About Ocean Protocol (OCEAN)

Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol that unlocks data for monetization in a Web3 world drive by AI. According to some estimates, the data economy could eventually reach $20 trillion.

Ocean provides the base layer for blockchain-based tools needed to manage the security, privacy and pricing of data. Ocean bills its mission as building "powerful Web3 apps for the emerging data economy."

It also has this stated mandate: “to ensure open access to the protocol and platform, provide data governance, encourage the network ecosystem growth and take measures to ensure that the platform becomes ever more decentralized with time."

CoinGecko explained how the platform uses a tokenized service layer to subject data and data storage computation services (and related algorithms) to a blockchain-based process for shared authentication, using a set of “deterministic proofs on availability and integrity that serve as verifiable service agreements.”

 The OCEAN token is used on the network to buy and sell data and related services. It is also a means of rewarding data curators. Additionally, it can be staked to provide liquidity. There are also plans to use it for governance. And, finally, it is also used in the creation of data tokens to run marketplaces.

"Basically," CoinBureau said, "the OCEAN token is the commodity that runs the entire data economy and incentivizes the community to provide the resources needed to secure and scale the network."

The Ocean ecosystem comprises data assets and services. Assets are represented by data and algorithms; services are represented by integration, processing and persistence mechanisms. Ocean Protocol facilitates discovery by storing and promoting metadata, linking assets and services and provides a licensing framework that has toolsets for pricing

According to Messari research, Ocean believes "big data" severely disadvantages users and network participants by sharing and monetizing their data while users have little-to-no control over the process.

To fix this, the Ocean team aims to build a decentralized data exchange protocol that lets consumers, corporations, and everyone in between exchange data with symmetric control and transparency. Ocean also aims to activate massive amounts of dormant or un-used data by incentivizing participants through monetization. The ultimate goal of this protocol is to fuel continued AI innovation, a technology that relies heavily on data inputs and a robust, reliable data market, Messari said.

In September of 2020, Ocean Protocol announced it was teaming up with Balancer Labs to create the first automated market maker (AMM) for data.

About one year later, in October 2021, the Ocean Protocol Foundation set aside 180 million of the native token OCEAN, then valued at $140 million, for grants to go to developers of for new applications creating and unleashing data; the grant decisions are made by the Ocean decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), called OceanDAO, Cointelegraph said.

When was OCEAN created and how much was it worth?

Ocean Protocol has a large team. Cofounder Trent McConaghy began his career doing AI research in the 1990s and had a hand in several AI-related start-up companies.

Another one of Ocean's founders is Bruce Pon who began with the project as early as June of 2017. Six months later, in December of 2021, the growing team garnered a seed round of funding, per Messari.

Pon is said to also be involved with a number of other entities, including Berlin-based development platform BigchainDB, contracted by The Ocean Protocol Foundation to build the network, which launched in April of 2019.

One month later, in May of 2019, came an Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) in which some $6 million worth of OCEAN coins were sold to the public. It changed hands for pennies around this time. More than one year after it debuted, OCEAN was still only $0.10. Around the end of 2020, OCEAN began to rise, eventually reaching an all-time high of $1.93 as of April 2021. It since has been subjected to downside volatility, according to CoinGecko.

How is the price of OCEAN determined?

The supply of OCEAN is deflationary as it is capped to 1.41 billion tokens, according to the project's website.

A majority (51%) of this supply is disbursed according to a Bitcoin-like schedule over decades, to fund the community, including OceanDAO.

Why does OCEAN have value? 

Data has become integral to how all the biggest companies are growing.

It's a strategic asset, with a concrete value. As CoinBureau explained, data is "pervasive since it is created at every level of business, from the consumer data that drives sales to the financial data that drives many business decisions."

Many in the industry have tried to build data marketplaces in the past. Issues of privacy and control over the data has made the goal elusive, explained Ocean cofounder Trent McConaghy. "With blockchain and compute-to-data, Ocean is addressing this. So our goal is to unlock this data economy with data marketplaces, connecting the buyers and sellers of data. These can be individual humans, families, small companies, large companies, cities, nations, etc.”

As mentioned, the data economy is estimated to eventually grow into an opportunity described as possibly totaling many trillions of dollars – if the right tools are in place.

Is OCEAN secure?

According to Messari, Ocean relies on four different types of parties for network security and data exchange.

Providers are participants who may offer data, data storage, and computing power, purchasable with Ocean's native token. Marketplaces are participant-built environments that facilitate data discovery, transactability and verification.

Alongside these marketplaces are data commons that interface with websites, libraries and the like.

Lastly, as Messari explained, Ocean has keepers that support the network via running and Ocean node and are compensated via block rewards.

"Data is exchanged in a three-part process that starts when the client initiates an offering, which is accepted and purchased by data service providers and then verified by keepers," Messari said.

What are the main benefits of OCEAN?

•  "Ocean Protocol is about helping people and businesses unlock data and monetize it, spreading the benefits of data and AI beyond the handful of organizations that hoard, control and get rich from it," CoinDesk said, pointing out how the creation of an efficient data marketplaces is the lynchpin to this.
• Ocean thinks the key to a sustainable, profitable data market is ensuring that providers and custodians feel safe when sharing data, according to Messari. "A peer-to-peer protocol for data sharing is Ocean's solution," Messari said.
•  Ocean Protocol is designed so that data owners cannot be locked-in to any single marketplace, CoinGecko said. "The data owner controls each dataset," the website added.

 What do critics say about OCEAN?

In August of 2020, Cryptomedication wrote that "the idea of AI on the blockchain, in the way that Ocean Protocol proposes they will implement it, is far-fetched at best and more than likely not possible."