Sheldon Dearr on Octopus Network's substrate ecosystem

0:01i'm ashton addison from blockwest capital for investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have sheldon dear the technical lead at octopus network sheldon welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thanks for having me ashton you're very welcome a lot going on in the substrate ecosystem and it can get technical but we're gonna

0:24break it down today in layman's terms for people to get more familiar with octopus network how you're interacting with the web 3.0 ecosystem and then we'll talk about the intricacies and what it looks like moving down the road but for now let's start off the conversation with just a little bit about what is octopus network how does it function within the blockchain

0:46ecosystem and then we'll dive into the details excellent so octopus network is a web3 interoperability protocol that helps projects launch their own blockchains specifically application specific blockchains or app chains so if you're familiar with web3 at all you can think of us like an infrastructure provider but also that we provide a suite of solutions to help people gain easier

1:09access to web3 technologies and that doesn't mean anything except technologies that they're building that they're operating that they can borrow from from different places to make new things okay great now let's break that down a little bit further sheldon from it can be confusing for people that are just getting into cryptocurrencies and they just and they just starting to

1:30understand ethereum and then they see the substrate ecosystem and how it differs and there's layer zero and the infrastructure you know people don't really need to know exactly how it works but maybe you can give an overview of like how substrate functions and how you're actually helping projects launch into substrate sure so substrate is different from

1:51ethereum in a number of ways but the one that we probably want to focus on is the way that the software is packaged together so when you're working with ethereum you're working with the ethereum virtual machine and that means that you've got a sort of suite of functions you've got a bunch of different options and that's what you can use it's a can work for everybody concept just

2:12based on the existing suite of evm substrate is much more customizable it does include some evm compatibility which we'll discuss later but substrate has some some different advantages but the main components that make it different is at the low layers of the tech stack it's customizable you know based on what you're trying to achieve with ethereum virtual machine is a

2:36little bit more effort required sometimes especially when you're doing things that are either off chain or interacting with off-chain operations and substrate is really really excellent for that off-chain workers is a concept we could touch on technically but from a layman's perspective substrate is a software suite of modularized sort of options that you can use to

2:57build your own system evm is more of a menu hey i want to use this i have this option in front of me i'm going to pay the gas costs and then you know i'm able to afford whatever the network is able to offer me instead of choosing what my network will do definitely and so with substrate and you sort of hinted at at the beginning there with app chains with the customizability you're

3:20you're essentially creating your own blockchain that in terms of ethereum you if you have a token that you've launched you're sort of parented under the ethereum network and there's limitations there but from what i understand on substrate that customizability is essentially you're creating your own blockchain is that right that's correct the blockchains that

3:39we helped launch are sovereign and there are components of integration that we support encourage you know help with but these are independent blockchains they're they're commonly labeled as side chains and i try not to use this language because that implies that their consensus or their sort of their lower layer components that make them work that

4:01they're integrated with the other chain the main chain in this case near protocol that's not the case these substrate block chains are are completely independent okay and from what i've seen of the polka dot and the kusama ecosystem where projects try to do a pair chain lease offering or a fundraising and then that gets them a slot on polkadot is that related to you

4:26know because polkadot's running on substrate is that related in the same way of how they're launching projects through octopus no this is one of the points where we specifically differ so polka dot is designed to be the place where you know very very large substrate products will exist and interoperate with each other kusama is more of the bleeding edge

4:50of experimental very similar but also in production it's not a test net octopus network doesn't want to use the nomination process in this way because we think it forces too tight of a bottle deck we want to make sure that there's an ability for people who do good work to be able to join and that means instead of saying hey we have a limited number

5:12of slots you know we're going to let the market decide what they're worth we'd say instead okay there's a collateral purpose that the token will provide you have to be able to achieve a certain amount of collateral to be reasonably secure but that doesn't mean that you have to you know win over somebody else necessarily you don't have to compete with capital to get

5:32infrastructure your capital itself becomes your infrastructure very cool and yeah from what i understand on through the pair chain lease offerings there's only a limited amount of spots that are possible to actually launch you know a substrate blockchain is there still that limitation if you're going through the octopus network route or is can can you

5:54essentially launch an infinite amount of substrate blockchains we have the capability to launch an infinite amount of substrate blockchains it's a little bit technical the reasoning why but i can summarize it pretty easily at polka dot you have a relay chain a bit of infrastructure that all para chains are supposed to interact with in order to communicate effectively with

6:17other pair chains we don't have this type of infrastructure model we have a relay protocol instead so if you eliminate that barrier and then look at the scalability of near protocol that's effectively how you get to infinite app chains we can talk about the longer story for that but that really is part of the research we did before hanging our hat on near protocol

6:41and that just means that when we grow large enough on your protocol it's very likely that we will have our own shard very cool and i do love mirror protocol we've had them on the show a few times this past year so i'm looking forward to seeing how that grows out and now as well i'd love to just get more of a snapshot now that we have all the background

7:00information on how it functions and how it differs about where octopus network is at right now in terms of working with projects that are launching chains you know have you already worked with a lot of projects that are already live or where exactly is that at so right now we have two projects that are live we launched our main net october last year and then within

7:22just over 30 days the first app chain went online so deip is the third app chain that should be coming into election status relatively soon that has slowed us just a little it's not something that we're trying to hide deip is a massive suite so it took us longer than expected to audit dip but that audit is nearly complete so coming back to your

7:46question there are two app chains running today and they're their their services are moderately unique their concepts are are very well audited in web 3 and by audited and web 3 i mean that they have a unique fairness model that we scrutinized and they were just out of the box already ready to do those things we didn't have to push them that was part of their

8:07design and that's part of the way we see app chains is that they need to put fairness forward that's part of the logic of web3 instead of the you know sort of legacy mindset of web 2 where people are the product people need to be the community the participants the equity holders etc stakeholders if you will definitely yeah i think people are

8:25waking up to the models and which one is more beneficial and i'm sure we'll only see continued growth in web 3. Now i wanted to just backtrack a little bit and just talk about you know octopus network as a whole what is with this octopus you know is it some you know marine biology project or eight leg eight eight eight limbs why is it called octopus network

8:51so there's a few reasons that we you know we'll marinate about and kind of have fun discussing about but realistically at a grounded level octopus network has its tentacles if you will in multiple ecosystems multiple technologies and multiple business operations so being a relatively large and you know varied entity there's a lot of

9:18different components that we have our tentacles in for instance we'll be you know looking at a couple of different things with a grant program we already have our accelerator program in its second batch you know we're building an education program that's just coming out of pilot that's more the business octopus if you will if you want to think of it more as a

9:37technical structure which i tend to do you can think about the different ecosystems we participate in which is chiefly near protocol the cosmos ecosystem and substrate as we were discussing very interesting and i like that you mentioned the accelerator program there as well i feel like these networks to help them grow you almost need accelerators incubators grants as you

10:00mentioned as well can you talk about the accelerator program what are you interested in accelerating and you know are you already working with people at early stages sure so like i said we're in our second accelerator batch so we have already gone through the first one and we had a showcase day at the end of that three month period the results of that is that we

10:21introduced some winners one of them is becoming an app chain that would be fusotau so to be clear our accelerator is not only designed for app chains a lot of people kind of expect that oh you don't you want to accelerate projects for your ecosystem of course we do but we know that the knowledge on our team and the knowledge just in our organization in

10:40total it spans a lot more than just substrate and these other ecosystems that we've discussed so effectively we encourage anyone to join as long as their their product is you know reasonably ideated prepared you know you have sort of a base layer of business components in place to start the work then just about anyone is welcome to sit with us this is part of our trust model that

11:02we're establishing ourselves that we're showing people that were effective that our knowledge is valuable that our help is valuable so this is very very different from an incubator and there was some misunderstanding about this in the past incubators and other you know common financial devices that you see in sort of the startup world they require

11:22some sort of equity or stake people who enter our accelerator program we charge them nothing we don't accept any of their equity it's an operational risk to us we literally can't take it on and then they have the opportunity to get in front of our community and win some money at the end fifty thousand dollars is the price so the mindset of the accelerator

11:44is to help the entire web3 space grow and if that means we're helping a finance smart chain project or someone build their own chain that isn't substrate that's perfectly fine with us we're still happy to demonstrate that our you know our knowledge and our help was useful and that you know we're genuinely here to help build the space i really like that approach sheldon and

12:05they say you know blockchain even if they're a different chain everyone needs to work together because it's just so small and early compared to the traditional financial world in the real world you know we're still in the early adopter phase so i like that those principles going forward and i think that's attractive and we'll open the doors for even more

12:24projects to innovate so great work on that i'm looking forward to hearing more about that i want to know a little bit more about the octopus network itself and how that interacts with the app chains and more specifically as well the governance and the governance token because i know that there is an octopus network token and cryptocurrency as well can you talk

12:45about the token how it functions in the ecosystem and how it provides value to everyone in the ecosystem so the oct token is effectively a utility and governance token i try not to refer to it as a cryptocurrency even though it's a common you know sort of understanding of the space that all tokens are currencies the purpose of our token in

13:06governance and with utility is to provide economic collateral and security governance and ultimately enablement to larger governance structures so not just governance at the ground level but governance at a higher level meaning that eventually the octopus network team's goal is to sort of transition out of the need for our existence that doesn't mean that we

13:27would leave the project we would just become participants on the same level as the public and that's our sort of end goal of being universally fair and not needing to you know control the bridge ourselves or you know strangle hold innovation or decisions about parameters like staking yeah definitely like a real democracy and decentralization and not having that influence to make

13:49the executive decision on the other projects that's great to know thank you for clarifying that i know that you guys are pretty early on only having a few app chains launched so far and that the vision is very grand and the plan is into the long-term future and i want to talk about the long-term future now i'd love to hear your insights in

14:13what you see as some of the key factors to success in how octopus network is going to grow from where it is now to five years from now and beyond so operational scalability is something that we're coming into our own on because we're just out of our what i would call initialization phase so you know we only went mainnet two quarters ago or like a quarter

14:38and a half ago or something like that the reason i say that is because we have so much to coordinate for app chains and so much value that we want to gift them to enable them we're working on refining and streamlining that process that's something where we pretty much all know hey this is what needs to happen this is what we want to do but the way that it gets done and the

14:59sort of workflow and logic is something that we're going to continue to refine and iterate up to the point where we you know go full down if you will so that's one component because like i've mentioned in passing before part of our responsibility is to help app chains with marketing with community we act as the validator of last resort for the first 100 app chains so

15:21not just being a safeguard at a technology level but acting as a safeguard as a business partner is also something that we're you know really key on we all know that how we want to do that it's the mechanics that we're working through so scalability or sort of you know realization of the dream long term that's one component of it the other component is being able to sort of

15:46meet the market where it is so we have a really intelligent market positioning thanks to our ceo louis lou that's really anchored around how wonderful substrate is and how hard it is to be a para chain so making it easier to join octopus network in every way shape and form whether that's enabling our evm template which is recently merged into our

16:06master repo on github or you know just the general onboarding and the process that app chains need to go through to get started that's the main thing that is journeying forward and the easier that gets the more you're going to see other organizations saying okay it's worth it for me to go down this path because so much is already streamlined

16:28so that's a pretty good portion of it but that is again about meeting the market where it is today where there are hundreds of sort of orphan substrate projects that are either running a test net like a main net where a test net has a you know economic value attached to it from trading on real markets or blockchains that are sort of orphaned

16:50trying to make contact with venture capital or other organizations so they can reach that higher level of operation we are communicating with these projects we're helping others pivot to those types of designs but the ability for the market to trust us and recognize our value our presentation of that value these are medium-term goals or short-term goals

17:13and they really all fall into hey we're trying to build trust in the community so people can understand that our purpose is to help incredible i like it and for startups and people that are looking to get involved with octopus either through the acceleration or through some of these other programs that you mentioned what is the first steps that they need

17:36to take to reach out to you so transparently accelerator program is just on our website accelerator.oc.network you can apply to the accelerator at any time there's no real prerequisites except that you know have some base level of preparedness and that your ideation is complete and that you're beginning to work on the idea i'm sorry i think i missed the other

17:59component of your question just for the acceleration for the grants and all the other faucets of how startups can get involved with octopus network so economic preparedness is the main one that i've ended up coaching on you know participation tokens you know governance tokens tokenization of time or liquidity or you know a unified dow operation

18:25there's a lot of different things that sort of non-web3 crypto projects need to consider and that's a lot of what's been going on in the background with some of these conversations where we know that a startup for instance might have had a very simple hey we're building a product it's going to you know create this profit line and then that will help with

18:43other components of the business we have to help them complete that circle of value and say okay the customers value that they get out of interacting with you can't just be being a customer they also need to be a participant they also need to you know have a reason to come back besides oh the product is great so that's kind of a base layer but that's again that's not a limit

19:05to being in the accelerator that's more of a economic target that we're coaching people on so that they can be web 3 applications and not necessarily just blockchain applications ben thank you for that extra information now for just the viewers that are looking to learn more about octopus network and participating in it not as a startup but just as a as a crypto holder and getting

19:28involved what is the best way for them to learn more so our website is oct.network it's got a trove of information there's there's quite a lot to go through but if you'd rather sort of go more into the technical details you can look at docs docs.network and also take a look at mainnet.network mainnet.network is our ui it's our dashboard you'll see the bridge there you'll see

19:53the app chains there that's where voting on app chains takes place that's where you can see their process as they go through auditing booting and launch so those are really the three main sites that i'd recommend following up on but if your interest is more just sort of exploration and not necessarily direct participation our medium also has a lot

20:10of great content thanks to our chief editor exam amazing i will leave all those links in the description box below for the startups for the viewers and everything else thank you so much sheldon for coming on explaining all of this talking about octopus network i'm really looking forward to seeing it grow and following along so let's definitely follow up in

20:29the near future it's been a pleasure ashley i'd love to come back another time and be happy to have some exciting updates for you