I am very bullish on how the data economy is going to be in the future. Most of us really don’t understand how big the data economy is/will be and how important it is to own the data instead of giving it away for free to big companies like Google and Facebook.
And, some web 3 protocols are helping us, the people/users who generate the data, to be part of the economy and get paid (token incentives) for doing our part which is sharing the data whenever needed and that too only if one is interested to share in the first place.
And one such protocol is “Ocean Protocol”. This article covers a lot about Ocean Protocol, its native token called $OCEAN, staking data, data markets, and a lot more.
Data is the fuel that can power innovation. Better and accurate data can save road accidents (with AI-driven self-autonomous cars), improve the environment, the well-being of society, and more.
Just saying: Global Big Data Market to Reach $234.6 Billion by 2026
Everybody creates some kind of data. If you are buying electronics for every Black Friday, that’s a kind of data that companies like Google and Facebook use to generate revenue and help electronic brands.
That’s fine. They are helping businesses. But what about the users? We generate the data, we provide the data for free and we aren’t getting anything in return. Data is an asset. But that’s not what it looks like with the current data economy.
So what if people can license their data like intellectual property and can sell it? Like really own the data. And what if AI and Blockchain intersect (more and accurate data = better AI models & blockchain because no single entity gains control of the data)?
All of this led to a “Decentralised Data Exchange Protocol” aka “Ocean Protocol“. And the OCEAN token is what powers the network. It can be used as a means of exchange within the network.
Here are five ways the token can be used/earned in the network:
You can find more info on earning OCEAN data from this video:
Now, let’s dive a bit deep into the ocean protocol.
Some key points we need to understand here are AI is good if it makes the apps and products that we use better. And AI is bad if someone is using it to track what we do on the internet.
And moreover the data the big companies are collecting, most of that gets unused.
So Ocean Protocol, a smart contract-powered decentralized platform running on Ethereum Blockchain with a consensus mechanism of Proof Of Authority, is trying to incentivize users who want to share their data for better use cases like improving the AI models and at the same time helping data collectors to go to a place where they can find the data that they need.
Rather than data being unused & storing it on centralized servers for nothing, Ocean Protocol is trying to make sure that all the data will be put for better use cases with a lot of safety and at the same time incentivizing users for sharing their data.
The key thing to understand is our data, despite being shared will be kept private and at the same time will be used for better causes. The data collectors will have to send their algorithm to the data to train their model, thereby keeping the data safe.
Remember! A single person/entity with access to large data can make him/her/entity very powerful. And Ocean Protocol has also taken care of that problem with the concept of Compute To Data
So, can Ocean Protocol create a successful data marketplace? Maybe. Maybe not. And the value of the $OCEAN token is attached to that one question.
More info on Datatokens & Ocean Market:
You can buy OCEAN Tokens from centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance and then transfer them to your Metamask wallet or any other web 3 wallets.
And the other way is to swap any tokens that you have on your Ethereum Mainnet into OCEAN using Uniswap or Sushiswap.
Finally, if I have put it in a single sentence: Ocean Protocol happened when AI, Blockchain, and Big Data met together.