Ocean Protocol AMA
Hello Everyone ! Welcome to our 15th AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Ocean Protocol India. On 13th of Jan 2022, CryptoSpartans had a live AMA session with Dr. Prakash. In case you missed it here is the recap.
AMA Summary:
Segment 1: Questions for Ocean Protocol Team
Segment 2: Twitter Round Question
Segment 3: Live Q&A
The transcript has been edited for clarity.
Segment 1: Questions for Ocean Protocol Team
Lucifer Morningstar | HOST
1. Can you please introduce Ocean Protocol to the community and what is your primary intention behind the project?
Dr. Prakash l Ocean India
Ocean Protocol per se is more or less like a Layer 0 - Chain-agnostic Data protocol that allows individuals and emerging data businesses to easily unlock the value of their data and monetize it through the use of ERC-20 based data-tokens and very soon will allow ERC-721 backed Data-NFTs as well. The technology through it’s core products allows the user and community to unleash a new era of data-economy with self-sovereign use of personal data by enabling data-privacy. Through 2021, we had successful process for multi-chain approaches to address problems of gas fees and involving many communities toward the ethos of Data Economy.
As for our Project ~ The Indian Outreach Program, is an off-shoot grant program that was funded by Ocean DAO during the Round 10 of the Ocean DAO by community voting who believed in the role of Indian community to propagate the value of data economy given the number of data-scientists and AI expertise in the country.
As an OP Ambassador, I aim to bring forth the values of Ocean protocol beyond the native use of token utilities. Will also share a lot more details about the IOP towards the end.
~S~|HOST
2. What project milestones have you achieved until now and what are you working on currently?
Dr. Prakash l Ocean India
Ocean Protocol as such that is run by Ocean core & Ocean DAO have two different mode of operations. The Ocean DAO acts as the community leaning layer of Ocean protocol foundation and we have been closely working with the DAO to have a long-term collaboration in extending a lot of community based incentivization for the Indian Community. Would also be glad to explain some basics of Ocean protocol milestones.
In terms of progress of our project, we are very much on trach to complete our deliverables during the January sprint and there's a very accessible hackathon happening towards the months end and the Quests will be soon open by next-week to get a head-start to working on them.
Priyank Gupta |HOST
3. Third and final question for this round. Can you tell us more about the roadmap and tokenomics of the native token $OCEAN?
Dr. Prakash l Ocean India
In terms of roadmaps and achievements, in the interest of time. I'd post some relevant easy-to-follow links and a schematic, followed by highlights that's expected of 2022.
https://oceanprotocol.com/technology/roadmap
https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/ocean-product-update-2021-6875bc1f804f
For the 2022, Highlights, I'll share them from a community perspective:
- V4 market will solve 99% of the rugpulls that folks commonly see in DeFi pools
- We would also have Data-NFTs that allow people to sub-license data assets
- Data-farming 👨🌾 which would be the most innovative use-case yet for an Ocean token holder
- OceanDAO continues to cyclically fund projects through a community voting mechanism. New projects can start off by proposing a project that is capped at 3000 USD, grants can be either technical, community oriented.
- Multiple Sub-DAOs have been launched to decentralize the efforts towards community outreach. The IOP, that is stewarded by me is one such project and we aim to decentralize the efforts of Ocean DAO in the Indian community.
We also aim to be a sub-DAO by forming strategic collaborations with Indian stakeholders to accelerate learning of Blockchain basics & Web3 since this also falls under purview of Ocean Ambassadors program.
P.S: We also had an extensive program called the Rugpull index, which solved a lot of subjective rugpulls, and they are an amazing project that continued to solve a lot of problems and the community funded project now stands to benefit a lot of Ocean Protocol data-assets. Soon they will be extending towards larger DeFi general use-cases.
Segment 2: Twitter Round Question:
- @Cryptogeeek_ : Ocean Protocol lets you Buy & Sell Private Data, While Preserving Privacy. can this Private Data be Misused & cause Damage to Users ? How Does Ocean Protocol ensures that Privacy of Users is Preserved ?
Dr. Prakash l Ocean India
At first, Ocean protocol stack has a very efficient tech-stack that shows a very practical and an efficient solution called Compute2Data, which safeguards the privacy of the data-sets of the native users.
Generally Private AI has shown a lot of interest even among the big corporations who have been showing heavy investments into private AI technique such as differential privacy, federated learning that ensures that data doesn't leave the device.
However they are not Blockchain efficient. Ocean protocol uses Compute2data.
On Compute2data technicalities, Compute2data ensures that Compute/Algorithm Providers can supply or send algorithms and be sure that the computed returned results are sufficiently aggregated or anonymized that the data is fully obfuscated and the privacy risk is minimized.
Compute2data has also shown application in industrial use-cases in the mature European market.
This has been very successful for ocean marketplace, this ensures that even the dataset and performing algorithms can happen at 2 different sites, thus ensuring decentralized analysis while safeguarding privacy at the same time.
Very soon, Ocean will also have federated learning support.
It is also noted that the user also has the freedom to display their own storage links that is only shown to the consumer for a desired amount of time. on the OMP, you can choose to license your dataset for a very limited amount of time viz. 1 day, 7 days, 1 month etc
Here's a schematic for a level of understanding...
This schematic shows how an average stakeholder can have an understanding of what happens during Compute-2data, that is carefully audited by Blockchain tooling.
Secondly, the ocean market place has efficient functions. Any malicious datasets are taken care of by a purgatory function.
Purgatory catches the blatantly bad stuff: sensitive data, IP violations.
The rules are mentioned below.
https://github.com/oceanprotocol/list-purgatory/tree/main/policies
But on a very higher level of information, to simplify what it means.
The purgatory mechanism on the Ocean marketplace ~ allows people to submit a request to block a dataset based on various factors. Datasets that are considered to violate the rules are reported and removed from the marketplace.
This helps to ensure dataset are of good quality in the longer run. Of course given that the data-economy poses a lot of interesting questions and problem statements, there is no one magic wand to rule them all, but the fundamentals of the roadmap are a good indication of where the future of self-sovereign data-uses will be.
2. @raghav_deopura : Can you explain what Data Farming is and how will it work and what’s its significance in the near future? Also how will Ocean Protocol incentivize the data suppliers and individuals that will be providing liquidity for datatokens?
Dr. Prakash l Ocean India
That’s a very good question coming from strong research and awareness about a project. Just like how yield farming kick-started the DeFi revolution. Data Farming is going to help kick-start the Multi-billion $ evaluation of Data economy.
Once you have done your due diligence and research about interesting data-sets in the marketplace, and If your wallet participates in the Ocean marketplace, then you’d be eligible to get a piece of the airdrop. This would be similar to that of ENS airdrop where a strong identity based metric was used to incentivize early adopters of the Ethereum based tech.
In short, once a person understands the values behind the top-performing data-assets (in the future, can be just based on beautiful Data-NFTs) you will be eligible for airdrops for participating in the data-asset pool.
Addressing a possible sub-question to this - What you can do as an $Ocean token holder?
You can either provide liquidity to a token data token liquidity pool or swap your $Ocean to your favorite Data token. And, if you are a Data owner that has shown sufficient reliability & accountability, you can also use $Ocean to create your own Data token liquidity pool and publish your data. To add more on that topic, If you look at the revised tokenomics model that was shown by the co-founder Bruce Pon which shows strong encouragement for the holders and community.
https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/https-blog-oceanprotocol-com-ocean-tokenomics-ii-faf05854314b
You'd notice that from the token release schedule, and based on the public stats of the existing token circulation supply of 613 Million tokens, only 43% is sitting on exchanges and open market . Instead of dumping majority of the tokens in the open market in the future, 51% of of all $Ocean tokens have been reserved for initiatives that generate value for the Ocean ecosystem to create a strong Web3 sustainability loop (You can also refer the article by Trent on W3SL for some interesting insights).
This also includes the 180 Million Ocean tokens that are reserved for the Ocean DAO which funds quality projects supported by the community, whereas it might be possible to see even 2x-3x the amount reserved for data-farming initiatives & projects that add long-term value on the ocean marketplace.
I would also share a popular article related to this at the end to look forward to the Data-farming update.
Segment 3: Live Q&A
Q1. @CarlottaSweat : What are the benefits of holding your token as long term investment? Can you tell us about the motivation and benefits for investors to keep the your token in the long run?
Ans : Without talking about any price action.
In the general crypto-market that we observe, the most fundamental questions that we tend to observe is that the strongest teams are the ones that have the most number of interesting problem to solve for the next 5-7 years with key fundamentals that accelerate early community and network rewards, with no rush to reach the moon. This allows for excellent price discovery for people who are able to access the deep-tech involved in a project and also have a great idea of what the roadmap can be from a community engagement perspective.
Ocean protocol addresses all of that, with a strong founder team who have been in the strong Data & Crypto space since the early bitcoin days. An interesting tidbit about the founders, They also invented NFTs before it was cool.
Ascribe, one of the earliest startups was about selling digital art through bitcoin keys proving ownership, and almost half a decade later we see them having a mass adoption courtesy the use-cases of ethereum. We can anticipate a lot of game-theory and really good use-cases when we observe Data-NFTs and Data-farming.
Q2. @naykorohan : Can you provide us with the tokenomics or distribution details of $OCEAN tokens?
Ans : Thanks for that, the updated tokenomics as shown below
https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/https-blog-oceanprotocol-com-ocean-tokenomics-ii-faf05854314b
are such that a majority of the following roadmap are channeled through three key pillars
- Marketplace products that promote both top-down and bottom-up approach
- 180 Million Ocean tokens reserved for the Ocean DAO projects that get funded by the community voting every month. So far we have had 13 rounds completed.
- Upcoming phase of data-farming that have almost 2-3x the amount reserved for the Ocean DAO.
As a status summary, 51% of all existing supply in the future will community owned. This is of course after excluding the tokens with OPF, early investors & founding teams.
Q3. @levi_cryptoman : Why would, two firm or entities share their private data with each other? What advantage will they get by sharing the entity’s data with each other ? Will it not reduce the competitive edge of these companies over each other ?
Ans : I will allude this to an eligible example. A lot of times, there is a general perception among the public that their own data is not useable to themselves. It’s all about valuable leverage. In the traditional world, we often see that the data is often misused by big corps such as Facebook, Google and a lot of bigger MNCs that have the leverage to own your data and despite many promises that they won’t sell your data, is often done anyway by the respective companies. The key is to understand their own data assets that would be of valuable sub-licensing use-cases or data that are of public good such as emerging sensitive data that can safeguard against large-scale economic impact. Another example from a popular Web2 scenario is as shown below.
This is a popular Data anecdote, that is often shared around. Allow me to explain how this can impact people's way of thinking
Data of public good is still misunderstood by the general public and enterprises. We need to bridge this gap and prove that publishing data can lead to superior results.
My favorite example that I learned from Bruce is the following: https://www.herox.com/blog/408-history-of-challenges-the-goldcorp-challenge
Gold Corp was a dying mining business with a valuation of less than 10 Million $ I think. All they had was a dataset of 400MB worth of drilling data. The company's new CEO published the dataset against all recommendations along with a 1 Million US$ bounty. Gold Corp received 1000+ submissions I think from data scientists across the world. 80% of the proposed drilling sites were profitable, leading to Gold Corp's massive growth up until today. It's a multi-billion dollar company now. And it achieved this just by publishing its data.
Q4. @A_k_1_7 : To get People to Invest in a your Project the team has to ensure that Investors understand your project. So Do you have tutorials videos so that we can know your Project More clearly or Do you have a YouTube Channel or something? Can you share it With Us ?
Ans : The Official Youtube channel of Ocean Protocol have some innovative explanations on understanding the project. I would also recommend listening to one of the founders podcasts where data-economy is explained in detail.
https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/datatokens-daos-and-nfts-14aedce1bba7
Blogposts are the best place to learn about the hidden gems in the project. With Indian Ocean outreach, we aim to create a lot of content that helps to simplify the understanding behind the project.
Q5. @Alonhusk008 : Can you please share what is the utility usecase of $OCEAN token in your ecosystem?
Ans : Thanks for that. As alluded earlier, I would say that Data-farming initiatives will reward Token holders a lot more compared to traditional traders, even though trading based on speculations have also been seen in the open market, which is inevitable for any early project.
The most exciting use-case that you can do, while holding your Ocean tokens is to vote on your favourite projects that you like during the Monthly grants of Ocean DAO. The community based voting occurs through a snapshot system as can be seen below.
https://snapshot.org/#/officialoceandao.eth
Also a rough schematic of where $Ocean investors can derive value from the ecosystem. All of them have a lot of use-cases as described in comparative timelines
Q6. @Rafidpanca : Private data is the most valuable data because it can be used to improve research & business outcomes. However concerns over privacy & control make it hard to access. Question, Are there ways these concerns could be addressed with Compute-to-Data?
Ans : Thanks for that Question, mainstream adoption in research and business outcome has 2 different routes.
One is through top-down approach and the other is bottom-up.
The latter use-case is why the Ocean DAO exists, which continually funds projects that show promise to add value to Ocean by spreading the ethos and benefits of Ocean usage. The utility doesn't always have to come from the token itself. The Products are completely open-source and anyone can create their test marketplace with their stakeholders. For additional tech support however, it's best to have the support from Ocean either through the DAO/through OPF.
Regarding top-down adoption:
A fine example of Top-down collaboration has been the strong-hold of Ocean-tech in Europe, where with the advent of GDPR regulations on fair-data usage has created a data-economy valuation of 400B$ valuation in Europe alone.
Their finest top-down collab has been with European organizations such as GAIA-X, Daimler & also a few startups like Drive and Stake that enable data-tokenization of user-data on Tesla automobiles. This was announced earlier in Q4 2021.
Q7. @antarya50845300 : What role does Indian Ocean DAO play in Ocean Protocol?
Ans : Glad to have that question. The Indian Ocean Program evolved from a successful proposal from the Round-10 of Ocean DAO voting where we had a successful token vote of 3.56M $Ocean tokens from community faithfuls and from the Ambassador community as well.
With OceanProtocolIn we aim to have an effective community mechanism for the Indian community by engaging with numerous community initiatives that are both technical and non-technical in nature.
In the interest of time and also encouraging readers to explore more about IOP, I'd recommend having the Project documentation link placed below. The overview of our initiatives are shown below.
https://indian-ocean.gitbook.io/indian-ocean-outreach-program/
The IOP aims to be a community based program always. For now we only intend to channel all the Ocean DAO based community based information that will incentivize the Indian community with knowledgeable quests and also encourage rich incentives for furthering the Ethos of the Ocean DAO & the Indian Ocean DAO initiative.
You can also join our socials, especially Telegram & Discord to stay updated to a lot more updates about OceanDAO & The Indian Ocean Initiative.
Q8. @CryptoMemer_ : Ocean Protocol is Tool for web3 so with Web3 trend what role does ocean Protocol plays ? What will be the benefits for ocean Protocol & its user’s ?
Ans : Ocean protocol community has taken some time to evolve, that’s where Ocean DAO comes in to resolve the problems recognized early last year. Ocean protocol won’t be the first and not the last protocol to create data-based marketplaces, the aim it to have a lot of marketplaces that grow together to create an amazon like flywheel effect that accelerates data-based discovery and unlocking the value of data that belongs to us as Self-sovereign individuals.
And to round off the general Web3 aspect.
To succeed in Web3 you need the following
Web1: High level tech (Protocol comes into play)
Web2: Strong finances (Powerful tokenomics)
Web3: Social technology driven by users and community (Ocean DAO - committing 51% of token supply to the community)
Ocean is not just committed to provide high tech to top-down approach firms. Bottom-up approach driven by the community and Ocean DAO has succeeded in providing funding & kick-starts to a lot of projects that are shown below
Thank you everyone once again for participating in this exciting community AMA! It was our pleasure to host AMA with Ocean Protocol.
