The application chain protocol can reduce the cost of application deployment to the platform and ensure its security. NEAR is expected to introduce a large number of developer community resources through Octopus.
Original Title: “NEAR Future Application Chain Network: Detailed Introduction of Octopus”
Written by: NEAR Protocol
In recent years, various ecosystems based on blockchain have made significant progress in robustness, interoperability, and customization. The NEAR protocol is often referred to as the third-generation blockchain network. It is a PoS chain that uses sharding technology and pays special attention to expansion and availability. Although NEAR is often referred to as a ready-made expansion solution for existing Ethereum applications, the protocol can also handle many other types of decentralized solutions.
In this context, Octopus Network officially released its first application chain protocol in the NEAR ecosystem. This move will greatly reduce the cost of the application platform and ensure its security. It provides a huge competitive advantage for NEAR to attract a large number of applications and developer teams. It can be said to be a very remarkable achievement.
Introduction to Application Chain and its importance
Application chain is an independent block chain designed for a specific application or a set of specific applications. Unlike smart contracts that usually run on public/private chains, application chains allow developers to customize their applications based on governance structures, cryptocurrency economic models, and even the underlying consensus algorithm.
From a technical point of view, the application chain provides developers with a dedicated transaction processing performance 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 ensuring the transaction security of a certain application chain.
The application chain has a flexible security level (depending on the number of verification nodes responsible for providing support for a certain application chain), and has its own token, encryption economic model, incentive model and customized code base. To put it simply, the benefits generated by the developer or project party running their own applications on a customized blockchain can now be obtained with only one application chain, and at the same time they can enjoy lower transactions from the parent chain The benefits of congestion and status verification services.
Introducing the application chain into the NEAR ecosystem means that all important stakeholders within the ecosystem will get additional opportunities in terms of their own products, services, and benefits. The verification node has the ability to ensure the security of the application chain and therefore receives additional rewards.
Developers can freely build and publish application chains, and make them have flexible parameters in terms of encryption economic model and governance to suit different usage scenarios. In the end, a series of new solutions will use the security and transaction load capacity of a larger parent network to provide support for users and make them benefit from it. With the continuous development of the blockchain ecology, the application chain on Polkadot and Cosmos has verified this concept, and the future of cryptocurrency will be closely related to the efficient deployment of such protocols.
Introduction to Octopus Network
Octopus Network is about to deploy a decentralized protocol, by which time any developer, project party or entrepreneur can quickly and efficiently create their own application chain in NEAR at a lower cost. Louis Liu, the founder of Octopus Network, explained: “Octopus provides instant-available security, interoperability and on-chain governance services for projects that want to create customized blockchains for their own open network applications.”
More specifically, the Octopus Network relay runs as a smart contract on NEAR, providing the infrastructure for the verification node market of the application chain released by Octopus. The verification node pledges OCT tokens to verify a certain application chain. In return, the verification node can obtain the token of the application chain for which it is responsible: each application chain has its own encryption economic model and related inflation rate.
It is worth noting that each verification node is responsible for running an independent node, and each node has its own BFT consensus mechanism for the application chain it is responsible for. However, since each chain published in Octopus is connected to NEAR through security, assets and contracts can be seamlessly communicated between NEAR and any application chain.
From an economic perspective, validating nodes pledge OCT tokens and earn rewards from each application chain of Octopus Network. There is no inflation in OCT tokens. From the perspective of governance, OCT token holders do not participate in the governance of the application chain, and the system leaves this opportunity to the holders of the original token of each application chain.
Octopus founder Louis Liu and the Octopus team believe that the next round of innovation in the cryptocurrency field will revolve around a scalable and low-cost application chain:
“We gradually believe that smart contracts and application chains have unique value propositions. In other words, there is a special advantage. They can be applied to different scenarios. I think smart contracts are a better way, especially for DeFi. Choice, because all smart contracts on a certain platform have the same security level, and they have excellent composability. For other Web3.0 usage scenarios, such as games, digital collectibles, NFTs and more The creator economy, including music, broadcasting and even blogs, DAO platforms, IoT platforms, etc. For such use scenarios, the application chain is a better choice, because the application chain can achieve subtleties between decentralization and performance In addition, on-chain governance allows the application chain to evolve appropriately in a legal form. If this work cannot be carried out within the smart contract, it will become very onerous.”
How Octopus Network Works
Octopus Network is built around OCT tokens. OCT token is a homogenous, non-inflationary utility token. Different application chains based on this protocol need to use this type of token for pledge. Along with this design comes a large number of prerequisites and many functions built in Octopus Network.
First of all, building an application chain requires accumulating sufficient OCT tokens from ecological stakeholders for pledge. Only when the minimum security level is reached, the application chain can be released. Its genesis block comes from the configuration parameters of the parent chain. .
Secondly, as more verification nodes choose to pledge for a certain application chain, the verification node set of the application chain is updated in the smart contract of the parent chain and propagated to the application chain. This is the basis for the application chain to gradually increase the security level, which can be effectively built as “Shared Security as a Service” (SSaaS). Similar to AWS providing data storage services for software companies, Octopus can provide security services for the blockchain ecosystem that seeks to quickly guide users to settle in and streamline development.
Once fully launched, the Octopus application chain and parent chain assets can be fully interoperable. OCT tokens can also be used as collateral for cross-chain assets between the application chain and the parent chain. The last and most important point is that the application chain itself is governed by the holder of the token, not by the verification node that pledges the OCT token.
As shown in the figure above, in order to ensure its legitimacy on the Octopus network, the launch of the new application chain needs to follow specific procedures:
- The application chain to be started needs to be queued, waiting for the verification node to pass the pledge OCT token support.
- Once supported, their application chain can be activated and fully launched.
- If a verification node goes offline, the application chain is considered a “failure state”, and the state will not return to normal until the number of verification nodes exceeds the minimum threshold.
- If there are no more assets on the application chain due to cross-chain transactions, the application chain is considered to be in a “frozen state”.
Reasons why Octopus Network chose NEAR
After extensive analysis of the existing L1 protocol, OctopusNetwork decided to build its own platform based on NEAR. Louis Liu, the founder of Octopus, said that NEAR was chosen because NEAR has good scalability, interoperability, high security and user-friendly design.
“Last year we reached cooperation with several public chains, so we are very familiar with the field of public chains. After comparison and investigation, we believe that NEAR has higher security, faster finality, and is a kind of L1 capability. Expansion protocol and better availability are our best choice. In addition, NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge can achieve trustless interoperability between NEAR and Ethereum, making it our first choice.”
Compared with other L1 platforms that can accept application chains, such as Cosmos or Polkadot, NEAR stands out by virtue of some key technical advantages. Compared with Cosmos, it is easier to publish an application chain in NEAR. The complete Octopus solution will simplify the process of finding validators and staking and deployment.
The result of this is that developers can create some fair start-up chains on NEAR, because the purpose of issuing tokens in the native application chain is only to introduce services, and not to be used for staking, which is the same as staking The OCT token is completely different.
Compared with Polkadot, the application chain provided by NEAR has a much cheaper security leasing fee, and there is no limit to the number of application chains that can be started. Polkadot has a limit of 100 parallel chain card slots, and less than 10 can be put into use this year. And NEAR did not set up auctions or required a large fee to obtain access qualifications like Polkadot.
In general, Octopus chose NEAR because compared with other existing L1 solutions, the cost of deploying in NEAR is lower, its scalability is better, it is more user-friendly, and its interoperability with public chains such as Ethereum Also better.
Short-term/long-term potential: What resources can OctopusNetwork bring to NEAR?
Although the Web3.0 revolution is still in its early stages, NEAR is constantly expanding its field and extending it to the forefront of different cryptocurrency innovations. The Octopus application chain built on NEAR is expected to accelerate the short-term and long-term development progress of the NEAR protocol.
Many applications hope to develop their own chains on a safe, low-cost, scalable and user-friendly L1 platform. In the short term, NEAR has a unique value proposition for such applications. This set of propositions will not only enhance the overall value of the NEAR ecosystem’s internal products and services, but also bring many new assets and new users to NEAR.
“For Octopus Network, the system will assign a cross-chain smart contract to each Octopus application chain on the NEAR platform. This means that no additional coding work is required to transfer their native cryptocurrency to the NEAR blockchain. We want to transfer all application chain assets to the NEAR platform to further promote the prosperity of the NEAR DeFi ecosystem. The DeFi ecosystem will provide additional liquidity and functions for various assets.”
From a long-term perspective, Octopus Network will play a role as a combinable method, enabling various applications to adopt different security levels on NEAR. Some applications may not require verification nodes to provide this higher security in order to thrive, while other applications may require higher security over time.
Using Octopus Network, NEAR developers can quickly build some less secure applications at a lower cost. If an application needs higher security in the future, Octopus can attract more verification nodes through the increase in currency prices, or issue more tokens for security service providers through the native application chain to achieve security expansion . For future applications to be released in NEAR, the Octopus application chain provides flexibility for project parties and developers to expand the capacity of a single application.
Octopus Network can accommodate NEAR’s account model, and any application chain will respond to contract calls like other NEAR applications. This means that the application can transition from a certain contract to a certain application chain or from a certain application chain to a certain contract, because a certain project may require lower-cost transactions, or the application may begin to manage more assets, which requires more than NEAR parent chain can provide higher security and faster finality.
Octopus Network team
The team members behind Octopus Network have excellent technical capabilities and have accumulated rich experience in the field of cryptocurrency and mainstream software development. This team of only 8 engineers has obtained multiple L1 agreement grants, including Cosmos, Solana, Flow, Oasis, PlatON and ChainLink.
In addition, they have successfully developed an IBC suitable for Substrate, and developed a domestic version of Substrate online training courses together with other Substrate enthusiasts (many projects are from their hands). What’s more worth mentioning is that they are also active participants and co-organizers of the domestic Rust community, 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 rich Chinese Rust community resources to NEAR in terms of development and deployment of the application chain.
Conclusion: a new innovation frontier
The application chain deployed on NEAR through Octopus Network will strongly promote the growth of the NEAR ecosystem. It is expected that a large number of new applications, encrypted economic models, governance mechanisms and decentralized solutions will be released on NEAR in the future. NEAR will operate the Octopus application chain in an efficient, scalable and low-cost manner, and Octopus Network is expected to introduce a large number of developer community resources for NEAR.
As Web3.0 continues to develop, new decentralized applications emerge in endlessly. The collaboration between Octopus Network and NEAR is expected to greatly improve the development process of the open network, ultimately benefiting users, developers and entrepreneurs.
