Interoperable Data Exchange Protocol: Bridging Across Various Applications and Industries

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18 Feb 2024

Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol that enables the sharing and monetization of data in a secure, transparent, and privacy-preserving manner. It was created to address the challenges of data silos, privacy concerns, and lack of incentives for data sharing in various industries.
Here's an overview of its key components and purposes:

Decentralized Data Marketplace: Ocean Protocol provides a marketplace where data providers can publish their data sets and data consumers can access them. This marketplace is decentralized, meaning there's no central authority controlling it, and transactions are facilitated through smart contracts on blockchain networks.
Data Tokenization: Data in Ocean Protocol is tokenized, meaning that each data set is represented by a unique digital token. This tokenization allows for granular control over access rights and enables data providers to monetize their data directly.
Privacy and Security: Ocean Protocol incorporates privacy-preserving techniques such as differential privacy and encrypted computation to ensure that sensitive data remains secure while still being accessible for analysis and use.
Interoperability: The protocol is designed to be interoperable with various data sources and applications, allowing for seamless integration with existing data infrastructures and tools.
Incentives for Data Sharing: Ocean Protocol introduces mechanisms for incentivizing data sharing and collaboration. Data providers can earn rewards in the form of tokens for sharing their data, while data consumers can access high-quality data sets for their applications.

Use Cases:

Healthcare: Sharing medical data securely among researchers, healthcare providers, and patients for research and personalized treatments.
Supply Chain: Tracking and tracing products throughout the supply chain, ensuring transparency and authenticity.
Finance: Analyzing financial data for risk assessment, fraud detection, and market prediction.
AI and Machine Learning: Accessing diverse data sets for training and testing machine learning models.
Climate Science: Sharing environmental data for climate research and mitigation efforts.

Overall, Ocean Protocol aims to democratize data access and foster innovation by enabling a decentralized ecosystem for data sharing and monetization.

Ocean is a decentralized data exchange protocol.
AI lives on data; Ocean facilitates it.
Ocean has two specific parts:

A live tech stack. At the core is Datatokens and Compute-to-Data
A lively community. This includes builders, data scientists, OCEAN holders, and Ocean Ambassadors. Ocean's community is active on social media.

Let's drill into each.

Tech: Ocean data NFTs and datatokens

These enable decentralized access control, via token-gating. Key principles:

Publish data services as ERC721 data NFTs and ERC20 datatokens
You can access the dataset / data service if you hold 1.0 datatokens
Consuming data services = spending datatokens

Crypto wallets, exchanges, and DAOs become data wallets, exchanges, and DAOs.

Data NFTs & datatokens are an on-ramp and off-ramp for data assets into DeFi

Data can be on Azure or AWS, Filecoin or Arweave, REST APIs or smart contract feeds. Data may be raw AI training data, feature vectors, trained models, even AI model predictions, or non-AI data.

Tech: Ocean Compute-to-Data

This enables one buy & sell private data, while preserving privacy

Private data is valuable: using it can improve research and business outcomes. But concerns over privacy and control make it hard to access.
Compute-to-Data (C2D) grants access run compute against the data, on the same premises of the data. Only the results are visible to the consumer. The data never leaves the premises. Decentralized blockchain technology does the handshaking.
C2D enables people to sell private data while preserving privacy, as an opportunity for companies to monetize their data assets.
C2D can also be used for data sharing in science or technology contexts, with lower liability risk, because the data doesn't move.

Compute-to-Data flow

Community: Ocean Ecosystem

Ocean has a lively ecosystem of dapps grown over years, built by enthusiastic developers.

The Ocean ecosystem also contains many data scientists and OCEAN holders, excited about the future of AI & data. You can find them doing predictions, data challenges, Data Farming, and more.

Community: Ocean Ambassadors

Ocean has an excellent community of ambassadors. Anyone can join.

OCEAN: The Ocean token

OCEAN is a utility token. It's used to stake on data for curation, buy & sell data, and more. Its supply is disbursed over time to drive near-term growth and long-term sustainability.
Contents:

Getting and storing OCEAN
Staking OCEAN
OCEAN supply
Token design
OCEAN addresses

Getting and Storing OCEAN

OCEAN is available on most leading CEXes and DEXes. The Ocean Token page at oceanprotocol.com has details.
The Wallets User Guide here in Ocean docs shows how to set up wallets and store OCEAN.

Staking OCEAN

You can lock OCEAN and earn rewards via Ocean Data Farming.

OCEAN supply

Total # tokens: 1.41B. All tokens are minted; all control is revoked.
OCEAN supply is divided as follows:

51% (719.1M OCEAN) - to Data Farming and incentives programs. Distributed via vesting: burn-in period then 4-year half-life. For Data Farming: Reward Schedule docs.
15% (211.5M OCEAN) - to Ocean community (grants, more) and foundation operations.
10% (141.0M OCEAN) - to the founding company, and in turn to its investors, employees & operations
24% (338.4M OCEAN) - to token acquirors. This completed in early 2019. All acquiror vesting is complete as well.

OCEAN Token Design

The system-level design of the OCEAN token is based on The Web3 Sustainability Loop, a general design pattern. The Ocean-specific version of this design is described in section (7) of that same article.
This design gives flexibility to adapt the Ocean products for traction and growth. The flexibility is due to the goal to "drive network revenue", subject to the constraints of the mission & values of Ocean Protocol.
In the design, a % of revenue is used to buy back & burn OCEAN. The remaining % drives growth.

OCEAN on Networks

The "root" OCEAN token is deployed on Ethereum mainnet with address 0x967da4048cd07ab37855c090aaf366e4ce1b9f48.
The OCEAN token has bridges to several other chains. The Networks docs give the address of OCEAN on each network, and how to get OCEAN on each of those networks.

Networks

All the public networks the Ocean Protocol contracts are deployed to.
Ocean Protocol's smart contracts and OCEAN are deployed on multiple public networks: several production chains, and several testnets too.
The file address.json holds up-to-date deployment addresses for all Ocean contracts.
On tokens:

You need the network's native token to pay for gas to make transactions: ETH for Ethereum mainnet, MATIC for Polygon, etc. You typically get these from exchanges.
You may get OCEAN from an exchange, and bridge it as needed.
For testnets, you'll need "fake" native tokens to pay for gas, and "fake" OCEAN. Typically, you get these from faucets.
Below, we give token-related instructions, for each network.