NiMA- Good evening/afternoon/morning everyone! I’m here and happy to discuss ecosystem related topics.

Note: I’ve enabled slow mode (30 sec interval for now) so we can have in depth discussions :) I’ll start with some basic concepts and history.

@sheridanjohns our OG community hero and ecosystem head is also here with me and will help with some questions.

Before getting into the details … how about a bit of history!? :) I drew this simple graph to show you the timeline.

In the very early days of open source software there was no funding and no business model … governance happened in forum and mailing lists! So, we could say all crypto/blockchain projects are spiritual grandchildren of open source projects like Linux.

Then came Bitcoin, Bitcoin had a super power! Super 💥 power … block rewards! With this Bitcoin had a built in incentive mechanism for maintaining the network and increasing security without participants even knowing or trusting each other!.

There was a problem however! No one paid the core Bitcoin devs for their hard work ^^ most were early miners or lived on donations. More recently, some major companies like Blockstream fund work on the core Bitcoin software.

This however meant for non early movers and those who joined later there was no formal process for funding open source work.

Then (after much experimentation …) came Ethereum.

Ethereum started their journey with a white paper just like Bitcoin, but they needed funding for their work. So they raised funding (in BTC) and with that formed Ethereum Foundation as the steward and guardian.

There are also other commercial entities like Consensys but EF (Ethereum Foundation) is the central funding entity.

There is still a huge issue here … what if the foundation runs out of the initial raised funding. Or what if 3rd parties want to do valuable work but don’t want to deal with EF?.

Then came projects like Dash who had onchain funding for improvements to the network.

That means a portion of the block rewards go to funding cool and useful projects around the ecosystem.

Dash’s funding model is interesting but it is not really that inclusive. A small group of large token holders (super nodes) control the voting process and it’s difficult for outsiders and smaller players to join that group.

So what is the solution?, here we start entering the DAO era.

Aragon (a DAO infrastructure provider) funds various types of activities and holds network level voting processes where ALL token holders can participate. No matter how large or small their holding is.

So far we’ve covered no funding, funding but no network rewards, and funding with both centralized and decentralized governance.

Then more recently smaller and much more agile DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Orgs) emerged out of the ethereum community … prominent examples are Moloch DAO and Metacartel DAO.

Their approach is raising the funding from anyone who supports the vision/cause. Funders can also pull out their funding at any point of time if they are not happy with the DAO.

This way both the source of funding and the governance/voting are extremely decentralized.

Metacartel is arguably the most successful DAO and community today in the entire Ethereum (and blockchain) space.

Their success is in large part due to direct skin in the game (funding) from all their members.

Anyone can propose projects/ideas and if enough people support it … get funding for it! It could be anything from marketing to developing useful DApps and tools.

Question- Could you explain in laymans terms what DAO’s essentially are and their potential impact on the data economy?.

NiMA- We could see Data Economy specific DAOs.

People interested in Data Privacy and Data Economy could come together (for example our amazing community at Ocean) and decide to start such a DAO together.

The DAO can then tap into a larger funding pool and fund relevant projects that bring value to the open data economy. A huge benefit of this approach is transparency.

All funded projects and all proposals are visible to anyone. This is in contrast to foundations and centralized grants giving entities that are somewhat opaque.

The DAO can then tap into a larger funding pool and fund relevant projects that bring value to the open data economy. A huge benefit of this approach is transparency.

Ocean Byte- Excellent summary and train of thoughts. I’d like to emphasize that everyone could start this DAO. There is no permission that someone needs to initiate it.

I would like to add the community can then decide together about the rules of the DAO, though it is also possible to have a DAO with just a few selected people.

There is not a DAO that fits all, but every DAO can determine their needs, governance rules and restrictions.

NiMA- That’s a VERY good question, one of the ways we are innovating in this regard is using a new approach where voting and governance rights are earned by meaningful activity in the ecosystem.

Our first step in this direction is implementing SourceCred for Ocean Port, our new BUIDLer/devs forum.

To follow up and give you a bit of context … SourceCred is a new project that uses a version of Google PageRank algorithm to measure and reward the most valuable contributions in the community.

Right now our instance of SourceCred only monitors activity on Ocean Port/forum. In future this could be expanded to Discord, Github and eventually also Telegram.

The basic idea is that if you do something that is used and valued by others you get rewarded for that. Even if it happens later down the road!.

There is in fact a very interesting concept called DAO Mesh … Trent also covers this briefly in his article.

You could have many DAOs that collaborate on various projects. The idea is that we will have many DAOs vs. ONE BIG DAO (like the 2016 The DAO of Ethereum which failed very badly).

So, for instance if we have even 5 people here who are interested to fund some particular projects/activities they could form a small DAO together and gradually grow from there.

Cobz Question- Can non tech guys invest for reward in such DAO, Like me and Donnie ?.

NiMA- Ofcourse.

Cobz commet- To expand the example further, let’s imagine these 5 people want to fund a developer to build a Bot to help moderate Telegram Groups, once the Bot is ready they could offer this bot to different Telegram Groups.

NiMA- That’s really interesting.

We are entering a new realm with @oceanByte ‘s idea.

For profit DAOs.

So far we covered non profit community funding DAOs, but what if a group of people wanted to get a financial return for their investment/contribution.

@oceanByte idea would fit perfectly! All token holders of the DAO (your share in a DAO is represented by normal tokens) would then get a portion of future revenues of that Bot/project without doing any accounting. All happening on chain.

There’s a Data Economy specific concept that is just starting to gain some momentum! *Data DAOs*.

Imagine you guys gave your health data to a DAO whose purpose was processing and monetizing that data in a privacy preserving fashion.

The Data DAO could then use Ocean Protocol to facilitate exchange of data for financial gain (or sometimes for non profit motives) and in return the funds would go the vault and eventually all members of that DAO.

This is also an area where our next generation Data Tokens will help grow massively. Anyone could become member of data DAOs and make money just from their data without doing any work themselves.

The DAO can then tap into a larger funding pool and fund relevant projects that bring value to the open data economy. A huge benefit of this approach is transparency.

Question- How do you see Ocean develop potential integrations, will there be a startup incubator program?.

NiMA- Are you talking about integrations with other blockchain and web 2 projects?.

Re your 2nd point (incubator program), that could be a great use of ecosystem funding resources. We are as you know in the process of selecting a few top projects from our ecosystem (mainly from Data Economy Challenge) to support and help grow.

But incubator programs are not the only way to fund ecosystem projects.

In 2020 we are planning for various activities to support builders and new entrants to our ecosystem. The total funding available this year is 25 Million $OCEAN tokens. We’re committed to doing this in the most transparent and open way.

Question- Are you able to give us anymore information or hints on what’s going on with the EU government and the GAIA-X initiative?.

Sheridan- Ocean has been an active member since late 2019 and has attended regular working group sessions in Berlin. Ocean is one of the few blockchain projects engaged.

Major companies such as Bosch, SAP, Festo, and others have been involved in the project’s conception.

Ocean very much supports the initiative. Currently it is still lead by Germany and France, the plan is to gradually expand to include more EU countries over time. Through our engagement aim is “lead” GAIA-X towards blockchain by promoting the use of standards such as i.e. IPFS, DID, W3C VC.

This way we bring GAIA-X to adopt standards that make the next logical step to adopt blockchain technology to help fuel decentralization which is not always that easy transition for enterprise and government, many of whom are not very blockchain savvy and sometimes also not blockchain friendly.

For now we are providing advice and guiding the conversation, formally and informally on various levels.

As a result various stakeholders have reached out to Ocean directly to begin exploring actual POC within the context of gaia-x and outside the context of gaia-x as well. we are very excited about this!.

Question- Thanks for your update.. What kind of role does ocean have for the Gaia-x, is that like an advice role or more POC with the ocean protocol?.

Sheridan- For now we are providing advice and guiding the conversation, formally and informally on various levels.

As a result various stakeholders have reached out to Ocean directly to begin exploring actual POC within the context of gaia-x and outside the context of gaia-x as well, we are very excited about this.

Question- Could you elaborate on these “next generation Data Tokens”?.

NiMA- Trent published several blog posts re potential designs for Data Tokens.

The basic concept is tokenizing access to data. Right now many non financial assets are tokenized. e.g. CryptoKitties, Art and real estate.

In future we will see data tokenized and financialized just like IP and art assets.

Comment- Ocean was mentioned in Forbes today.

NiMA- This is the result of real hard work by the entire Ocean team and our friends from SingularityNet.

I cannot thank them enough. The past 10 days most of us did not have any sleep or life :) but to see this initiative take off (soon) it’s truly amazing!.

Question- We have been spying on you in the COVID hackathon group, you guys are really working hard on this. Would love to know what’s going on ?.

NiMA- The private groups are active until 2 AM.

I should also thank the real AGI OG Dr. Ben Gortzel who personally supported and lead this effort.

Comment- So many connections made and parties involved.

NiMA- We are onboarding and collaborating with OpenMined which has a community of 8000 data science and AI professionals/devs.

We will support them in any way we can so their privacy preserving AI projects become real apps that save lives.

Question- Will there be any enterprise/governments partaking in this?.

NiMA- At this stage it is a grass roots movement but we have the highest ranking AI teams in the world already committed to collaborate and support.

Robin- The concept of the hackathon is that it is open for tech/community partners to get involved.

We got a good head start with partners but I personally think that there will be many more that come on board after they see results — the FOMO effect.

But most importantly the goal is to create a new community that can move things forward much faster because of all the knowledge and skills than all of them could on their own. A community to last.

NiMA- I think Covidathon is more like an incubator in fact than a hackathon. We should start calling it Incubathon.

Robin- I have never seen that level of cooperation in the tech world before. It is truly amazing.

NiMA- Everyone! Live Yang and prosper … was great chatting here and look forward to seeing you all soon. I will share more updates re Covidathon here in the coming days.

Sheridan- Be well all.