Data monetization has been the focus of the technology industry for the past decade. The Ocean Protocol is an open source project that aims to bring control of the data back to the creator.
Talking to Alex Fazel of Cryptonites at Paris Blockchain Week, Bruce Pon, co-founder of the Ocean Protocol, recalls his beginnings at TradeFi and how he created Ocean. According to Pong, his ah moment came when he realized that Bitcoin was essentially an orchestration tool for transfer between users. And while it was mainly used for remittances, Pong believed it was much more valuable when used for data transfer.
With this recognition, he OceanAn open source protocol that allows users and businesses to transfer and monetize their data. His background at TradFi allowed him to understand the value of registries and databases early on. This turned out to be the perfect pair for blockchain technology at the time.
“Blockchain is not only a transfer of value and currency, but also a transfer of intellectual property and data.”
His goal in the Ocean Protocol was simple. That is, it coordinates business logic around registry services that allow users to transfer and monetize the data in the registry.
One of the main advantages of the Ocean Protocol is its ability to adapt to the L1 blockchain on the market. Pong said this flexibility has grown the protocol and greatly increased its flexibility. Until 2017, Ocean was based on its own network, building all the technologies used in-house. Based on Ethereum, Pong said, it could create a turning point for the protocol and create better technologies with more value.
However, the Ocean Protocol is not exclusive to Ethereum. According to Pong, the company is working on a core building block of agnostic technology that can transfer and monetize data.
To achieve this, the Ocean Protocol has set up attractive incentive and reward incentive programs for both protocol users and the developers and scientists who build on them.
One of the solutions that facilitates protocol adoption is data bounty. Pon explained that the company’s Ocean Data Bounty program will allow a strong community of 250,000 people to submit ideas on how to use different datasets. This includes presenting ideas for monetization and creating algorithms and analyzes to better understand the data.
“The goal is to find the value of the data in the right context,” he said in an interview.
One way the Ocean Protocol funds these incentives is to specially allocate the native token OCEAN. According to Pong, the company has decided not to release 51% of the supply it allocates to community incentives, but to use it for high-yielding agriculture.
Yields generated on OCEAN tokens will be used to fund these incentives and other data farming incentives. He explained that this does not dilute the supply and helps activate the data system at no cost.
Pong said this type of data system is one that allows users to monetize it and is useful to society.
“Everything you do produces data and is worth it to someone.”
