Ocean Protocol is a crypto on-ramp for data services that enables data to be valued. Data owners may monetise their data while maintaining privacy and control by selling it through the Ocean Market app. Consumers, on the other hand, can purchase previously unavailable private data.

This is especially beneficial for AI practitioners and data scientists who gain from increased data availability, crypto-secured provenance, and revenue potential. Compute-to-data enables the use of private data in AI models and research without explicitly disclosing it. Users of the Ocean Protocol may potentially profit from data curation by staking on it. In the meanwhile, developers may utilize Ocean Libraries to create and deploy their own decentralized markets, wallets, and other applications.

History

Bruce Pon and Trent McConaghy established Ocean Protocol in 2017. As the inventor of blockchain database BigchainDB, Bruce Pon has been working on integrating data and AI together since 2013. MITSloan awarded him a B.Sc in Engineering as well as an Advanced Executive Certificate. Prior to Ocean Protocol, Pon co-founded Avantalion, a consultancy firm that has assisted in the establishment of 20 banks throughout the world for companies such as Mitsubishi and Volkswagen. McConaghy holds a PhD in Creative AI and has authored several books on the subject. He created the AI and circuit design start-ups ADA and Solido before shifting his emphasis to Ocean Protocol. Ocean Protocol also has 35 consultants with experience in blockchain, artificial intelligence, big data, and business.

How does it work

Datatokens connect data assets to blockchain and decentralized finance solutions. These are ERC-20 tokens that represent the right to data access. Data services are published by providers by installing and minting datatokens, and consumers use datatokens to access those services. In order to access a dataset, a consumer delivers 1.0 datatokens to a data provider. They may potentially offer someone else access by sending them 1.0 datatokens.

When datatokens are posted on the Ocean Market, the publisher has the option of setting a fixed price or using automatic price discovery assisted by an automated market maker. Balancer powers the AMM pools, which include both the datatoken and OCEAN as liquidity. The price is determined by the ratio of the two tokens' numbers. When the proportion of datatokens in the pool falls, so does their price, and vice versa. As a result, the price of datatokens is automatically changed.

By staking their OCEAN tokens in a liquidity pool, OCEAN holders may curate data. This allows them to collect fees but also exposes them to the danger of temporary loss and rug pulls. Datatokens serve as a link between the data sector and DeFi. They may be kept in crypto wallets, exchanged on crypto exchanges, transferred to a decentralized autonomous organization, and used to do other DeFi transactions because they are ERC-20 tokens.

Total supply and circulation

The total OCEAN supply is limited to 1.41 billion tokens, 434,026,837 of which are presently in circulation. 51% of the maximum supply will be utilized to finance OceanDAO-curated community initiatives. These tokens will be distributed over decades in a Bitcoin-like fashion. OCEAN is really deflationary since it consumes 5% of all network revenue. This means that when the Ocean Protocol is implemented more widely, OCEAN supply will drop quicker.