About Octopus Network (OCT)

In the coming Web3 era, app developers will require greater control of the specific economic, governance and consensus methods associated with their specific apps, opening the door to a new sub-genre of blockchains called appchains. These are customized to operate one specific application, as opposed to multiple apps, as is the case with public chains. In seeking security solutions for appchains, Web3 developers were running into cost barriers.

Seeing an opportunity to make appchains less cost-prohibitive to launch, Octopus came up with a leased security design (LPoS) which allows appchains to choose the level of security they need at any time and scale as necessary, as Louis Liu, founder of Octopus, explained.

“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,” he said.

The Octopus Relay is a set of smart contracts running on the NEAR blockchain, and which facilitates the security leasing market with OCT as the token that binds participants, the project says.

NEAR solves scalability issues with sharding technology to allow the network’s capacity to scale up as the number of nodes in the network increases.

Octopus appchains “pay rent” using their native tokens, leasing security from OCT holders who stake on the appchains in return for rewards.

When was OCT created and how much was it worth?

 The project was first launched in China in 2019 by Louis Liu, former CTO for Beijing Keyin Tech Co. He is a former project manager at China Mobile. His team had previously been known as Cdot. Other members include Julian Sun, chief software architect, and Burt Chen, a lead developer. The mainnet launched in October of 2021. About that time, OCT changed hands for about $3. It eventually reached an all-time high of $7 in January of 2022. By June of 2022, OCT had declined to $0.26. As of early October 2022, OCT was $0.32, according to CoinGecko.

How is the price of OCT determined?

 OCT is a non-inflationary token. Its total supply is capped at 100 million, of which 30 million are in circulation.

Roughly half of the supply is vested over three years and could conceivably impact price as it comes into circulation in coming months, D-Core analysts said.

Why does OCT have value?

While supply/demand factors and general crypto conditions are a part of what drives the price, there are also Octopus' longer-term considerations, as the project’s success is hitched to the potential rise in app chains.

Additionally, if NEAR, on which Octopus runs, continues to gain traction as a smart contract rival to Ethereum, interoperable projects and their native assets could begin to proliferate, possibly giving OCT a use-case in terms of being a type of cross-chain collateral.

Meanwhile, demand for the network's LPoS services is expected to increase.

"As more and more app chains look to use the Network, token demand from validators and delegators should increase," D-Core said. "Growth in the adoption rate also means that there should be a higher demand."

Is OCT secure?

Octopus deploys a decentralized protocol. It provides developers with security via a smart contract running on NEAR. According to the project, 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,” the project said.

The network security audits were underway as of last year. Recently, per D-Core, there was a bug bounty program that focused on the timelock contract and the prevention of loss to investors. Another security measure of note: By way of the Octopus Relay, “honest” nodes can submit a fraud-proof to challenge one or more malicious actors. If the fraud-proof is confirmed, the malicious actors’ staked OCT is reduced, buttressing app chain security.

What are the main benefits of OCT?

• Octopus Network gives developers an outlet to affordably create their own appchains on NEAR.
• The Octopus team believes that the next round of crypto innovation will revolve around scalable and low-cost appchains which are seen as optimal for apps to thrive with uniquely decentralized on-chain governance.
• As Web3.0 continues to develop, new dApps should proliferate, in part owing to the collaboration between Octopus Network and NEAR which, Blockcast said, is expected to "greatly improve the development process of the open network, ultimately benefiting users, developers and entrepreneurs."

What do critics say about OCT?

Because the core team is based out of China, government regulation might negatively impact the project, some analysts have said.