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Near Future Application Chain Network: Octopus Detail

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Octopus Network has officially released its first application chain protocol at Near Ecology

Source: Near Chinese Community

In recent years, blockchain-based ecosystems have made significant progress in their robustness, interoperability, and customizability. The NEAR protocol, often referred to as a third-generation blockchain network, is a sharding POS chain with a particular focus on capacity expansion and availability. While Near is often referred to as an off-the-shelf scaling solution that fits into existing Ethereum applications, the protocol can also handle many other types of decentralized solutions.

In this context,Octopus Network has officially released its first application chain protocol at Near Ecology. This move will significantly reduce the platform cost of the application and ensure its security, providing a huge competitive advantage for Near to attract a large number of applications and developer teams. It is a remarkable achievement.

Introduction to application chain and its importance

An application chain is a separate blockchain designed for a specific application or set of applications. Unlike smart contracts, which typically run on public/private chains, app chains allow developers to customize their apps around governance structures, cryptocurrency economic models, and even underlying consensus algorithms.

Technically, application chains provide developers with a proprietary transaction processing capability while benefiting from the security of the parent chain. This means that applications on the application chain do not have to compete with other applications on the network for this performance. A set of independent verification nodes is responsible for securing transactions within an application chain.

The application chain has a flexible level of security (depending on the number of validation nodes responsible for supporting a particular application chain), its own tokens, cryptoeconomic model, incentive model, and a customized code base. Simply put, the benefits of a developer or project running their application on a customized blockchain are now fully reaped by a single app chain, along with the benefits of lower transaction congestion and status verification services from the parent chain.

Bringing application chains into the NEAR ecosystem means that all key stakeholders within the ecosystem will have additional opportunities for their own products, services, and benefits. Validation nodes are rewarded for having the ability to secure the application chain.

Developers have the freedom to build and distribute application chains with flexible parameters in terms of crypto economic models, governance, etc., to suit different usage scenarios. Ultimately, a range of new solutions will leverage the security and transaction-load capabilities of larger parent networks to support and benefit users. As the blockchain ecosystem continues to evolve, and application chains on Poca and Cosmos have proven the concept, the future of cryptocurrencies will be closely tied to the efficient deployment of such protocols.

Octopus Network is introduced

Octopus Network is about to deploy a decentralized protocol that will allow any developer, project partner, or entrepreneur to create their own application chain at NEAR quickly and efficiently at a lower cost. Louis Liu, founder of Octopus Network, explained, "Octopus provides instant security and services such as interoperability and on-chain governance for projects that want to create a customized blockchain for their own open web applications."

More specifically, Octopus Network Relay runs on NEAR as a smart contract, providing the infrastructure for the validation node market of an application chain published through the Octopus. Validation nodes pledge OCT tokens to validate an application chain. In return, the validating node gets tokens for each app chain it is responsible for: each app chain has its own crypto economic model and associated inflation rate.

It is important to note that each validation node is responsible for running a separate node, and each node has its own BFT consensus mechanism for the application chain it is responsible for. However, because each chain published in the Octopus is connected via security and NEAR, assets and contracts can communicate seamlessly between the NEAR and either application chain.

From the economic perspective, authentication nodes pledge OCT tokens and earn rewards from various application chains of the Octopus Network. OCT tokens are inflation-free. From a governance perspective, OCT token holders do not participate in the governance of the application chain. The system leaves this opportunity to the holders of the native tokens of each application chain.

Octopus founder Louis Liu and the Octopus team believe that the next wave of innovation in cryptocurrency will revolate around scalable and low-cost application chains:

"We believe that intelligence gradually contracts and application of chain has a unique value proposition. In other words, there is a kind of special advantage. They can be applied to different scenarios. I think especially for DeFi intelligent contracts is a better choice, because a platform on the security level of the intelligence of all contracts are the same, and they have excellent combination. Web3.0 for other usage scenarios, such as games, digital collections, NFT, and the creator of the wider economy, including music, radio, and even blog, DAO platform, the Internet platform, etc., "The application chain is a better choice for such usage scenarios because it can strike a delicate balance between decentralization and performance. In addition, on-chain governance allows for appropriate evolution of the application chain in a legal form, which becomes burdensome if it cannot be done within a smart contract."

Operation principle of Octopus Network

Octopus Network is built around the OCT token. OCT tokens are homogeneous, non-inflationary utility tokens that are required to be used as collateral for different application chains built on the protocol. Along with this design comes a large number of prerequisites and many functions built into the Octopus Network.

First, building an application chain requires the accumulation of sufficient OCT tokens from ecological stakeholders to be pledged. Only when the minimum level of security is achieved can the application chain be released, and its creation block is derived from the configuration parameters of the parent chain.

Second, as more validation nodes choose to pledge to an application chain, the set of validation nodes for the application chain is updated in the parent chain's smart contract and propagated to the application chain. This is the basis for progressively increasing levels of security in the application chain and can be effectively styled as Shared Security as a Service (SSaaS). Much as AWS provides data storage services for software companies, Octopus can provide security services for blockchain ecosystems that seek to quickly guide users through and streamline development.

Once fully started, the Octopus application chain and parent chain assets are fully interoperable. OCT tokens can also be used as collateral for cross-chain assets between the application chain and the parent chain. Last but not least, the application chain itself is governed by the holder of the token, not by the authentication node that is pledging the OCT token.

As shown in the figure above, to ensure its legitimacy on the Octopus network, the launch of a new application chain needs to follow a specific procedure:

The chain of applications to be started needs to be queued up for verification nodes to be supported by pledged OCT tokens.

Once supported, their application chain can be activated and fully started.

If any verification nodes go offline, the application chain is considered to be in a "failed state" and does not return to normal until the number of verification nodes exceeds the minimum threshold.

If there are no more assets on the app chain due to cross-chain transactions, the app chain is considered "frozen."

Reasons for choosing NEAR in Octopus Network

After an extensive analysis of the existing L1 protocol, OctopusNetwork decided to build its own platform based on NEAR. Octopus founder Louis Liu said Near was chosen becauseNear has good scalability and interoperability, high security and a user-friendly design.

"Last year we worked with several public chains, so we are very familiar with the public chain area. After comparison and investigation, we believe that NEAR is our best choice because it has higher security, faster finality, and is a scalable L1 protocol with better usability. In addition, NEAR'sRainbow Bridge enables trustless interoperability between NEAR and Ethereum"To make it our first choice. "

Compared to other L1 platforms such as Cosmos or Poca that can embrace application chains, Near stands out with some key technical advantages. Compared to Cosmos, publishing a chain of applications in Near is much easier. The complete Octopus scheme will simplify the process of finding the verifier, as well as the pledge and deployment.

As a result, developers can create chains on NEAR that start fairly, as native app chains issue tokens for service introduction only, not for pledge, as opposed to OCT tokens used for pledge.

Near offers a much cheaper secure lease than Poca, and there is no limit to the number of app chains that can be launched. Porcard is limited to 100 parallel chain card slots, and fewer than 10 will be operational this year. Nor did NEAR set up an auction or demand a hefty fee to gain access, as Boca did.

In general, Octopus chose Near because of its lower cost of deployment, better capacity scaling, better user friendliness, and better interoperability with common chains such as Ethereum compared to other existing L1 solutions.

Short-term/long-term potential: What resources can OctopusNetwork bring to NEAR?

While the Web3.0 revolution is still in its early stages, Near is continuing to carve out its own territory and extend it to different frontiers of cryptocurrency innovation. An Octopus application chain built on NEAR is expected to accelerate the short - and long-term development of the NEAR protocol.

Many applications want to develop their chains on a secure, low-cost, scalable and user-friendly L1 platform. In the short term, Near has a unique value proposition for such applications. This proposition will not only increase the overall value of Near's in-house products and services, but also bring many new assets and users to Near.

"For Octopus in terms of the Network, the system will for each NEAR the Octopus on the platform application chain distribution across a chain intelligent contract. This means that requires no additional coding can put their native encryption of monetary transmission chain to NEAR blocks. We want to apply all of the chain transmission assets to NEAR the platform, in order to further promote NEARDeFi ecological prosperity. The DeFi ecological will provide additional liquidity for all kinds of assets and function."

In the long run, Octopus Network will play a role as a combinable way to enable various applications to adopt different levels of security on NEAR. Some applications may not need validation nodes to provide this high level of security to thrive, while others may require even greater security over time.

With the Octopus Network, Near developers can quickly build less secure applications at a lower cost. If an application needs higher security in the future, Octopus can attract more authentication nodes through price increase, or issue more tokens to security service providers through the native application chain, so as to realize the expansion of security level. For future Near releases, the Octopus application chain provides project parties and developers with the flexibility to scale up the capacity of a single application.

The Octopus Network can accommodate Near's account model, and any application chain will respond to contract calls just like any other application of Near. This means that an application can transition from a contract to a chain of applications or from a chain of applications to a contract, as a project may require a lower-cost transaction, or the application may start to manage more assets, requiring higher security and faster finality than the NEAR parent chain can provide.

Octopus Network team

The team members behind Octopus Network all have outstanding technical capabilities and have accumulated rich experience in the field of cryptocurrency and mainstream software development. The team of just eight engineers has received several L1 Grants, including Cosmos, Solana, Flow, OASIS, Platon and Chainlink.

In addition, they have successfully developed Substrate's IBC and, together with other Substrate enthusiasts, have developed a national version of Substrate's online training course. It is worth mentioning that they are also active participants and co-organizers of the Rust community in China, for example, they are responsible for organizing the Rust Conference in China. From this perspective, it is not difficult to find that the Octopus team will not only open up a new development paradigm for Near, but also bring abundant Chinese Rust community resources to Near in terms of the development and deployment of application chain.

Verdict: A new frontier of innovation

The chain of applications deployed on Near via Octopus Network will strongly drive the growth of Near Eco, and a large number of new applications, crypto economic models, governance mechanisms and decentralized solutions are expected to be released on Near in the future. Near will operate the Octopus application chain in an efficient, scalable and cost-effective manner, while the Octopus Network is expected to bring in a significant amount of developer community resources to NEAR.

As Web3.0 continues to evolve, new layers of decentralized applications are emerging. This collaboration between Octopus Network and Near is expected to significantly improve the development process of the open Network and ultimately benefit users, developers and entrepreneurs.