It’s been awhile since a holistic update has been released, so I want to update our fellow sailors before the dog-days. This blog post recaps where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going.

May our jib draw long and hard on the good ship Ocean as we prepare to set sail for uncharted waters…

Photo by Anton Scherbakov on Unsplash

In Our Wake

We kicked the year off in spectacular fashion…the whitepapers were released, the pre-launch whitelisting was completed, and a successful pre-launch token distribution was run.

We’d again like to thank everyone that has taken an interest in our project thus far, from the acquirers in the pre-launch to the official partners already on-board to the community developers that are contributing to the development of the ecosystem to the channel contributors that keep the fire burning. Without your support we would not be where we are today.

And where we are today is quite a ways from where we started 6 months ago. At last count, across BigchainDB and DEX we’ve added 18 people working on Ocean in the last 6 months, bootstrapped from the ground up. For anyone that’s done recruitment in the past, you know what an arduous journey this can be, and what a significant achievement this is. The team now brings together a perfect blend of technical and growth expertise. But we don’t plan to stop here…it’s our mission to continue to attract the best and the brightest to the cause.

From a technical standpoint, we’ve made a number of refinements as well. At the core, Ocean Protocol has always been aimed at addressing a data and service availability issue. What has become clearer over time, however, is the imperative of focusing on the Commons. The commoditization of data and services has begun, but in most cases, lacks optimization. This optimization is organic, and Ocean Protocol can help accelerate the process.

Where the true test lies is in making freely available assets go viral. This means optimizing for the Commons. It also means defaulting to OPEN.

Open Commons Everywhere. This is our focus. If we can prove that “free” is “profitable”, then WE (all of us) win.