Ocean Protocol: Tools for the Web3 Data Economy

Abstract

This chapter describes a toolset to enable Web3 data economy. Ocean Protocol is an on-ramp for data services into crypto ecosystems, using datatokens. Each datatoken is a fungible ERC20 token to access a given data service. Ocean smart contracts and libraries make it easy to publish data services (deploy and mint datatokens) and consume data services (spend datatokens). Ocean contracts run on Ethereum mainnet to start, with other deployments to follow. Ethereum composability enables crypto wallets as data wallets, crypto exchanges as data marketplaces, data DAOs as data co-ops, and more. Ocean Market is an open-source community marketplace for data. It supports automatic determination of price using an “automated market maker” (AMM). Each datatoken has its own AMM pool. Anyone can add liquidity, aka stake (equivalent in AMMs). This is curation, as stake is a proxy to dataset quality. We envision thousands of data marketplaces, where Ocean Market is just one. In addition to Ocean Market being open-source (and therefore forkable), Ocean includes tools to help developers build their own marketplaces and other apps. Ocean’s “Compute-to-Data” feature gives compute access on privately held data, which never leaves the data owner’s premises. Ocean-based marketplaces enable monetization of private data while preserving privacy. These tools are part of a system designed for long-term growth of a permissionless Web3 Data Economy. The Ocean Data Farming program incentivizes a supply of data. The community-driven OceanDAO funds software development, outreach, and more.