This post outlines the main concepts in the Ocean Protocol design. We flesh out many higher level concepts described in the Ocean whitepaper; and introduces the idea of curation to problem tribes (groups of people solving a specific problem). Also, we lay out the different layers of the protocol stack and discuss some of the major components and capabilities.

Release the Kraken! [credits: Kwinten Crauwels]

Introduction

At the current pace of digitization, we see the emergence of vast, expansive platforms that capture gargantuan amounts of data and efficiently extract intelligence from them. Users are farmed for behavioral data by platforms which maximise for data ownership. They then can steer the user behavior to outcomes that are within their favor. Data is abundant and data acquisition is growing. But the vast majority is locked up in platforms, enterprises and institutions. This leaves little resources and incentives for communities to collaborate on data and intelligence problems that can help build out a more sustainable and equitable future.

In this post we discuss how Ocean Protocol helps building out Public Intelligence Networks. Rent-free and open networks where humans can contribute resources such as data, compute, intellect and opinion to solve problems that humanity faces:

Mapping out the state of our ecological resources and predicting the supply and demand of basic necessities like clean water, energy, food and shelter

Shedding light on and giving voice to suppressed minorities using neutral data feeds without bias or censorship

Early warning systems for disease outbreaks, space exploration and meteorite impact, fake news, digital security attacks, …

Universal recommenders for services, health, media, match making, social media triage, …

The above is a just a sample of interesting fields where we believe Ocean Protocol can contribute.

One of the big questions we ask ourselves is how to incentivize communities, companies, and individuals to nurture raw data into intelligence for the commons? Data wants to be available. Knowledge can be extracted from data and open, incentivized intelligence networks have the potential to solve problems at global scale.

Those tribes that have missions with a context that is most aligned with this ideal are likely to be trail-blazers. Seth Godin’s Tribes gives us many examples, and notes the visceral force behind tribalism:

Tribes are the social equivalent to breathing. Their existence is like an involuntary process that creates social order.… Our value is determined by how we compare to others in the tribe, or by how large a tribe we can create.

Bitcoin taught us how to pool resources in order to secure a network. The infrastructure is tokenized and the network distributes rewards related to the security (amount of hashing power) that is contributed to the overall network. The token quantifies the work/value creation (ie. security, storage and validation) of each miner in the system.

At Ocean Protocol we’re intrigued by how tokenized ecosystems enable:

Fair value capture and attribution across the ecosystem

Incentive designs that promote availability over walled gardens

Public markets that drive down the marginal cost of utilities

The creation of tribes with a clear Schelling point, signalling and governance structures

The next question is, how can we leverage technology, ethics, and community to free data and intelligence from the status quo?

In the next section we discuss the concept of tribes. After that we’ll move into the data service supply chains following up with decentralized data services. Finally we lay out our protocol stack and conclude.

Problem Solving Tribes

Arguably, open source communities give us a taste on how collaborative commons could look. Similarly to enterprises and NGOs they share a mission and a vision. Online communities are very powerful [Social Architecture from Pieter Hintjens is a must read]. At Ocean Protocol we want communities to flourish and solve problems at an unseen scale and pace. We coin ocean communities “Tribes”.