Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol to unlock data for artificial intelligence.

The goal of Ocean is to connect the providers and consumers of data through a decentralized platform. Then, they want to give open access of this data so that developers can build services on top of it.

What is the need for the Ocean Protocol?

One of the challenges that Ocean Protocol is trying to solve is with the huge amount of data that is being collected, but not fully utilised. This growth they claim in their white paper is exponential. For example, in 2010, the world produced 1 Zettabyte of data, but in 2016, the total amount of data produced was 16 Zettabytes and by 2025, there will be produced 160+ Zettabyte. However, McKinsey suggests that only 1% of this data is actually analysed, this is a waste that Ocean Protocol will try and tackle.

Furthermore, they argue in their white paper that even thought this data is extremely valuable it remains restricted or inaccessible. Also, artificial intelligence will become more and more prevalent. For example, by 2025, Tractica suggests that AI software and services revenues will hit 60 billion dollar mark.

Then we can piece all this together. So, AI needs data. Without data, AI models are not accurate. With no accuracy, the AI model is unusable. However, the winners as of today have been companies such as Google and Facebook due to their very large amount of data, resources and AI expertise.

Why is data locked up?

Well, one of the reasons is that sharing is risky. As soon as the data is shared, it leaves the hands of the original owner and is out there in the wild. Basically, it is all about control, privacy, and security.

The reasons why a centralized exchange is not the best marketplace for sharing data include:

1. Hosting - so the data will have to be stored at the data exchange, and that is not needs to be hosted at the data exchange, which is not adequate for some data providers;
2. In Situ Data – another option would be to store data in situ at the data
   provider, however data consumers might find the range of is limited for data consumers.
3. Cost - data exchange finance themselves via transaction fees, commissions,
   and services, adding friction and cost.
4. Pricing - the pricing mechanisms for data are not flexible enough to build apps or to train models.
5. Audit - in a regular basis, data providers have to audit and check that they are adhering to their licensing terms.
6. Control - once the exchange receives the data, the control that data providers have will be over.
7. Trust - There is an absence of frameworks, consent frameworks, and regulatory
   frameworks for data sharing.
8. Tracking - There is not really any tracking of data in order to enable royalty pricing models for data.

Ocean Protocol wants to power a two-sided market for data between data providers and data consumers. On one hand, data providers amongst other things will publish data for sharing, sell data on the marketplace and store data. On the other hand, data consumers will discover data that suits their needs, buy the data from the marketplace, identify the data quality from reviews and keep track of the data that they have purchased and used.

The Ocean Token (OCN)

The Ocean Token will be given to keepers who contribute to the network verification and network services. Then, these tokens can be used as a way to exchange value within the Ocean Protocol network and to power the protocol itself.

There are four ways to earn Ocean Token, these are (1) providing data; (2) curating data; (3) being a marketplace; and (4) providing network services.

A final note that Ocean Protocol is being led by DEX, and BigchainDB (a blockchain database). Therefore, the team comes with real-world business experience and combined they have knowledge in big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence and data exchanges. They say in the white paper that they also have Singapore as the lead government partner. Since, their two missions are aligned, as you know, Singapore's goal is to be the pre-eminent hub for data sharing around the planet.

That's all about Ocean Protocol. In summary, they want to enable the safe sharing of data and ensure that the provider of data is compensated for it. They want to do that by also guaranteeing control, auditability and transparency to everyone.

Web: https://oceanprotocol.com/

Whitepaper: https://oceanprotocol.com/tech-whitepaper.pdf

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