Taking data to a new level with Ocean
Ocean Protocol is introducing Ocean Market, a platform for buying and selling access to data. Building the amazon.com of data means keeping mainstream users in mind, which is why the Ocean team decided to build with Portis. In this article, Manan Patel, Growth Accelerator for Ocean, shares their vision with us.
Jose Aguinaga is a Developer Evangelist representing Portis. Portis is a self-custodial, embedded blockchain wallet. Portis delivers top developer experience to DApp developers, giving their users a friendly onboarding experience.
Jose: Hi Manan, thank you for this brief interview about Ocean Protocol. Let’s get started with some introductions. Could you provide us a quick intro about yourself and Ocean?
Manan: Hi Jose, happy to do so. I’m Manan Patel, Growth Accelerator at Ocean Protocol. I’ve been working at Ocean for a few years now, and I’m currently in charge of increasing the engagement of our protocol. More often than not, this means work with potential partners to determine the best-fitting collaboration and to help with product demos. In short, Ocean by itself is a layer 2 protocol that allows secure data monetization and data exchange between data providers and data consumers. Our biggest implementation of the protocol, Ocean Market, provides the means for our different users to publish, discover, and consume data assets.
Jose: I see — so, is Ocean Market an online store for data?
Manan: To be more precise, it’s a platform for buying and selling access to the data. Ocean focuses heavily on preserving the privacy of the data, so the data that is being granted access never leaves the premises of compute providers.
Jose: How so? How can users get access to the data, and know which data they are purchasing without downloading it?
Manan: Think of Ocean Market as an Amazon.com of data. We provide ways for users to upload the metadata of the data itself, without having to include the data. For example, data providers can describe format data, data points, images, samples, and pricing. Talking about the pricing, to access this data, Ocean provides data providers with the ability to create dynamic pricing of data using our datatokens and AMM pools. Datatokens are compatible with ERC20 tokens standards. They represent the right to access the underlying datasets (for non-private data) or compute services (for private data).
Jose: Interesting. Can you expand a bit further on the last point? How can users create value on datatokens, and how is this data priced?
Manan: By all means. By tokenizing data sets, data providers create datatokens that can be priced either fixed or dynamically. On fixed pricing, the datatoken is given a fixed price in the form of OCEAN tokens upon creation of the data set. However, on dynamic pricing, Ocean creates a Balancer pool by mapping the datatoken with OCEAN token as a pair. The initial liquidity provided by the data provider in that pool determines the initial price of the datatokens. The price of datatokens fluctuates based on supply-and-demand dynamics of data sets, which is determined by the stakers staking their OCEAN tokens on that dataset, based on data demand — e.g. Healthcare and Fintech data might be more valuable than Agritech data. This way data providers can let the market determine the price of their data sets, based on the market demand. Using dynamic pricing, data providers also acquire a staker community for their data sets, which later on can spread the word about their data sets and their value for bigger exposure to a potential consumer base.
Jose: Introducing data pools as part of price discovery on data sets sounds like a great idea, but expensive in terms of gas. How are you tackling these considerations?
Manan: Good question. We recently integrated Polygon, formerly known as Matic, into our application, which heavily reduces the economical value and cost of these transactions. We have ported most of our infrastructure to not only support Ocean Market but also the developer resources needed to engage with the Protocol using Polygon. Using a bridge, we can map OCEAN tokens into mOCEAN tokens to engage in data publishing and consumption there.
Jose: Great! Portis also provides support for Polygon, which reminds me: where have you integrated Portis within Ocean?
Manan: Portis is now one of the supported wallets within the Ocean Market. Now, whenever users “Connect to Wallet” as part of their publishing or consumption process of datatokens, they are given the option to select Portis. In the past, we had only provided access to the store via Metamask, as we wanted to make sure users are the only owners of their data access.
Jose: That’s indeed quite important. Portis has put extensive effort to give our users the driving wheel in their digital life. We recently published how Portis is different from other custodial and non-custodial solutions. What are other benefits of using Portis in Ocean Market?
Manan: Well, the UX is superb. Ocean Market wants to make sure that any user can tokenize their data, and more often than not, the entry barrier for crypto is the onboarding experience.
Portis has given our users a very familiar paradigm since everybody knows what an email and a password are. It makes our users feel secure about the way they engage with Ocean.
Jose: That’s good to know. Portis never holds the private keys of the users. In a recent article about our self-custodial architecture, we explained our whitepaper and security model. We care not only about the convenience of the wallet, but also the trust of our users.
Manan: Neat! We couldn’t be happier to have included Portis, and it would be great to see further integrations with our ecosystem and perhaps add the ability to list our datatokens pricing directly in the Portis wallet.
Jose: Definitely. The Portis development team is currently working on enhancing the SDK that allows the integration of the Portis wallet. Our hellonext page would be the best starting point for requesting these features. Anything else? What would be the next steps for Ocean, and what would be the best ways to learn about Ocean?
Manan: We have a lot of things prepared for 2021. From adding integrations to IP-based transfers using NFTs, to engaging and growing the OceanDAO. Our roadmap was published earlier this year, and you can find more information there. We are also available on Telegram, Twitter, and Discord.
Ocean Market is another Portis consumer we are very happy to have within our ranks. Read our documentation about how to integrate your DApp with Portis, and let us know about your experience on our Twitter.
