Octopus Network Partners with NEAR

The NEAR Ecosystem is excited to welcome Octopus Network onto NEAR Protocol. As a decentralized appchain network, Octopus Network inaugurates a new frontier of innovation on NEAR Protocol for the hundreds of developers and entrepreneurs looking to launch applications on their own blockchain. 

Notably, the NEAR Foundation has reached an agreement with the Octopus Foundation to invest one million dollars, so as to become Octopus Network’s exclusive strategic investor.

While Octopus Network has tested out multiple Layer 1 blockchains including Cosmos, Polkadot, and others, they have selected NEAR to be the ‘mother-chain’ of the network. Faster than Cosmos Chains, and more affordable and scalable than Polkadot ‘Parachains’, NEAR Protocol welcomes the Octopus Team and the multiple communities interested in launching appchains on Octopus Network! 

A New Frontier of Innovation on NEAR Protocol: Octopus Appchains

Octopus Network Relay will launch as a smart contract on NEAR to provide a foundational infrastructure for a validator marketplace between validators, and appchains launched through Octopus. As a home for developers and entrepreneurs looking to launch their own blockchain with customizable crypto-economic and governance parameters, Octopus Network provides affordable and easy integration with NEAR. In line with this design, Octopus Network is built around the OCT Token: A fungible, non-inflationary utility token, that is required for staking on different appchains built on top of the protocol. Validators secure Octopus appchains in return for appchain’s native token rewards. 

“Octopus provides out-of-the-box security, interoperability, and on-chain governance to projects looking to create a specific chain for their application.”

Economically: Validators stake OCT Tokens to earn rewards from the respective application chains on Octopus Network. OCT Tokens are non-inflatable., 

Governance: OCT Token holders do not partake in the governance of different application-chains: That opportunity is left to native token holders of the respective chain. 

In the long term, Octopus Network will function as a composable means by which applications can operate with different security parameters on NEAR: Some applications may not need such high security from validators in order to prosper, while others may require more over time. Octopus Network effectively allows for developers on NEAR to quickly spin-up applications with low security in a cost-effective manner and with respect to unique crypto-economic or governance parameters. 

Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR commented:

“NEAR’s vision is to give people control of their money, data and power of governance. To do that NEAR is building and funding various efforts for developers to build applications with such properties. Octopus’ multi-chain network architecture allows developers to cheaply and easily spin up self governed app chains. Unlocking use cases which normally wouldn’t be a good fit for a shared smart contract platform. It’s exciting to closely partner with the Octopus team, who have been working on multi-chain interoperability for the past few years to bring this to reality.”

Notably, the team behind Octopus Network is exceptionally talented and experienced in both crypto and mainstream software development: With a team of eight engineers, they have successfully built IBC for Substrate, and also offered the initial Substrate online training course in China with other Substrate enthusiasts  (from which a number of projects have originated from). Most notably, they are also active participants and co-organizers of the Rust community in China (they actively organize RustCon in China). 

Octopus Network:

“We’re excited to form a strategic partnership with NEAR Protocol. NEAR has been widely recognized as one of the best technical teams in the whole blockchain space.” said Louis Liu, founder of Octopus Network. “Sharding, layer 2, and multi-chains are the most promising potential architectures of next generation blockchains, each having unique value and advantages over the others. The future of the blockchain universe will most likely involve all these architectures which will coexist with each other. NEAR Protocol has been in the leading position of homogeneous sharding protocols. By teaming with NEAR, Octopus could launch a novel multi-chains network in 2021, which provides unprecedented flexible cost effective shared security and interoperability to appchains. By leveraging a prosperous and sustainable appchain ecosystem together with partners, Octopus Network has the potential to take the lead in multi-chain direction.”

With appchains deployed on NEAR through Octopus Network, a world of new applications, crypto-economic models, governance mechanisms and decentralized solutions are poised to launch on NEAR Protocol.

About NEAR Protocol: 

NEAR exists to to accelerate the world’s transition to open technologies by growing and enabling a community of developers and creators. NEAR is a decentralized application platform that secures high value assets like money and identity with the performance necessary to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of Open Finance and the Open Web in their hands. NEAR’s unique account model allows developers to build secure apps that consumers can actually use similarly to today’s web apps, something which requires multiple second-layer add-ons on other blockchains.

Technically speaking, NEAR Protocol is a brand new public, proof-of-stake blockchain which is built using a novel consensus approach called Doomslug. NEAR Protocol uses a new sharding mechanism called Nightshade which splits the network into multiple pieces so that the computation is done in parallel. Parallelism radically increases throughput and allows the network to scale up as the number of nodes on it increases. With NEAR, there isn’t a theoretical limit on the network’s capacity.

If you’re a developer who wants to see what building on NEAR is all about, check out the NEAR documentation to get started. If you want to be part of the NEAR community, join our Discord or Telegram channels or follow NEAR on Twitter. 

 About Octopus Network: 

Octopus Network is a decentralized appchain network natively built on NEAR Protocol. Octopus provides out-of-the-box security, interoperability, and on-chain governance to projects looking to create a specific chain for their open web application. The Octopus Network Relay runs as a smart contract on NEAR Protocol, provides the infrastructure for a validator marketplace between validators, and Octopus appchains. Built around the $OCT Token – a fungible, non-inflationary utility token – Octopus allows for flexible security, and autonomous governance for any application looking to launch their own appchain. .

Visit Octopus on their website, say hello via their Twitter, or see the BUIDL on Github . You can also read news on their Medium and check out their Discord server.