BlockTalks x Ocean Protocol AMA Transcript!

Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!

BlockTalks x Centaur AMA recap

We recently hosted an AMA with Ocean Protocol, on November th,4 at 1.00 PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Trent McConaghy, Co-Founder & Board Member at Ocean Protocol so here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.

INTRODUCTION

Trent McConaghy — Sure. I’m Trent:) Founder of Ocean Protocol. Did almost 20 years of AI, via two startups and a PhD And since 2013, I’ve been focused on blockchain. I believe that blockchain is an amazing tool — a lever — to change the world for the better. And I live that belief by using it to try to do that:). I did AI back in the 90s when it was super uncool. Everyone else was doing Web 1.0. I was the weirdo in the corner lol.

Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks

Q1. Could you please introduce Ocean Protocol to our community in layman’s term?

Ans — Ocean is Tools for the Web3 Data Economy.

What it does // what you do with it:

• You can use Ocean Market app to earn by selling data, and curating / staking on data.
• As a developer, you can use Ocean Protocol libraries to build your own app for secure, privacy-preserving data exchange.
• In Ocean Protocol, each data service gets its own datatoken. This enables data wallets, data exchanges, and data co-ops by directly leveraging crypto wallets, exchanges, and more.

That’s the simple summary. I’ll expand a bit.

Why it’s needed: problem

The data economy is already huge — $377B+ in Europe alone. But there are problems:

• First, only a few companies benefit from the current siloed structure and because of this, the status quo represents a shadow data economy.
• Second, every day, individuals, companies, cities and even nations struggle with who can see their data, and who controls their data. There’s widespread surveillance, hacks, and more. These are issues of data privacy and control, or more generally, *data sovereignty*.

This persists for two reasons:

• there isn’t open infrastructure enable secure, privacy-preserving sharing & monetization of data
• there isn’t an easy way to turn that data into assets, in a way that the market accepts

Ocean addresses this:

• that makes it easier for people to publish their data, auto-price it, and sell it, and
• bridges the gap between data services and DeFi, a set of tools for financialization of data assets, including lending, exchanges, and derivatives.

Ocean Protocol Overview

Trent — That’s a great overview! And at a glance, it looks quite accurate, zooming in on the key things.

BlockTalks — ❤

Q2. What are the advantages of Ocean Protocol to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?

Ans — Ocean stands in a class of its own. There are no other alternatives, in blockchain or otherwise. It’s the only tool that wraps data services (datasets, etc) as a data asset (in our case ERC20 token). Then with this data as assets — datatokens — you can hold them in regular crypto wallets, exchange them on regular crypto exchanges, and more.

Here’s a pic that summarizes this.

Ocean Ecosystem Data Token Creators & Consumers

There are other data-related blockchain plays. They are all complementary. Here are examples of high-quality data-related blockchain plays. We’re in touch with all of them. To give a feel:

• Filecoin and ARweave are about decentralized data storage. People who wish could store their data on one of these services and make it available on Ocean as datatokens.
• Streamr and Numerai Signals focus on the decentralized data feed side. These feeds can all be wrapped as Ocean datatokens.
• TheGraph Curators makes specific data queries in Ethereum easier to search. Their feeds can all be wrapped as Ocean datatokens.
• Chainlink brings datafeeds onto the chain for more trustworthy on-chain calculations, such as DeFi price feeds. These feeds can all be wrapped as Ocean datatokens.

Back to Ocean…

Here’s why you might consider using Ocean, in terms of unique selling propositions (USPs). To users of Ocean Market, possible USPs are:

1. monetize data (your data or other data you get the rights to), while preserving privacy and control
2. earning potential by staking OCEAN on data (this is exploding, I’ll discuss more later)

To people building on Ocean, possible USPs are:

1. An on-ramp and off-ramp for data assets into crypto, allowing: crypto wallets for data custody & data management, DEXes for data exchanges, DAOs for data co-ops, securitizing data assets, and more via DeFi composability. “Data legos”

2. Quickly launch a data marketplace, with many USPs: buy & sell private data while preserving privacy, non-custodial, censorship-resistant, auto price discovery, data audit trails, and more.

3. Decentralized data exchange platform, enabling these characteristics: improve the visibility, transparency and flexibility in usage of data; share data while avoiding “data escapes”; needs little dev-ops support and maintenance; has high liveness; is non-custodial; and is censorship-resistant.

Examples for (3): E.g. Ocean as a traffic data management platform for smart cities. E.g. federated learning without having to trust the orchestration middleman.

Q3. What are the major milestones Ocean Protocol achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?

Ans — We released Ocean V1 mid 2019. It introduced infrastructure for decentralized access control. This is a foundation for people to sell or share data with others, without a centralized middleman compromising security or control.

Ocean V2 brought in privacy, via the Compute-to-Data Feature. Compute-to-data enables publishers to sell private data while preserving privacy. The private data stays on the publisher’s premises, avoiding “data escapes.”

Ocean V3 is our most important release yet. It keeps the benefits of V1 and V2 but in a simpler yet more powerful system. Its foundation is datatokens. On top is the newly introduced Ocean Market.

Ocean V4 is OceanDAO, where the community proposes projects and curates them, with goals of both near-term growth and long-term sustainability. We’re on track to release OceanDAO in Q4, in line with our roadmap.

Ocean V5 was putting Ocean onto a permissionless. Actually, we achieved that as part of Ocean V3 by deploying to Ethereum mainnet. Always nice to do something ahead of schedule:)

Given that we just released Ocean V3, and it’s a big release, let’s elaborate on it, in terms of (1) datatokens and (2) Ocean Market.

(1) Datatokens.

• They’re ERC20 tokens to access data services. Each data service gets its own datatoken.
• You can access the dataset if you hold 1.0 datatokens.
• To access the dataset, you send 1.0 datatokens to the data provider (running Ocean Provider). To give access to someone else, send them 1.0 datatokens. That’s it.
• Ocean makes it easy to publish data services (deploy and mint ERC20 datatokens), and to consume data services (spend datatokens).
• Because datatokens are ERC20, and live on Ethereum mainnet, there’s a whole ecosystem to leverage. Crypto wallets become data wallets. DEXes become data exchanges. DAOs become data co-ops. Etherscan becomes a data provenance tool.

This last thing is the simple-but-poweful thing about Ocean datatokens. It appropriates all these awesome tools built for crypto at large, for use in the data industry.

(2) Ocean Market (https://market.oceanprotocol.com).

• It’s a decentralized exchange (DEX), tuned for data. It’s a web app where people can publish data, stake on data (curate), and buy data.
• Datasets / data services get published as datatokens.
• After you publish a data service as a data asset, you can easily create a pool for that data asset. The pool is a Balancer Automated Market Maker (AMM). Then you have a OCEAN-datatoken pool. People can use this to buy and sell datatokens, or stake on datasets. Got that one? It gives you a way to immediately put your newly minted data asset into a primary market. Boom!
• Publishing data then putting it into the pool (as primary market) can be seen as an “Initial Data Offering” (IDO). This makes Ocean Market the world’s first IDO Launchpad.
• People can earn by selling data, or staking on data (or running their own fork).
• n staking, you earn fees as a function of sales volume and as a function of the % of the pool that you own. (Just like any AMM pool.) Thus, the game is to find data assets that promise to have high sales volume and are relatively undiscovered by other stakers.

In the week since we released Ocean V3, the Ocean ecosystem has become a microcosm of the larger crypto industry. People are doing Initial Data Offerings to launch their data assets. Others are speculating on those data assets, staking on them, and consuming them. There’s an explosion of Telegram discussions. There’s good actors, bad actors (scammers), and of course datatoken shills.

What this all means is:

We are witnessing the birth of a new economy, the Web3 Data Economy.

In front of our eyes, right now. We’ve been aiming for this for a long time. It’s super fun to see it finally happening:)

Questions Asked on Twitter For Ocean Protocol Team!

Q1. Less than 1 week running and Ocean Market has over 160 datasets with 450K OCEAN pooled. What are you looking at the future of Ocean Protocol?

Ans — For the rest of 2020, this is:

1/3 Addressing the issues with V3 as they arise. E.g. helping users better handle scammers like rug pulls or fraudulent IP. It’s a continuous process.

Just like banks have to improve fraud detection over time, we have to do the same but in a decentralized context, with different tools.

2/3 onboarding more data partners, for more datasets. Helping unlock more data in general.

3/3 rolling out a first (humble) version of OceanDAO

Going into 2021 and beyond: the overall goal is ubiquity, for Ocean to be a layer for data access control across more networks, in line within our mission & values.

To get there, we will focus on growth. This is from a bottom-up perspective (working with developers and consumers), top-down (working with enterprises, cities, etc), and zooming in where we have the most traction and opportunity (Ocean Market and DeFi).

Q2. Ocean Protocol aims to unlock data, using a thoughtful application of both technology and governance. This sounds interesting and amazing, could you tell us the methodology Ocean Protocol adopts in making this a reality?

Ans — This one’s a bit more simple and general.. Start with a mission and a vision. Then execute, execute, execute. Don’t be scared to adapt, just stay true to your mission and vision.

It’s not easy. Tenacity is the most important thing. And along the way, from this high level, there are details. E.g. we ended up helping launch the field of Token Engineering. Simply because we needed to. Or recently we built our own token simulator, to verify designs.

Q3. This token model of OCEAN works on multiple level, such as Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium [BME] model, work token model and token burn. How does the OCEAN token model compare to or differ from those approaches?

Ans — Ocean has burning, but that doesn’t make it BME of course. Ocean’s core token dynamics are those of a work token, embedded within a loop for growth and long-term sustainability. OCEAN is designed to increase with a rise in usage volume.

We have a blog post describing the design in general, here:

Ocean Token Model

And maybe to elaborate a few points:

To ensure long-term sustainability for the Ocean community, the OCEAN token is designed to increase with a rise in usage volume (all other things being equal). Here’s how.

First, a rise in usage volume (of Ocean tools in the Data Ecosystem) leads to more OCEAN being staked, leading to more OCEAN demand, which then drives $OCEAN. The first example of this is in V3.0: staking OCEAN as liquidity for datatoken-Ocean AMM pools for Ocean-powered markets. Publishers are incentivized to stake to get automated price discovery of their data assets, and liquidity providers for the transaction fees.

Second, a rise in usage volume leads to more Network Revenue, which goes to (a) burning and (b) OceanDAO. As of V3.0, the Ocean community gets 0.1% of all volume, and an additional 0.1% from volume coming through Ocean Market. Burning OCEAN reduces supply, which drives $OCEAN. Funds go through OceanDAO to workers who have the mandate to grow usage of Ocean tools.And for near term growth: Ocean Data Farming is a program to drive near-term growth of the supply of data assets.

51% of OCEAN is minted over time as “Network Rewards” directed via OceanDAO to community projects. This ensures a baseline of funding regardless of transaction volume. To help near-term growth, more tokens are disbursed in earlier days than later days.

Q4. Many platforms that handle data, in many occasions, use them to advance important areas such as medicine, or to help those who need it. Is this contemplated in the mission and vision of Ocean? What are your plans in this regard?

Ans — This design is the opposite of ad hoc:) We’ve long seen health data as a key set of use cases for Ocean. Health data is typically the most sensitive , ie having the most privacy sensitivity. Yet if we can build AI models across health data of millions or even billions of people, they will be radically more accurate than today’s models. It’s traditionally a tension between privacy < → health benefits.

Is there a way to reconcile?

Yes! :) Bring compute to the data, “for AI eyes only”. So the AI can build models across millions or billions of people, without the data ever leaving the premises. BTW data today is built on a single hospital’s dataset. Or sometimes you have a Google that tries to do it across 10 or 100, and they get a privacy backlash. This is a solution.

So we’re working with some orgs on the health vertical:)

Q5. Now that Ocean Market is made publicly available as part of Ocean V3 release — how will it benefit users in the whole data flow? What kinds of data can be monetized on it and how do you confirm the authenticity of these data?

Ans —Ocean Market is so easy to use that a lot of people/companies that couldn’t publish/sell/buy data can do it now.

Here are three types of data that you might sell:
1. Your proprietary data
2. Others’ proprietary data that you’ve acquired the rights to
3. Open data that you’ve added value to

1. Selling Your Proprietary Data

Here, you create or dig up your own datasets, then post them for sale on Ocean Market.

What might that data be?

• As an individual, it can be of personal data, such as your location data, browser history, or data you’ve exported from Facebook or 23andme.
• As a business, nonprofit, or city, it can be data that your organization has accumulated over time, which might be of value yet is sitting latent.

If you’re worried about privacy or control of your data, consider using Ocean Compute-to-Data rather than making the data downloadable.

2. Selling Others’ Proprietary Data

A second approach is to sell data that others have the rights to (with their permission, of course).

Here, you find a data rightsholder, then act on their behalf to sell their data in Ocean Market. Compute-to-data can allay concerns of privacy or control. In this case you are playing the role of data broker.

3. Selling Value-Added Open Data

People who want to use open datasets can simply download them directly from a browser. For this variant, there is no need for Ocean! It would simply get in the way. And it would be silly to pay for it.

(As an aside, I love silly jokes. But I digress…)

However, there is a way for you to earn from open datasets: add value to them, then sell the value-added datasets.

Here are some ways that you can add value:

• Tag or label data. For example, transcribing audio, or assigning bird species to bird photos. This helps for AI “supervised learning”.
• Clean the data to make it easier to consume. For example, scrape public websites and put the information into a format that’s easy to for AI & analytics tools to consume.

We’re seeing a tremendous variety of data in Ocean Market already.

You can see for yourself.

Ocean Market

There’s web browsing data of consumers, Amazon product page data, mental health data, covid19 data, altcoin sentiment data, more.

Re: how do you confirm the authenticity of these data?

That is a *great* question. There is no easy answer.

Rather, you frame it as a problem of minimizing the rate of IP violation over time. Then you take specific tactics to address it.

For example..

• Find ways for data publishers to give authentic signals about who they are, so people can assess whether to trust the publisher
• Find ways for data publishers to give authentic signals about the source of the data itself
• Have a process to address reports of IP violations
• Give statistics and reports of publishers and others. Those signals will show e.g. if a publisher has previously done a rug pull

BTW what’s _not_ an answer is “put it on the blockchain”. Contrary to popular belief, just putting data on a blockchain does not magically make it trustworthy. Blockchain is not a trust machine.

However, blockchain *is* a claim machine. You can record what claims people make, and track them over time. And you can track their activities for all to see, and assess for themselves.

Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Ocean Protocol Team!!

Q1. If each data service has its own token, how does Ocean customize each of these tokens to suit the type of data that each particular service has? Why have you decided to do this? Why not create a single universal token?

Ans — We want every single data service to be an *asset* that’s independent from the others. So that it can have price discovery.

It *does* follow a universal standard for assets — ERC20.

There can be a variety of data services. The first two are for downloading data, and compute-to-data. Over time we envision many more. A generic streaming data service. Then specific services to make it frictionless for Chainlink, Filecoin, and more.

Q2. You have a lot of tokens locked for rewards and other incentives. This is a huge number! Explain us how are they unlocked? who is deciding that? What kind of activities can be rewarded?

Ans — Yep, it is a huge number. The plan is to unlock it over time, hardcoded in a vesting schedule in a smart contract. Vesting schedule is like Bitcoin, with a 4-year half life.

Those funds to to OceanDAO, where the community proposes projects, and votes on what projects should get funds. The criteria is (a) is ROI > 1.0? (b) is it in line with Ocean Mission & Values. These criteria ensure that there’s growth in the near term and sustainability in the long term.

Ocean Token Model

Q3. Defi becomes very popular these days. In the upcoming feature is there any plan ocean protocol makes a movement and expand more to DeFi space? Also what role do you think ocean protocol will takes to makes DeFi more widely known and widely used?

Ans — The data industry is a 400B EUR industry in Europe alone. Compare that to the 10B USD AUM in DeFi.

Ocean is a big fat bridge from the world of data to DeFi. It is a way to bring data assets into DeFi. So the tools of DeFi have way more assets to work with. Data assets as loans. Data-backed stablecoins. Data insurance. And more.

Q4. How can users stay updated with this project? Are there channels, including local communities where users can get the latest updates??

Ans — https://oceanprotocol.com/community

Q5. Is there any ambassador program?

Ans — Yes. See link above.

Q6. saw on your website that Ocean has its own Data Marketplace, Could you explain more about this marketplace? What kind of data can i sell in this marketplace? Are there any certain requirements for users who want to buy and sell their data in that marketplace?

Ans — Anyone can sell any data that they have the IP rights to. You’ll want to sell data that people actually want to buy of course. A great use of data is for AI modeling, because AI can extract value from data. So focusing on data for AI models is a good bet.

Q7 . Could you explain about ocean protocol Marketplace? How can I access it?

Ans — This is a great question to end on. You can go check it out now, and start staking immediately if you like. You’ll be one of the first participants in the fresh new Web3 Data Economy. And, it’s fun!

Ocean Market

Here are some important links of Ocean Protocol 👇

Official Website —https://oceanprotocol.com/
Blog —https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/
Telegram — https://t.me/OceanProtocol_Community
Twitter — https://twitter.com/oceanprotocol
Discord — https://discord.com/invite/TnXjkR5
GitHub — https://github.com/oceanprotocol
YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH8TXwmWWAE9TZO0yTBHB3A
Meetup — https://www.meetup.com/Ocean_Protocol_Berlin/
Gitcoin — https://gitcoin.co/oceanprotocol