Ocean reveal successful POC with a leading car manufacturer was a success HSV GTS Follow Jan 18 · 7 min read

On January 17 2020 Ocean Protocol revealed that their proof of concept (POC) with a leading car manufacturer was a success.

The success of this POC has initiated deeper engagement with two more lead customers, towards production deployment targeting the first half of 2020 and are also in discussions with many more companies.

When the NDAs are revealed covering these world-leading manufacturers we will see things get crazy for Ocean Protocol in 2020, this is real blockchain adoption on a global scale that will improve the lives of of millions of people.

In 2016, the world produced 16 ZB of data, but only 1% was analyzed — this needs to change

A lack of trust prevents data sharing, centralized data exchanges fail because they lack fair and flexible pricing mechanisms, data providers lose control over their assets, and there is a lack of transparency in how the data is used. So data remains locked up due to a lack of trust.

Use case: Autonomous Vehicles

A leading use case for proprietary data is autonomous (self-driving) vehicles. The RAND Corporation calculated that 500 billion to 1 trillion miles driven are needed to get AI models accurate enough for production deployment of self-driving cars.

Our collaborators at Toyota Research Institute (TRI) saw that it would be prohibitively expensive for each automaker to generate that much data on its own. The answer would be to pool data via marketplaces.

Then the challenge is, a single data marketplace may itself be centralized: we arrive at another data silo. We need a substrate that enables many data marketplaces to emerge. This is the goal of Ocean Protocol. Critical new benefits emerge: higher liquidity for each marketplace and organizations are directly incentivized to pool data rather than silo it.

AI advances six times faster, when data is available

AI models have limited accuracy and usability without appropriate data. Ocean Protocol provides the tools to unlock the remaining 99% of untapped data, connecting them to AI, so we can develop more breakthroughs to help our society, this is a perfect scenario for Autonomous vehicles and pooling data together.

Bringing Data Sharing for Autonomous Vehicles and Insurance via MOBI

While working at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), Chris Ballinger was advocating for data sharing between automakers, ride-sharing apps, logistics companies and autonomous car start-ups so that a base level of reliability for autonomous cars could be reached. They called it the “Trillion Mile Challenge.”

Naturally, when Chris stumbled on a series of blogs from Trent about how AI and blockchain were natural allies, his interest was piqued. We connected and within 8 weeks, developed a prototype called AVDEX, the Autonomous Vehicle Data Exchange built on BigchainDB. The prototype was announced on-stage at Consensus 2017 in New York.

Source: Consensus 2017 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV_ACBqEl-k&feature=youtu.be&t=868

Shortly after, Chris led the charge to set-up a mobility initiative between the MIT Media Lab, Toyota Research Institute and a host of blockchain partners to tackle a broad range of mobility challenges. One year later, MOBI — the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative was announced, including BMW, Ford, GM, Renault and Toyota as founding members.

After 18 months of whirlwind activity, our collaboration with Chris continues strongly. He presented his vision for mobility and autonomous vehicles on-stage at the 9984 Summit in Berlin.

As an advisor to Ocean Protocol, we look forward to Chris’ insight and guidance on how we can further the goals of MOBI by using Ocean Protocol as a secure, data exchange protocol for solving mobility challenges.

Last week, we announced our support of MOBI with a $1 million commitment towards the MOBI Grand Challenge, a DARPA-style initiative to further the research for autonomous vehicles. The MOBI Grand Challenge is an excellent forum to bring the public, government, industry and academia together, while unlocking data and services for problem solvers. Working together, accidents, congestion and environmental impact of mobility can be significantly reduced, while increasing the flow of goods and improving accessibility to everyone.