RESEARCH REPORT ABOUT OCEAN PROTOCOL

28 min readAug 27, 2020

Author: Gamals Ahmed, CoinEx Business Ambassador

ABSTRACT

This research report presents Ocean Protocol. Ocean is a decentralized protocol and network of artificial intelligence (AI) data/services. It aims to spread the benefits of AI, by unlocking data while preserving privacy. It helps power marketplaces to buy/sell AI data & services, software to publish and access commons data, and AI/data science tools to consume data. Ocean does decentralized orchestration: at its core are decentralized service agreements and decentralized access control, which execute on decentralized virtual machines. This allows connection to, monetization of, and curation of arbitrary data services. On that, Ocean adds network rewards to incentivize data sharing, including privacy-preserving data commons.

Ocean Protocol is governed by a Singapore based non-profit foundation, whose mandate is to ensure open access to the protocol and platform, provide data governance, encourage the network ecosystem growth, and take measures to ensure that the platform becomes ever more decentralized with time.

Ocean a protocol and network for AI data and services. It aims to spread the benefits of AI, by unlocking data while preserving privacy. It helps power marketplaces to buy/sell AI data & services, software to publish and access commons data, and AI/data science tools to consume data.

Ocean helps make data available for use by AI without losing control of the data, via decentralized service agreements and permissioning that bring compute to the data.
Ocean has network rewards to incentivize a supply of commons data and services.
Ocean uses on-chain bounties to continuously fund improvements to the network and community.
Ocean is permissionless with governance to balance stakeholder groups.

1.INTRODUCTION

Society is becoming increasingly reliant on data, especially with the advent of AI. However, a small handful of organizations with both massive data assets and AI capabilities attained worrying levels of control, which is a danger to a free and open society.Short term use: diversification in cryptocurrency portfolios.

Ocean Protocol aim to unlock data, for more equitable outcomes for users of data, using a thoughtful application of both technology and governance.

Ocean Protocol is being built by a diverse ecosystem of contributors who share a common vision of unlocking data for AI.

1.1 OVERVIEW ABOUT AMPLEFORTH PROTOCOL

Ocean Protocol is an ecosystem for the data economy and associated services. It provides a tokenized service layer that exposes data, storage, compute and algorithms for consumption with a set of deterministic proofs on availability and integrity that serve as verifiable service agreements. There is staking on services to signal quality, reputation and ward against Sybil Attacks.

Ocean helps to unlock data, particularly for AI. It is designed for scale and uses blockchain technology that allows data to be shared and sold in a safe, secure and transparent manner. While vast amounts of data are generated each year, data exchange and analysis have been hampered due largely to concerns over trust and security. Currently, many organizations have data but do not have the trusted and secure means to share it. Without data, AI cannot advance and be applied to solve problems and ultimately improve lives. More pressing is the fact that today, only a handful of companies have both AI and data capacities, and if data remains locked up, these companies could very well govern the development of AI and thereby our future. Through blockchain technology and tokens, Ocean Protocol connects data providers and consumers, allowing data to be shared while guaranteeing traceability, transparency, and trust for all stakeholders involved. Ocean Protocol is designed to give data owners control over their data assets and prevent them from being locked in to any single marketplace.

By bringing together decentralized blockchain technology, a data sharing framework, and an ecosystem for data and related services, Ocean Protocol is committed to kick-starting a new Data Economy that touches every single person, company and device, giving power back to data owners, enabling people to reap value from data to better our world.

The Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange that aims to unlock data with a “deterministic proofs on availability and integrity that serve as verifiable service agreements” in place. It is breaking down data silos, equalizing access to data for all.

Operating from a time-tested Ethereum blockchain, there is now more incentive for data generators to share theirs because of an incentivizing model in place. There is also staking in place to “signal quality, reputation and ward against Sybil Attacks”.

Seeking to open up the under-exploited trillion-dollar machine learning and AI ecosystem, the idea behind it is to drive relevance and quality with an objective of creating meaningful value from these large-and increasing, chunk of data while simultaneously breaking down the self-propagating cycle created by companies as Google and Facebook.

The conflict between access to data and data sovereignty is key to understanding how AI works, and moving it forward. The Ocean Protocol Foundation wants to help resolve that conflict, by introducing a way of letting AI work with data without giving up control.

Ocean helps to unlock data, particularly for AI. It is designed for scale and uses blockchain technology that allows data to be shared and sold in a safe, secure and transparent manner.

A decentralized data exchange protocol to unlock data for AI
Uses blockchain technology that allows data to be shared and transferred in a safe, secure and transparent manner
Enables a decentralized platform and network connecting providers and consumers of valuable data, and providing open access for developers to build services

1.1.1 SERVICE AGREEMENTS & ACCESS CONTROL ON OCEAN

The Ocean network is composed of data assets and services. Assets are in the form of data and algorithms. Services are processing and persistence, which leverage assets. The assets and services are made available for consumption via the network.

At the heart of this are decentralized Service Execution Agreements (SEAs) and decentralized access control, which together power data service supply chains. This allows connection to, monetization of, and curation of arbitrary data services. This allows compute to be brought to the data, thereby solving the concern of data escapes since sensitive data never needs to leave the premises (just the results of computation).

This baseline functionality will coincide with the deployment of the initial physical network. Ocean’s main target users — AI researchers and data scientists — expect reasonable network performance and usage costs. For this reason, Ocean will initially ship as a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) network called “Pacific”, where each node is a Parity Ethereum client. We refer to nodes and node operators as “keepers” [Zurrer2017], to highlight that they are different than traditional blockchain “miners”. The keepers community will collectively govern adding/removing keepers and smart contract upgrades.

1.1.2 PROOF-OF-SERVICE AND INCENTIVES ON OCEAN

On top of the SEAs infrastructure, Ocean adds network rewards to incentivize data sharing, which will lead to a commons. Specifically, Ocean incentivizes participants to submit, refer, and make available (provably) quality AI data & services, via a new construction that it calls a Curated Proofs Market (CPM). A CPM has two parts: predicted popularity of a dataset/service, and its actual popularity:

1. Cryptographic Proof. The actual popularity is the count of the number of times the dataset/service is delivered or made available. To avoid being gamed, it must be made available in a provable fashion using a cryptographic proof. For example, this may be proof of data availability.

2. Curation Market. This is for predicted popularity, a proxy for relevance. The crowd knows much better than designers of Ocean whether a given dataset/service is relevant; so we harness the power of the crowd via a curation market. This market can be thought of giving reputation to data/services where the actor must “put their money where their mouth is.” They stake to buy “shares” (aka drops) in that dataset/service. The earlier that an actor stakes or bets on a given dataset/service, the more drops they get for the amount staked, and in turn the higher the reward.

To avoid people gaming the reward system, only stakeholders provably making high-quality data/services available will be able to reap rewards. Network rewards for a given dataset/service are distributed based on amount of stake in that dataset/service, and its actual popularity. In other words, CPMs instantiate the goals of verification and virality.

To the best of our knowledge, Ocean is the first system that explicitly incentivizes people to share their data/services, independent of whether it is free or priced. Whoever bets on the most popular data/service (and makes it available) wins the most rewards.

1.1.3 ON-CHAIN BOUNTIES

Ocean will be a utility network to serve the public at large. Therefore it must be self-sustaining; and the technology and ecosystem need steady improvements, by the community and for the community. To this end, the Ocean network will have an on-chain bounties system where a portion of the network rewards is for technology improvement and ecosystem development.

1.1.4 PERMISSIONLESS

Ocean will go from PoA to permissionless, while maintaining performance. Technology options include ETH2.0, Parity Substrate, and Cosmos SDK.

1.1.5THE OCEAN PROTOCOL AIMS

Drive the fourth industrial revolution-largely defined by access to actionable intelligence found at the depth of secured but accessible data crunched by iterative AI algorithms.
Develop a protocol and network — a tokenized ecosystem. This network can be used as a foundational substrate to power a new ecosystem of data marketplaces, and more broadly, data sharing for the public good.
Unlock data, for more equitable outcomes for users of data, using a thoughtful application of both technology and governance.
Ocean Protocol aims to enable the safe and secure exchange of data and to grant individuals and organizations easier access to data that can be used to help solve pressing societal problems and develop valuable business solutions.

1.1.6 WHY OCEAN PROTOCOL

Ocean Protocol has developed a decentralized network. Its technology allows people to have full control over who accesses their data, how, and ensures that they are rewarded for what they share. Knowing that ownership and data privacy is not compromised, people will have the confidence to share with ease. This opens up data access, connecting supply to demand. A new efficient data economy is now on the horizon.

Here are four great reasons why you should join the community at Ocean Protocol and help us open up data to realize the untapped potential and solve the greatest problems facing humanity.

1. Data economy is real with huge untapped potential

Ocean Protocol want to open up the data economy by opening data access in a way that works for everyone. They want to connect data creators, providers with data consumers through an environment that’s secure, trusted, and fair.

2. Crossing borders with Ocean Protocol’s data sharing platform

Now with Ocean Protocol, you can start to have data markets forming where the value of the data can be much lower, and with any party without the need of existing trustworthy relationships. This is because the process is digitized and governed by smart contracts. Smart contracts allow data owners to program the conditions of access which are then executed with perfect precision. This gives data owners and buyers transparency, security and guarantees of payment and use.

Another unique feature of Ocean Protocol is that it allows algorithms and models to travel to the data, get trained and then leave without exposing the data or taking a copy. This gives data owners comfort to share their data and set tangible value for their data assets.

This entire means that a Data Economy can start to form, on a global basis where data gets unlocked and priced fairly.

They want to build a community that is open to everyone — a place where data is accessible, and people are rewarded for sharing it. No more gatekeepers, no more silos.

3. A team of the best and brightest

The team is made up of sector specialists and business savvy entrepreneurs with an impressive pedigree. Our diverse trio of founders have established 14 projects and companies between them. Trent McConaghy has been working in the field of artificial intelligence for over 20 years, and serves as advisor to numerous top governments on AI & blockchain strategies. Bruce Pon is a MIT graduate who worked at Daimler (Mercedes Benz) and established a thriving company that has built banks & financial services in 15 countries across the globe. Daryl Arnold is a prolific founder and global entrepreneur, with a rich experience in data, marketing, technology and sustainability.

Dimitri De Jonghe heads the research team at Ocean and has founded 3x bleeding tech blockchain start-ups. Head of Product, Don Gossen, has spent 10 years as a data and analytics expert with extensive experience working on four different continents, and Marketing Director Cristina Cenuse is a 3x founder with 15 years’ experience in Marketing & Advertising across international markets, with global brands. Executive Director Chalid Manaa has an impressive background in the intersection between IT & Finance, having spent nearly 20 years at top names like Accenture & Daimler.

Among their world-class Advisors are big names in crypto like Meltem Demirors & Ryan Selkis, thought leaders in AI such as Anastassia Lauterbach & Ben Goertzel, and tech pioneers Peter Wang, Luis Cuende, and Pindar Wong.

4. Creating partnerships to deliver in the long term

From the very start, they have been working hand in hand with Singapore government (IMDA), key partners such as AI Singapore and PwC to develop a framework for the safe and secure exchange of data.

In addition, Ocean is collaborating with a range of companies — from innovative start-ups and enablers to multinationals — including DCI, Emporio, Next Billion, ConnectedLife, Padang & Co, SG Innovate, to Aviva, Roche, and Johnson & Johnson, so that Ocean is front of mind when it comes to data sharing and AI advancement.

1.1.7 OCEAN PROTOCOL PARTNERSHIPS

Ocean has partnerships with leading companies including Unilever, Rochi, Messari, DCI, Couger, Mobi, xPrize, Fitchain and more.

The Ocean Protocol Foundation has contracted BigchainDB to build the core protocol, network, marketing, and community activities.

In upcoming versions, Ocean plans to introduce Bounties on-chain, roll out a beta version of Compute to the Data on cloud providers, begin the registration of Compute Services and set the conditions, terms of service of their cryptographic proofs and many more.

1.1.7.1 CONNECTED LIFE WITH OCEAN PROTOCOL

Singapore-based healthcare company Connected Life has announced a partnership with Ocean Protocol where they will utilize blockchain technology and provide distributed data exchange protocols for Artificial Intelligence.

Connected Life will use blockchain technology to provide solutions to enhance patient symptom monitoring.

The ocean protocol utilizing blockchain technology can advance the data economy. Identity-managed data can be established as an owner and by maintaining access control of data through smart contracts to strengthen trust in data sharing. In addition, the accurate traceability unique to blockchain technology enables tracking of the progress from data acquisition to use.

The Ocean Protocol is a sensitive data sharing solution because it protects the privacy of your data. To make a solution using AI more accurate, you need to load a lot of data and train the AI.

Ocean Protocol provides services that can be shared while maintaining the confidentiality of data. In order to combine medical data with negative images of data sharing for AI, which requires large amounts of data in order to be better intelligence, a protocol that combines blockchain technology and privacy technology is needed. The Ocean Protocol may be the forerunner of the data economy.

1.1.8 WHAT PROBLEM DOES OCEAN PROTOCOL SOLVE?

Most companies have tremendous amounts of data, but have difficulty exploiting it. Conversely, many others are starving for data, particularly in AI. Ocean Protocol allows data providers to share data, while maintaining control and having transparency.

1.1.9 OCEAN PROTOCOL INITIATIVES

To differentiate itself, Ocean Protocol are focusing on building an “exchange protocol” as this will strategically place them at a position where they can strike partnerships even in the face of competition.

With experience in the field, the team behind Ocean is now installing a protocol for tokenization and subsequent incentivization, rule setting and quality purposes making it easy for data owners/providers to free share quality aware that they will be compensated accordingly. Before that, these are some of their earlier initiatives:

COALAIP for intellectual property licensing.
IPDB that addresses scalability concerns. It is built on BigchainDB / IPDB technology.
BigchainDB is a unique high throughput database
Ascribe is an attribution and digital ownership platform

1.2 WHO ARE OCEAN PROTOCOL’S COMPETITORS?

Ocean is a protocol and network on which data marketplaces can be built to unlock data for sharing and selling. It enables data to be shared. Most other projects are decentralized / centralized marketplaces or data brokers. Ocean is complementary to both centralized & decentralized marketplaces, because it provides an additional channel for the marketplaces to publish their services. We consider projects like Enigma and Datum to be potential partners.

WHAT OCEAN PROTOCOL DOES?

Ocean protocol would open up the data space from a planetary level, democratize the space and eventually create a leveling source where companies-regardless of size or financial muscle, and individuals, can access data for machine learning purposes in a private, affordable and regulated manner.

Ocean Protocol at its bare bones is a connection between Artificial Intelligence developers and data owners. However, instead of creating a single line source, everything is done via the blockchain in a democratized, secure and compliant manner without Gatekeepers.

1.2.1 HOW DOES OCEAN PROTOCOL WORK?

Ocean Protocol is at once a business, technical, and governance framework that is interwoven together to allow data and services to be shared and sold, in a secure manner. Ocean Protocol stores metadata, links to data, provides a licensing framework and has toolsets for pricing. A multitude of data marketplaces can hook into Ocean Protocol to provide “last mile” services to connect data providers and consumers. Ocean Protocol is designed so that data owners cannot be locked-in to any single marketplace. The data owner controls each dataset.

2. OCEAN TOKENS

The OCEAN utility token is used as a unit of exchange for buying and selling data and AI services.

Ocean Tokens are the main tokens of the network. They denote Ocean Tokens as “Ọ” or with ticker symbol OCEAN. They are used in several ways.

1. Ocean Tokens are used as a unit of exchange for buying and selling data/services. A marketplace would price data/services in Ocean Tokens (OCEAN), or any other currency of

the marketplace’s or vendor’s choice, such as USD, EUR, ETH, or DAI. It the latter, the marketplace would use a crypto exchange to convert just-in-time to OCEAN. Therefore the Ocean network would only see OCEAN. they explicitly chose a one-token design over two-token design for simplicity, and to help equalize the access to upside opportunities of owning assets.

2. Ocean Tokens are used for staking. This includes staking in each given dataset/service, and introduce a long tail of additional tokens called drops. Drops are derivative tokens of Ocean tokens denoted in “Ḍ”. Each dataset would have its own derivative token. For example, 100 drops of stake in dataset X is “100 ḌX”. Drops relate to Ocean Tokens via curation markets’ bonding curves, which determine the exchange rates between them for different dataset/services.

3. Ocean Tokens are used in dispensing network rewards, according to Ocean’s inflation schedule.

2.1 THE TOKEN FOR THE DATA ECONOMY

The Ocean Token is designed to enable data exchange and to maximize the supply of data within Ocean’s POA networks, but as a standard ERC-20 token it is also deployed on Ethereum’s Mainnet for increased security. There will be a maximum of 1.41 billion OCEAN

2.2 PURCHASE AND COMPUTE DATA

The Ocean Token is used as a unit of exchange for buying and selling data and AI services within Ocean’s Pacific Mainnet. Consumers can discover and purchase data and AI services in marketplaces, which are connected to the Ocean Protocol Pacific network. The Ocean network processes transactions using Service Execution Agreements and clear payments with the Ocean Token.

2.3 OCEAN TOKEN IN MULTIPLE NETWORKS

The Ocean Token contract is deployed on the Ethereum Mainnet, our Pacific Mainnet, and on our Nile Testnet. As a standard ERC-20 token, the Ocean Token can be used with all the apps in the Ethereum ecosystem. In order to use services on the Pacific Mainnet, a token bridge is used to convert Ethereum Mainnet tokens into POA network tokens. The duality of the token gives users the best of both worlds. The security and ecosystem of the Ethereum network and the speed and scalability of the POA network.

2.4 THE OCEAN PROTOCOL TOKEN (OCN)

Is the means of value exchange and network incentivization Via:

1. Earn OCN for selling Data

Publish data for sale with a variety of pricing mechanisms
Maintain full control
Comply with regulation

2. Earn OCN for supporting the network

Provide validation and verification services for the network
Store blockchain history of transactions

3. Data marketplaces earn OCN

Curate and publish data to Ocean Protocol to find new buyers
An open source protocol that democratizes access for new data market places

4. Earn OCN for publishing public data

Publish, curate and conserve public data to earn minting rewards

2.5 STAKING & NETWORK REWARDS

In the future, Ocean Tokens can be used for staking to catalyze the supply of data and help marketplace dynamics. 51% of Ocean Tokens will also be dispersed as part of the network rewards for providers that supply data and services to the network and ecosystem.

3. THE DATA ECONOMY

There already is a data economy where it’s a flow of value and participants in the economy are buying and selling data in a closed and opaque manner. Just as Bitcoin opened up the money economy, ocean is designed to open up the data economy.

Components of the data economy

Three levels to both the open money economy and to the token economy:

Base infrastructure (i.e. a store of value)
Unit of exchange
Platform to launch and to exchange things

The last mile on top of the platform are the applications.

In the token economy the de factor standard, the unit of exchange, that has emerged is Bitcoin. The platform is Ethereum. On top of the platform you have a set of decentralised applications, DAPPS, running on Ethereum, which represent the kind of last mile in terms of applications. In terms of financial side the last mile are Decentralised finance or DeFi, some use cases of DeFi are for payments, lending, stablecoins, tokenization and decentralised exchange.

3.1 KEY ECOSYSTEM PARTICIPANTS

1. Publishers

Own rights to data assets
Publish assets on Ocean
Earn tokens for asset usage

2. Consumers

Harness data assets and services
Use their own choice of tools
Pay tokens for consumption

3. Providers

Offer data services (storage, compute AI)
Provide proofs of service provision and trust compliance
Earn tokens for service provision

4. Marketplaces

Enable discovery of relevant assets
Facilitate data transactions
Verify trusted data rules
Earn tokens for transactions and services

3.2 ECOSYSTEM DEVELOPMENT FUND

The Ocean Ecosystem Development Fund helps developers and projects in building with Ocean. The Ocean Protocol Foundation has allocated a total of 20 million OCEAN for this fund.

Funding is earmarked for developer teams, startups, service providers and existing organizations interested in building on Ocean.

3.3 SHIPYARD (Launch Your Great Idea)

Ocean Shipyard is an early-stage incubation program for taking your project to the next level.

Projects admitted to the program will receive funding from the Ocean Protocol Foundation for an initial 3 month period and are eligible to receive further funding for up to 3 additional months based on achieving specific milestones.

Program members benefit from a wide range of support from the Ocean team.

Seed funding for up to 6 months
Access to Ocean core developers
Project and community building support
Introductions to potential investors
Access to expansive network of blockchain professionals
Social media promotion and joint blog posts

3.4 OCEAN PROTOCOL BOUNTIES (Grow The Developer Ecosystem)

Funded by the Ocean Protocol Foundation, Ocean bounties provide exciting opportunities for the broader open source community to help grow the developer ecosystem and add value to the Ocean Protocol network. Bounties are managed on Gitcoin, connected to our bounties repository.

3.5 DATA ECONOMY CHALLENGE

The Ocean Data Economy Challenge (ODEC) is Ocean Protocol’s very own competition for developers building on Ocean. The ODEC is a great way for developers to showcase innovative ideas for building on Ocean and includes plenty of exciting OCEAN token prizes.

3.6 STAKEHOLDERS

Understanding network stakeholders is a precursor to system design. Table 1 outlines the stakeholder roles participating in the network.

Table 1: Key stakeholders in Ocean ecosystem

3.7 OCEAN IS DECENTRALIZED ORCHESTRATION

In the world of big data, there are frameworks for large compute jobs (or streams) like MapReduce, Hadoop, Spark, and Flink. The user configures a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of compute and storage. Often those DAGs are a simple compute pipeline. The framework orchestrates the work.

Since AI loves data, AI people use these frameworks in the course of building models (or AI-tuned variants like TensorFlow).

Ocean does decentralized orchestration: it orchestrates the execution of compute DAGs in a decentralized setting. In Ocean, a Service Execution Agreement (SEA) specifies the compute DAG. A SEA is the decentralized equivalent of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) found in big data environments.

A SEA Contract handles each step in the DAG compute; and compose to one higher level SEA for the whole DAG. All the SEAs have guaranteed execution due to running on the blockchain-based Ocean network (bottom). Once you deploy them, they simply go; a single entity can’t intervene and stop them (unless it’s within the definition of a SEA).

The decentralized setting means that SEAs unlock new capabilities, like privacy-preserving compute. Arbitrary forms of compute can be brought to the data. Therefore private data — the most valuable data — never needs to leave the premises, while at the same time value can be extracted from it.

3.8 OCEAN AS INTER-SERVICE NETWORK

In executing compute DAGs, each step might have one of many providers. There will be providers for data, algorithms, compute, storage, etc. Each of these may be centralized behind a firewall, centralized on the cloud (e.g. AWS S3 or EC2), or fully decentralized as their own networks (e.g. FileCoin or Golem, Enigma).

Ocean doesn’t provide these services itself, it simply connects them. This makes it an inter-service network, specifically for compute DAGs on big data / AI.

4. THE OCEAN PROTOCOL TEAM

The Ocean Protocol core team combines a deep background in big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence and data exchanges, with real-world business experience as entrepreneurs, designers and technologists who have started over 20 companies.

The team is experienced in big data, blockchain, AI and data exchanges from their previous work experiences and from their business experiences.

The core team has 40 members led by Bruce Pon. He is the Founder and CEO at BigchainDB, Founder of Ocean Protocol.

Others include: Dimitri De Jonghe, Cristina Pon, Aitor Argomaniz, Irene Lopez De Vallejo, Paul Galwas and 30 more.

Advisors:

In total, there are 35 advisors with “recognized expertise in AI, blockchain, big data, business and policy.” All of them were “carefully selected based on an alignment of values towards unlocking data and AI for society.”

Meltem Demirors: the Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares and Head of CS Treasury. Besides Ocean, she advises Future Commerce and was the Vice President of the Digital Currency Group from April 2015 to Feb 2018.

Dr. Carsten Stöcker: the CEO & Founder Spherity GmbH, is also part of the team. In his LinkedIn he describes himself as a “Technology Entrepreneur, Business and System Integration Professional with Expertise in 4th Industrial Revolution/Industry 4.0, IoT, Blockchain, Machine Learning, Cryptography, Automotive, Supply Chain, Renewable Energy, Self-sovereign Identity, Digital Twinning, Environmental and Social Impact.”

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Gajek: the co-founder and CTO of Weeve.

Adam Drake: the CEO of Atazzo.

Chris Ballinger: the CEO & Founder MOBI

Others as Franck Martins and Dr. Anastassia Lauterbach, the director of Dun & Bradstreet.

5.OCEAN PROTOCOL TECHNOLOGY

5.1 ACCESS CONTROL

Keep Data Assets Secure With Web3 Access Control

Maintain control of your data and only grant access over your data sets without a centralized intermediary.

Traditional access control uses centralized intermediaries, where data owners risk losing control of their data. Ocean Protocol restores control and privacy by replacing the centralized intermediaries with a decentralized blockchain network.

Data sellers retain control of their data using blockchain-enabled access control.

How It Works?

Every interaction with data assets in Ocean Protocol, such as publishing, sharing, selling, and consuming are recorded immutably onto the blockchain, enabling audit trails to keep track of how your data is used.

1. Web3 Accounts

Each dataset registered in an Ocean Protocol marketplace has a Web3 account as owner attached to it, based on the account used to publish the data set. Only that owner can modify or transfer ownership for the data set.

Likewise, only Web3 accounts can consume your data, once they have been granted access to it.

2. Encrypted file URLs

The url of your dataset files is encrypted during publishing, and is only ever stored in encrypted form. This means that none of your actual data files are stored in any Ocean Protocol component, or marketplace, but only a reference to it in form of an encrypted URL.

The decryption key is split into pieces, and held collectively by the blockchain nodes. Decryption can only happen if the given conditions have been met, for instance when the buyer has paid for the data. Then blockchain nodes arrive at consensus to reassemble the key.

Ocean Protocol supports referencing files from various protocols and services, such as http(s), IPFS, AWS S3, and Microsoft Azure.

3. Service Execution Agreements

For each data set, the network validates who is able to access what. Ocean Protocol implements this with Service Execution Agreements (SEAs).

A SEA is a contract-like agreement between a publisher, a consumer, and a verifier. SEAs specify what assets are to be delivered, the conditions that must be met, and the rewards for fulfilling the conditions. SEAs are implemented as part of Ocean’s smart contracts.

4. Blockchain Smart Contracts

Ocean Protocol software uses smart contracts on the Ethereum platform — scripts that run on the blockchain Web3 stack.

These contracts interact with each other and higher-level Ocean libraries to register your data, ownership information, and facilitate secure data exchange.

5. Metadata Standards

Every dataset in Ocean has a decentralized identifier and associated metadata, following DID / DDO web standards. These identifiers are registered on the blockchain. To further help discoverability, Ocean suggests a model for metadata fields.

6. Provenance

All actions of Service Execution Agreements (SEAs) such as publishing, sharing, selling, and consuming data are recorded immutably onto the blockchain. This helps users to track the history of these actions.

5.2 COMPUTE-TO-DATA

Buy & Sell Private Data, While Preserving Privacy.

Compute-to-data resolves the tradeoff between the benefits of using private data, and the risks of exposing it. It lets the data stay on-premise, yet allows 3rd parties to run specific compute jobs on it to get useful compute results like averaging or building an AI model.

The most valuable data is private data — using it can improve research and business outcomes. But concerns over privacy and control make it hard to access. With Compute-to-Data, private data isn’t directly shared but rather specific access to it is granted.

It can be used for data sharing in science or technology contexts, or in marketplaces for selling private data while preserving privacy, as an opportunity for companies to monetize their data assets.

Private data can help research, leading to life-altering innovations in science and technology. For example, more data improves the predictive accuracy of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. Private data is often considered the most valuable data because it’s so hard to get at, and using it can lead to potentially big payoffs.

How It Works?

Data owners approve AI algorithms to run on their data. Compute-to-Data orchestrates remote computation and execution on data to train AI models, while preserving the privacy of the data.

Private data aids in research, leading to life-altering innovations in business, science and technology. For example, more data improves the predictive accuracy of modern AI models.

1. Marketplaces

Marketplaces can allow their users to publish data sets with Compute-to-Data enabled, in addition to access via file download.

In addition to Ocean Protocol core components, a Compute-to-Data infrastructure is set up as a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster e.g on AWS or Azure in the background. This Kubernetes cluster is responsible for running the actual compute jobs, out of sight for marketplace clients and end users.

Marketplaces choose what exact compute resources they want to make available to their end users within this K8s cluster, even have them choose from a selection of different images and resources.

Likewise, marketplaces can choose and restrict the kind of algorithm they want to allow their users to run on the data sets in a marketplace.

2. Data Owners

With Compute-to-Data, data owners can publish their data sets and allow Compute-to-Data as the only allowed access mechanism on them, and set a price for doing so, enabling the monetization of invaluable, latent data.

As with all data sets in Ocean Protocol, only the metadata stays publicly accessible, the references to the actual data files are encrypted during publishing so any data file stays secure.

End users will get only the status of their compute job and the final results back — there is no way of getting the asset itself.

3. End Users

Compute-to-Data in marketplaces allows end users to buy and sell private data, while preserving privacy

End users can choose and run their own algorithms on those Compute-to-Data enabled data sets, without the decrypted URL to the data files ever getting exposed to them, or the marketplace.

They might choose to become data providers themselves. With the assurance that their data stays secure, a greater incentive is created to share compute access to their private data.

4. Trusting Algorithms

Only trust in a narrow facet is required: does the algorithm have negligible leakage of personally identifiable information (PII)? For example, a simple averaging function aggregates data sufficiently to avoid leaking PII. AI algorithms also aggregate information.

The marketplace or data owner chooses which algorithms to trust. Therefore, it’s the same entity that risks private data getting exposed and chooses what algorithm to trust. It is their choice to make, based on their risk-reward preference.

5. Service Execution Agreements

Just like with other forms of access control, Ocean Protocol’s Service Execution Agreements define and control compute access to an asset.

A SEA is a contract-like agreement between a publisher, a consumer, and a verifier and it specifies what assets are to be delivered, the conditions that must be met, and the rewards for fulfilling the conditions.

6. Provenance

Because every compute job has to start with verifying if an end user is allowed to do so with Service Execution Agreements, each compute job is recorded on-chain.

That also means the blockchain based smart contracts ensure that every data provider and AI practitioner can verify proper execution of their algorithm.

5.3 DATA SCIENCE

Build AI Models on Private Data that was previously inaccessible. Data is unreasonably effective in improving AI model accuracy and Ocean Protocol’s marketplaces and Compute-to-Data help data scientists & AI practitioners get more data, including the most elusive of all private data.

AI practitioners and data scientists can access private data via remote execution of AI training algorithms against the data, with computation provided by the data owner. AI practitioners benefit from increased accuracy of their AI models, or perhaps even the ability to model things that were not previously possible. Data owners retain privacy and control of their data.

The blockchain-based system gives an audit trail on data being bought and sold. Compute-to-Data gives proof that algorithms are properly executed, so that AI practitioners can be confident in the results.

How It Works

A typical data science flow usually happens in an Ocean data marketplace where AI practitioners find data to run their algorithms on. Flows without marketplaces are also possible, for example, in a Jupyter notebook.

1. Find Compute Assets

The AI practitioner visits an Ocean-powered data marketplace, proposes to purchase data, and submits an AI model-training algorithm.

2. Approval by Data Owner

The data owner approves the AI algorithm to run on their data. This is done during publishing a data set and setting certain conditions for access to it. For example, a price can be set on a data set to run a compute job on it.

3. Orchestration

Compute-to-Data orchestrates remote computation and execution on data to train AI models.

4. Get Results

The AI practitioner receives the results: either a trained model, or the results of that model’s simulation on previously-unseen input data.

6. THE OCEAN PROTOCOL ROADMAP

November 2017

Ocean Token seed distribution
Technical Primer
Marketplace Framework

February 2018

Released Technical Whitepaper & Business Whitepaper

March 2018

Ocean Token pre-launch distribution with 3500 Contributors in 100 countries
Activated community & built up the team
Announced partnership with IBM Watson AI XPRIZE
Advisor Program launched with 40 advisors in 20 cities
Bounty Program launched with 15 bounties and 88,000 PROCN tokens offered

August 2018

Spree test network created
Ocean Enhancement Proposals introduced
Pleuston, a proof-of-concept data marketplace

December 2018

Spree test network updated
Development and documentation of Ocean network components
Building global community: 130+ events, 35+ advisors, 120+ ambassadors in 40 countries, 15+ bounties
Partnerships & collaborations: MOBI Grand Challenge, Fitchain

April 2019

Nile beta network deployed, with Service Execution Agreements, Access control, Metadata store
Commons marketplace
Project Manta Ray, a data science workflow powered by Ocean Protocol
More collaborations announced

v1 Pacific 2019

Pacific network launch, Ocean’s PoA Mainnet
Token bridge between Ethereum Mainnet and PoA network
Commons Marketplace update including AI for Good channel, stability of consume flow, and metadata validation
IPFS integration for decentralized asset file hosting

March 2020

Decentralized/non-custodial data marketplace
Customizable marketplace for data providers
Deployed with a strategic partner

May 2020

Unlock private data while preserving privacy, by bringing compute to the data
Integrated with Marketplace: buy & sell private data, without compromising privacy

Q3 2020

Marketplace for community to buy & sell datasets, complementary to enterprise marketplaces
Deployed as standalone webapp

v3 Data Tokens & v5

Q3 2020

Platform refactored for simplicity featuring data tokens
Updated token design in smart contracts and marketplace. Marketplace includes incentives and staking (v3)
On a permissionless substrate (v5)

Q4 2020

Community funding for software development (core, applications, infrastructure), for community/ecosystem work, and to incentivize data supply (v4). Including grants to incentivize for data.
Funding comes from the network reward
Projects are proposed and curated by the community

7. GOVERNANCE

At Ocean, they have designed a system that is flexible enough to support fixing Bugs or even adding more features. At the same time it benefits from the immutability and security that the blockchain offers to make it tamper proof as well as applying military grade security and audit processes.

The Governance implementation has to cover a wide variety of different requirements.

Network: Support two Ethereum Networks in parallel. Parts of Ocean are installed on Ethereum Mainnet and Ocean Protocol’s very own Mainnet (Pacific).

Bridge: Support the Token Bridge On- and Off-chain components used for Bridging the Ocean Token between Ethereum Mainnet and Pacific Mainnet.

Keeper-Contracts: Support the requirements coming from Keeper-Contracts that hold the Ocean Protocol Business Logic

Keeper: Support On- and Off-boarding Keeper Nodes on the network Level.

Contracts: Support smart contract upgrades and configuration with data persistence and immutability.

Support for complex foundation organisation elements at the same time being flexible enough to swap out those elements against other implementations.

The execution should be the same for all the different parts of the protocol.

Easy to use for Foundation and team members.

8. OCEAN PROTOCOL COMMUNITY

9. CONCLUSION

Ocean Protocol has everything one should be looking for if wanting to invest in crypto.

Amazing usercase that will be utlized on a global scale and change the world we live in.
A ridiculous low market cap of 13 million at the time of writing this article with the current price being USD $0.037. Note the ICO price was USD $0.20 with the IEO being USD $0.12, those that purchased in the ICO were compensated to match the IEO price so it was fair for all. As you can see this project is still way under IEO price and there is so much room for growth.
Ocean Protocol builds powerful Web3 apps for the emerging data economy. Founded in 2017, Ocean Protocol connects data providers and consumers, using blockchain technology.
Ocean Protocol technology allows private data to be shared, without compromising control or security for the data owner, while ensuring traceability, transparency, and trust for all stakeholders involved.
Ocean allows data owners to monetize data while keeping control over their data assets. Ocean Protocol Foundation is based in Singapore, and has an office in Berlin, Germany.
The amazing team leading this project and the extensive successful experience they have achieved in their past work history.
The partnerships that have already been made public by companies working with Ocean Protocol with many more to be announced and under NDAs.

8.REFERENCES

https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/4-reasons-to-dive-into-ocean-protocol-and-change-the-world-b18cc8d53235

https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/making-ocean-protocols-smart-contracts-and-it-s-governance-unstoppable-45cf99dc1b65

https://oceanprotocol.com/token

https://insureblocks.com/ep-67-the-data-economy-insights-from-ocean-protocol/

https://oceanprotocol.com/technology/marketplaces

https://oceanprotocol.com/technology/access-control

https://medium.com/@HSVGTS/why-i-decided-to-invest-in-ocean-protocol