In 2018 Singapore-based Ocean Protocol Foundation (OPF) commissioned BigchainDB(BDB) to build the world’s first decentralized, open source data exchange protocol to enable direct peer-to-peer sharing of data and AI algorithms. In 2019 BDB released the beta version of Ocean Protocol featuring a decentralized data marketplace, enabling data producers to publish data and buyers to consume data. Subsequent releases provided capabilities for privacy preserving computation, data curation and staking functionalities as well as the creation of third party decentralized data management platforms. The core logic of these products reside in smart contracts on Ethereum and are compatible with multiple other blockchains.
Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol built to unlock data for the new Data Economy. At its core, Ocean Protocol uses blockchain technology to allow for data to be shared and traded in a safe, secure and transparent manner. Its mission is to democratise data while retaining privacy rights. Through an open source approach and fostering an ecosystem for data and related services, Ocean is committed to kick-starting a new Data Economy that touches every single person, company and device in the world, giving control back to data owners, while exposing data for discovery and consumption.
Ocean Protocol is an on-ramp for data services into crypto ecosystems, using datatokens. Each datatoken is a fungible ERC20 token to access a given data service. Ocean smart contracts, Ocean libraries, and Ocean-powered front-ends make it easy to publish data services (deploy and mint datatokens) and consume data services (spend datatokens). Therefore Ocean provides decentralized access control.
Ocean contracts run on Ethereum mainnet. Ethereum composability enables crypto wallets as data wallets, crypto exchanges as data marketplaces, data DAOs as data co-ops, and more. Ocean Market is like a DEX tuned for data. It’s an open-source community marketplace for data that uses Ocean datatokens. Users can publish data, buy/sell data, consume data, and stake on data (curate). Each datatoken can have automatic price discovery via its automated market maker (AMM) pool.
Ocean’s Compute-to-Data feature gives compute access to privately-held data, which never leaves the data owner’s premises. With it, Ocean Market enables the monetization of private data while preserving privacy.