Ocean Protocol: Growing Convergence Between Data Science & Blockchain -- 2/6/23
Overview of Ocean Protocol:
How can we equalize access to data so we can create biggest opportunity for data scientists/builders to make most of modern AI/compute?
Answer -- Building decentralized orchestration layer for AI that uses the principles of data sovereignty, privacy preserving tech that allows data sharing/transactions
Everything has 1 objective -- unlocking/democratizing data for AI to kick start the data economy
How are you planning on implementing these solutions?
Sticking to key principles:
Sovereignty -- think of data as IP -- users can monetize/share data without worrying about privacy
If you create data set on Ocean, it'll be stored as an NFT, and you can create access licenses to that data with ERC-20 tokens
Is this tech ready to use now?
Able to customize licenses, set pricing, etc. -- able to use via libraries
Front-end includes data marketplace
How are you bringing blockchain and data science together?
Helps to define each one first:
Data science -- feasibly making data useful
Blockchain -- growing list of records that are linked using cryptography
AI/ML -- needs lots of data to train models -- can get that data from blockchains -- services like Nansen and Dune are making this data visible
Lots of different stages between collecting data and monetizing algorithm
Example -- aggregated/raw data that needs to be formatted -- lots of work, but can be monetized via Ocean
Do data scientists need to pay to pull data from Ocean's libraries?
No, can import for free
Ocean doesn't provide the data, just the infrastructure layer to unlock it
Looks like certain data is free but you have to pay for other data in the Ocean marketplace -- why is that?
Ocean market is 2-sided marketplace -- data suppliers and data providers
Providers can choose whether to give their data away or charge for it -- that's why some data in the marketplace has prices
Using Polygon because it has lower fees than Ethereum mainnet
What's the utility of the OCEAN token? Why does there need to be one?
1 -- Serves as the main currency for purchasing datasets
Consortium of 40+ companies in Europe using it
2 -- Earn active/passive rewards via staking -- X amount of tokens staked on a dataset, the more time is being bought/sold, more rewards earned by stakers
What opportunities/projects are you most excited about in the space of blockchain data?
People are becoming more aware of importance of owning their data and what you can do with it
Big data problem is becoming more prevelant and a multi-trillion dollar industry -- any project looking to capture even 1% is worth watching
Are you planning on working with legacy industries to bring more data onto blockchains?
Yes -- European initiative with companies sharing data using Ocean -- will be listing these on Ocean's website where you can see all the data their sharing in next few days
What are some incentives for average person to use Ocean protocol/market?
Goes back to tokenomics -- actively/passively stake to earn rewards
Data farming/data curation
Data farming -- uses incentive machine via OCEAN tokens -- higher data consumed volume or higher staked amount = higher reward
What key challenges in data farming/harvesting do you think the blockchain market is facing today?
Regulations are a big uncertainty
Audience questions:
How do we know that data in the marketplace is accurate?
This is where data farming comes in -- if you build forked marketplace using Ocean, you can build security layers
But if you're using Ocean's marketplace, data is curated -- data with highest amount of staked OCEAN will be most reputable
How do you prevent data publishers from selling stored personal data on the black market?
Builders using Ocean will likely be creating security layers on top -- like the European consortium
Publishers that abuse data can be hidden from the marketplace
Users can buy/sell data tokens for different data sets -- how is that calculated?
Every data set has its own token, price is set by the publisher
Is the Ocean platform geared towards data scientists or can anyone easily use it?
Currently more geared towards devs/scientists, but working to make it more useable for non-technical people
Is there any plan to work with Universities to find ideas from students and fund them to integrate into Ocean?
Yes -- $10m program right now
For Ocean Academy, is it possible for someone with no prior knowledge to enroll and complete a successful project? What languages does it support other than English?
Trying to make it doable for anyone, but for now only supports English
How does Ocean provide more data?
Key metric = number of forks
As more publishers put data on Ocean and more unions are formed like in Europe, there will be more forks from new builders, which represents more data
What if the publisher deletes the data before the buyer downloads it?
For now, no way to recover it -- this is why curation is important, and why we have KYC for publishers
How does fractional ownership/sharing of data NFTs work?
Since a lot of this data is going to be combined from multiple sources, data tokens could be very expensive
Ocean allows it to be fractionalized so more people can buy a piece of a token -- will be traded on exchanges for liquidity
Use cases:
Need the data to train algorithms
Use data as a financial instrument (like H2O token)