OCEAN PROTOCOL TOKEN UTILITY

Since I invested in Ocean Protocol I have seen numerous people enter the official and unofficial Telegram groups asking about token utility.

Obviously some people are finding this information challenging to locate and not looking in the correct areas, as an enthusiastic community member the last thing I would want to see is someone enter and leave our community because they were unable to locate information that should be easily accessible.

Although many in the community can find this information easily there are people that are not that gifted with computers or rarely use them, I have three friends who fall into this category who find it very difficult to search for information, what seems reasonably straight forward to many may not be the case for others for numerous reasons, eg for all we know the individual may have a learning disability and obviously does not want to disclose that to the community for valid reasons, ofcourse there will always be those with ulterior motives as well.

Hopefully this article will answer questions on token utility that many people wish answered but have been unable to find the information easily.

About Ocean Protocol

Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol to unlock data for AI. Through blockchain technology, smart contracts, and tokens, Ocean Protocol connects data providers and consumers, allowing data to be shared while guaranteeing traceability, transparency, and trust for all stakeholders involved. It allows data owners to give value to and have control over their data assets without 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.

Visit https://oceanprotocol.com/ to find out more.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/oceanprotocol

Medium: https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/

Ocean Token

Think of the Ocean Token as the ‘crypto asset’ that serves as the commodity in the data economy to incentivise the mass coordination of resources to secure and scale the network to turn in to actionable intelligence.

If Ocean is about trading data, can’t it use an existing cryptocurrency as its token, like Bitcoin or Ether?

While existing tokens might serve as a means of exchange, the Ocean protocol requires a token of its own because it uses a specific form of monetary policy and rewards. Users get rewarded with newly minted tokens for providing high quality, relevant data and keeping it available. This means the protocol requires control over the money supply and rules out using any existing general purpose protocols or tokens. Furthermore, from the perspective of Ocean users, volatility in an uncorrelated token would disrupt the orderly value exchange between various stakeholders in the marketplace they desire.

Ocean Data Providers (Supplying Data)

Actors who have data and want to monetise it, can make it available through Ocean for a price. When their data is used by Data Consumers, Data Providers receive tokens in return.

Ocean Data Curators (Quality Control)

An interesting concept to Ocean is the application of curation markets. Someone needs to decide what data on Ocean is good and which data is bad. As Ocean is a decentralised system, there can’t be a central committee to do this. Instead, anyone with domain expertise can participate as a Data Curator and earn newly minted tokens by separating the wheat from the chaff. Data Curators put an amount of tokens at stake to signal that a certain dataset is of high quality. Every time they correctly do this, they receive newly minted tokens in return.

Ocean Registry of Actors (Keeping Bad Actors Out)

Because Ocean is an open protocol, not only does it need mechanisms to curate data, it needs a mechanism to curate the participants themselves. For this reason a Registry of Actors is part of Ocean, again applying staking of tokens to make good behaviour more economically attractive than bad behaviour.

Ocean Keepers (Making Data Available)

The nodes in the Ocean network are called Keepers. They run the Ocean software and make datasets available to the network. Keepers receive newly minted tokens to perform their function. Data Providers need to use one or more Keepers to offer data to the network.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

Ocean is building a platform to enable a ‘global data commons’, a platform where anyone can share and be rewarded for the data they contribute where the token and protocol is designed specifically to incentivise data sharing and remuneration.

A quick overview of the above and more

Ocean is a decentralized data exchange protocol.

Ocean have taken pieces from ascribe to treat data like intellectual property that can be licensed and sold.

Ocean have taken the privacy mechanisms from BigchainDB to give users full control over their data.

Ocean took the models of governance and managing a network from IPDB and took from DEX the marketplace framework.

The network and protocol will be powered with a native token just like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Filecoin.

The Ocean token is used as the means of exchange within the network.

Providers earn Ocean when their data is sold.

Consumers use Ocean to buy data.

Curators earn Ocean for maintaining valuable public data.

Developers earn Ocean for building the marketplaces that bring communities together.

Keepers earn Ocean for providing network services.

Ocean wants a thousand marketplaces to blossom, how ?

Provide a substrate to power the data marketplace and alongside that a global data commons, Ocean is that substrate.

Ocean believes that everyone should be able to thrive in the data economy by unlocking the trillions in latent value and bringing to bear the power of data and AI thus enabling us to initiate change that benefits all humankind, this is why the team are building Ocean Protocol.