projects

27. 12:49

    that have launched within three to six months which is quite comparable to what you get with uh the app now the apps are still useful um for for certain cases especially where composibility matters so for example areas such as d5 we're not really targeting it because we believe that you know uh the apps really make sense uh for that so we're targeting um everything other than d5 and we're also targeting um not targeting a so-called infrastructure projects such as

28. 13:20

    layer ones such as near because we think that you know to be a really good layer one you will need a really highly skilled team and a lot of uh you know innovation and technology and there's probably a handful of projects out there that could qualify as a near protocol level projects but we don't think there's uh you know uh going to be a hundred of them okay that's so that's a that's a very great summary and i think maybe just if i can can provide a little bit of a kind of macro context this right now

29. 13:53

    octopus network is going to bring the universe of chains to near protocol so near protocol is a world of dapps platform where you can build tons of different applications and with octopus we basically bring in a whole new world of parallel blockchains that can operate on their own independently with all of those benefits that you just discussed so uh yeah let's let's see what uh what

30. 14:16

    more we have in in the pipeline okay sure thanks um yeah so so why octopus right so uh mainly right now there's two very well known protocols which is polka dot and cosmos uh but polka dot um so both of them have uh strengths and weaknesses uh and there's always trade-off and there's nothing wrong with that uh in technology uh but polka dot right now as we can see from the parochian auction for kusama is very expensive you will need to basically attract deposits of you know tens of millions of

31. 14:47

    dollars so not every project is able to do that and if we want to bring the you know what three revolution we definitely you know need to uh solve that issue so that more chains can be uh can go live and uh on the cosmos side um you need additional bootstrapping uh you know after you develop with a cosmos sdk so uh that also you know increases like difficulty and uh cost as well so we lower the

32. 15:12

    costly barrier um um the lower the cost barrier uh we also have a very special model uh called lease security so if you have a pair of chain on a polka dot essentially if you were paying half a billion dollars compared to another chain that is paying maybe 10 million dollars uh if you get the slot you would have something called a shared security in the polka dot model so what that means is that you know you're paying half a billion dollars you versus someone paying 10 million dollars but you would

33. 15:43

    essentially get the same level of security so in octopus um model we have something called lease security so in fact we call it lpos lease proof of stake so when the app chain wants to be an octopus option they will need to go through a process which i'll go through later and once they get this process one of the criteria is that they actually attract a security minimum security deposit so

34. 16:07

    the amount of deposit is not very high you know in fact it is at least 10 times less than what you get on polka dot and if you guys have been following the crowd loan then you understand that anyone that pledges their ksm we need to lock in the ksm for quite a long period of time uh close to a year uh in the octopus system we don't need to lock in for so long it hasn't been decided yet but i think

35. 16:30

    the talk is around maybe 30 days and also by connecting to octopus you'll be able all the app chains will be able to attract uh stable coin asset so stablecoin asset is quite important because you may have um you know a great application but because this application needs to be used by you know normal people consumers and they may want to see you know um things being priced in the us dollars for example so through the near protocol we're able to bring these assets onto the app chain and vice versa right

36. 17:05

    and of course connectivity to other blockchain so this is a ibc palette which will be used to con to communicate with other app chains but also communicate with uh you know let's say connect to cosmos hub but it is also possible if one of the polka dot pair chain incorporates ibc palette that you know this uh octopus app chain or anyone with a ibc palette will be able to connect to

37. 17:30

    topokoda and this is uh the really interesting bit about the inter-connected world of blockchains that you know is uh you know about to uh uh happen right uh there'll be so many different layers so many different types of connectivity uh and definitely we need to ensure that you know everyone you know gets that chance and it's kind of one reason that we do this project and of course a strong community um we're really really

38. 17:54

    happy and grateful to be part of the new ecosystem and you know we also try to bring more to the near ecosystem and grow this community uh we think there's a lot about us that is really you know that more people should know about and we're very confident that uh will be one of major blockchains uh and um the other thing is uh being able to disconnect right so when an app chain decides to um

39. 18:19

    secure a octopus slot that doesn't mean that you know they have to stay with us forever in fact it could even be um an opportunity for app chains to get connected and you know to a bigger ecosystem uh glory to the app or the users and at some point if they feel like you know they want to be an independent chain or they want to disconnect and go for a polka dot and kusama slot uh they're free to do so and all that uh can be done by the app chain governance and the last one is

40. 18:48

    oh well the last few but uh uh the other one is forkability right so um so if you have been in the chain uh space for a number of years and you understand there was a lot of talk about you know bitcoin forks how bitcoin became bitcoin and bitcoin uh cash you know and so on so forth right so forkability is something that uh we enable and we enable that because we include an our archival node um that actually you know takes a snapshot of uh keeps a record

41. 19:20

    you know of all the blocks uh on the app chain so if for example if in the case of the app chain having let's say for example a hostile takeover the community can actually you know have the option where you know they decide to you know create a separate chain according to a certain block height yeah and every app chain will get nap 141 wrapper contract so the app chain tokens can be bridged over to near and there'll be a um nap141 is basically erc20

42. 19:50

    but for near and this is really good because when app chain tokens wants to be listed on exchanges then the exchanges you know all they need to do is support near and they'll be able to to list that token yeah and of course there's a lot more going on in the near ecosystem which we'll hear about in the next one uh it's particularly defined so they will have access to like decentralized exchanges launch pads you know and so many other things on here and uh yeah and app chains also get you

43. 20:20

    know api rpc gateway and of course they have access to uh near rainbow bridge sorry it's quite quite a bit there okay so this is what um this is what uh the tokenomics basically looks like right it's a very high level very simplified version so you have uh so octopus network is a security okay so app chains come to octopus because they want uh the connection to near protocol and they also want to ensure that uh the security of the app chain is

44. 20:56

    guaranteed so the entire uh tokenomics center around of course the oct token there's only one token in this ecosystem and there um the the circulation is 100 million and it's a fixed supply so it's not going to be burned you know and it's not going to increase as well so oct token would choose who to support so they will stick oct token to provide security to app chains and the app chain in turn will provide a token reward to the validators and delegators and yeah so this is in essence why it is

45. 21:30

    it's a very simplified model and also this model is one thing i like to add about this model and that is because our validators are structured as a set of smart contract on near protocol what that actually means is that um we have a basically a zero cost system right so if you compare that with the polka dot okusama you have basically validators where you know if they were to stay or nominate their tokens they would earn something between 15 to 20 percent per year

46. 22:02

    right so when these validators are earning 15 to 20 per year on the tokens that also means that every single per chain that comes and tries to attract some deposit uh to secure the perichain slot would need to provide you know benefits beyond the 15 to 20 percent so there's a very high baseline for parachains to overcome and because of that um in fact you know the entire value of uh polka dot is uh being taken from the pair of chains there's a they're paying very high rent

47. 22:34

    it's a very high cost and because we structured this on near as a smart contract uh our cost is basically zero so when you're an app chain you don't have to compete with that baseline 15 to 20 all you have to do is make sure it's attractive enough so we don't know what that is uh the market determines that but if it's something like 30 percent you know if it's a really good project they offer 30 return or 50 return and the market is

48. 22:59

    happy with that then they'll be able to get their uh you know uh actually slot but certainly they don't have to pay you know 50 million or anything crazy like that wow so just to kind of reiterate and drive in here if i heard you correctly there's only ever going to 100 million octopus tokens to provide this least security to the potential hundreds to thousands of app chains that will inhabit this network is that right yep that's right okay and and i should say in comparison here

49. 23:32

    this is this is not financial advice but the polka dot market cap is 14 billion right now and we've just heard for the last 10 minutes about what octopus has on the level of innovation compared to polka dot so i'll let the audience in the near ecosystem draw their conclusions from that one yeah and definitely like participation is really important so we'll get to that bit but definitely

50. 23:56

    we want um yeah the new community to be supporting this project and to get involved so this is what the octopus architecture looks like this is slightly um a detailed version but as you can see here these are the relay the octopus relay and v stands for validators and these validators are structured as a smart contract or near protocol yeah so there is many ways to say it but we can say that you know it is in fact giving the capabilities of polka dot

51. 24:27

    too near yeah okay so this is a slightly simpler one that i've made up uh just to show everyone clearly um you know how the architecture looks like so um i believe um this is almost the same as uh the previous slide with the exception that i'm trying to demonstrate just focus on the connection and leave out the technical details so you have app chain which are substrate-based chains and any number of them can connect to the octopus relay and of course octopus relay is built on near protocol

52. 25:01

    so by connecting to octopus they have the benefit you know where they can have access to aurora or you know use the rainbow bridge to ethereum and near also i believe should have ibc bridge at the cosmos as well so that's one way they can uh proceed uh if they want to communicate between the various app chains they're free to do so all they need to do is incorporate the ibc palette

53. 25:24

    and they can also use the ibc bridge to cosmos hub and this interesting really interesting bit is actually the polka dot so once uh polka dot okay sama is up and any one of the pair chain incorporates the ibc palette then that also means that the app chain can be connected so as you can see here if you're a nav chain you know and this is your place here you can get to a lot of

54. 25:48

    different place right this is uh really connected and if you follow the analogy that you know every blockchain is sort of like a city you know or a district or a country and then that also ensures that your country would be you know uh highly connected um you know to the commerce of the world this is the app chain pipeline uh and this is uh essentially demonstrates the process uh through which app chains uh uh gets to uh well uh bid

55. 26:20

    for uh a slot and what they do is they um they have to approach our team and they have to give information about the project uh their code uh we will have a team to actually validate whether um you know they are a good project from all aspects and they need to also submit a runtime we'll do our auditing and they get to enter into this uh process where candidates are you know upvoted or

56. 26:44

    downvoted and if they're chosen then um the oct holders will stay in the enter in the staging and the booting process so this is so far our community so we have um one two three okay we have six projects uh that's uh in our community that wants to be an app chain and we have with the exception of dot bond and these are some of the backers near protocol was one of our seed investors

57. 27:15

    strategic seed investors but we also have electric capital d1 ventures a sense of like many big vcs yeah so app chain number one is the bio network so the bio network is a biomedical data project and this project originally started as a smart contract uh id app with a smart contract built on ethereum uh they managed to win some awards at the eve denver but since then they've decided to upgrade their project to a substrate chain

58. 27:47

    and they have identified octopus as a suitable relay chain for them and they're also integrated with a kilt io which is a decentralized id project and also ocean protocol which is a privacy computing and a data marketplace second one is a muse network it's a music network using nft and d5 and they already have i believe 50 artists and hundreds of songs in china they do have a working

59. 28:18

    app and we're hoping that they'll be one of the first app chains we also have atocha so atocha is a gaming decentralized gaming where anyone can create games uh puzzles and uh and people are incentivized to solve them and there's even uh a way for um decentralized uh judging to take place uh discover is a decentralized platform for discovering and propagating science-based information so what it is really uh there's a lot of health information

60. 28:50

    health data out there that is not verified um so what this does is they provide a structure where this data can be verified and people are incentivized and rewarded for uh doing that and it also opens up possibility of using algorithms and also gathering certain type of data that's valuable um mira social is uh one of the projects that i like a lot uh it's a decentralized meta social protocol uh so what that means is one layer above

61. 29:21

    facebook twitter instagram and they're able to grab your feeds off these uh layer one social media uh why is that important is because a lot of the new social media protocols uh built you know in the web3 world they have the issue where they do not have a lot of native content so um so they believe that the content must be drawn uh from layer one essentially you know the idea is not to disconnect you from uh you know existing uh you know communities online but uh oh but the idea is to basically

62. 29:52

    create your own space where it's secure where you control your identity and your data and they also have a way to monetize where if you can create a good following or you know a space where there's a lot of community members you can actually monetize that through a peer-to-peer uh advertising engine so uh we have some good news for people who wants to be an app chain so um we have a award a reward of a hundred thousand oct tokens for our

63. 30:24

    first uh 10 app chains so the first 10 app chain will also be given the status of a founding app chain and that's uh really important because we would uh definitely try to support the founding app chains as much as possible and make them model actions for everyone else to follow but um other than that we also have an additional 100 000 oct token for the first 100 hachim okay and uh this can be quite um quite

64. 30:55

    uh interesting because um if you're the first app chain or the first well 10 out chain really uh what you're getting is 200 000 oct tokens and you know and these 200 000 oct tokens of course you know we're not looking at the market price or anything like that but potentially this 200 000 oct token uh can not only provide you know their own project with the required security but also you know it could uh generate you know some value for for each app chain

65. 31:25

    to actually put back into their uh development work so uh what we like to say here is um you know we we give back to app chain projects uh it means that you know when app changes come to us uh you know we as a network we want to give some of that value uh back to the app chains so this is our growth strategy uh we have a go-to community strategy it's a little bit different from go to

66. 31:49

    market strategy um i would like to highlight that in a future article and we also have near gill um well octopus guild um so we were part of this uh near ecosystem and we have our own very special octopus guild for any app chains or anyone who's uh you know interested to develop an app chain and launch it on octopus uh please reach out to us and now you can join this and one of the key areas that we need to really focus on is uh developer training because there's not many

67. 32:21

    rus and social developers out there and we we have supported a program before which is now an official parody program uh to train developers in china so we like to bring that out to the rest of the world and we think that this is one of the areas where we can contribute and everybody can benefit what that means is basically when we train the russell substrate developer they can essentially work with

68. 32:46

    any project in the ecosystem including mir and yeah and it wouldn't matter to us and the last one is octopus accelerator and octopus accelerator is a program that's designed to help uh app chain projects um you know uh accelerate their development and uh potentially onboard to octopus so so aaron if i can just uh we're we're running a little shorter on time so we'll need to kind of uh speed it up a little bit but i just want to remind the audience looking back at the beginning of this fantastic presentation

69. 33:20

    what octopus aspires to do what these app chains just demonstrated is really the emergence of um you know the industrial emergence of other of web3 you know uh new verticals of web 3 is coming coming to octopus network so we have the future of biotech data we have affordable music and a new musical creator economy we have the gamification of you know e-games coming onto this network there's a lot of real innovation and if i understood you correctly the first 10 app chains will get a hundred thousand

70. 33:54

    octopus each that's right yeah and that's uh in um and that's not including another hundred thousand so in total you get two hundred thousand oct tokens if you're one of the first 10 app options okay so for for her uh app chains looking looking around substrate based app chains looking around i think octopus has a pretty a pretty great um pitch for you is there anything error that you would like to leave um the the near ecosystem community with kind of to wrap up the this this great presentation

71. 34:26

    yeah i think um yeah so i'm i'm done with the presentation and i think the the message is that um you know we're you know one we're a partner of near protocol and we believe that um you know the options are not only limited to the apps if there's anyone that's currently has a d app that wants to look at having their own chain you can come to talk to us and we'll be very happy to support you

72. 34:50

    and we think that it's not a one-way street we think that potentially there could be you know app chains that may want to have a you know certain part you know of their uh product you know on near protocol as a d app that's also possible uh we just think that you know if you look at the entire landscape we think that this app chain you know uh sector is completely like you know it's completely not there you know it's completely not

73. 35:16

    developed right so there's massive potential um you know in this area if you're looking at you know uh chains it's it's emerging for sure and just for the audience real real quick when can they expect octopus network to go live by um for actually you know tokens available able to use it etc our tokens will be released well generated around mid of august and around the third week of august we plan to have ido for community participation and we're talking to skyward

74. 35:47

    and hopefully uh we we can do we'll probably do a multi-uh platform ido but definitely skyward i believe is the most important one for us it's on the priority list so hopefully by third week of august we'll get an ideal and skyward