Decentralized application or Dapp, is a web application with at least part of its backend residing on a public blockchain. A Dapp’s backend could be implemented in two ways: a set of smart contracts hosted by a platform blockchain, or on a dedicated blockchain. The latter is called an application specific blockchain, or appchain for short.

Substrate is the most powerful open source blockchain framework presently on the planet. All kinds of blockchains can be built on Substrate, such as public chains, consortium chains, Polkadot parachains, and Octopus appchains. 

There is still no cryptonetwork in existence to serve appchains. Although Polkadot seems the natural choice of Substrate based blockchains to join, its architecture and economy actually do not accommodate appchains. A Polkadot parachain must afford the security cost of one shard, aka slot, of the network, meaning tens of millions of dollars per year. While a generic platform parachain could host thousands of applications to share the security cost, it does not make sense for an application specific blockchain to bear the cost itself. For a Cosmos zone, its developers have to bootstrap PoS/Tendermint security by setting up a valuable native token and an active validator community from ground. Polygon and Skale may seem like options, but in fact they are still smart contract based and therefore not designed to host appchains.

So where should appchains go? Do they have to stay isolated and bootstrap security and work out interoperability on their own? Here comes Octopus to rescue! The Octopus Network is designed to serve appchains by providing flexible and affordable leased security, powerful out-of-box interoperability, and many useful infrastructures. More importantly, the Octopus community consists of Web3.0 venture capitalists and enthusiasts who are eager to find, fund, support, and prompt appchains.

NEAR is a public multi-shard blockchain with great performance and usability. Octopus chose to implement its relay as smart contracts rather than a blockchain for two reasons: 1. To make sure the Octopus Relay can go live with 100% safety and reliability. 2. To minimize the security cost of the relay so that it does not need to pass the cost through to the appchains by any means. So, Octopus Relay needs a public blockchain to run on, aka mainchain.

It was estimated that one Octopus Relay could host several hundreds of appchains without difficulty. And there could be multiple relays on multiple shards of the NEAR blockchain. So, Octopus appchains are not limited in number.

Easy! What you need to do is import a pallet or two which encapsulates the services provided by the Octopus Network and use them as you wish.

$OCT is a fungible, non-inflationary utility token that is required for staking on different appchains to ensure their security economically. $OCT is an NEP141 (NEAR Enhancement Proposals-141 which is equivalent to ERC-20 standard) token on NEAR protocol.

The total supply of $OCT is fixed at 100 million, which will be minted before the mainnet launch at once. The plan is to sell 25% - 30% of the tokens to institutional investors via two rounds of private fundraising, and sell 2.5% - 5% to the public via an IDO. Please follow the offical twitter and join Ocotpus telegram group to keep up to date, and refer to the whitepaper for detailed token distribution plan.

Please follow @oct_network on twitter for updates.

Octopus mainnet launch is scheduled in Q3 2021.

Sure! Please refer to the document or join us on Discord for further information. There is a dedicated channel for testnet.

The Octopus community consists of three roles: Web3.0 application developers, Web3.0 venture capitalists, and last but not least, Web3.0 enthusiasts who see the Octopus Network as an important driving force for the next generation Internet and are willing to devote their time and energy to spread the idea. Feel free to choose your roles and dive in.

Send email to hi@oct.network or join us on Discord.