A Wholistic Overview of the Ocean Ecosystem

Past, present, and future 🏗️👪🔥

Summary

This post gives a wholistic overview of the Ocean Protocol ecosystem past, present, and future. It was originally given as a talk and a tweetstorm on Oct 6, 2021 at a Town Hall.

• Here are the slides of the talk (pdf).
• Here’s a video of the talk (starts 1:01:30).
• Here’s the tweetstorm.

The rest of this post is the tweetstorm in a blog-friendly format (unrolled).

Talk Outline

DEEP SHARE | Our co-founder @trentmc0 shared a progress report spanning teams across the Ocean ecosystem
1. OPF core team — roadmap update
2. third-party data markets
3. product contracts teams
4. the 80+ OceanDAO teams

Before we get to the teams, let’s have a high-level overview.

Top-Level Overview

The mission, more resolutely than ever, is:

Open up data, while maintaining privacy (blog.oceanprotocol.com/mission-values…)

The backbone of OCEAN token mechanics is the Web3 Sustainability Loop.

It drives near-term traction and long-term sustainability. (blog.oceanprotocol.com/the-web3-susta…)

For Ocean, the best traction metric that is both actionable and has value creation is data consume volume.

There are many possible ways to drive data consume volume. We group them into three pillars: bottom-up, top-down, and DeFi. Activities span all three pillars.

Teams 1: OPF Core

Let’s review progress of the OPF core team.

The team works on 3 core products:
- Ocean backend + Ocean Market
- OceanDAO
- Ocean Data Farming

The OPF core team’s top-level goals for 2020 included shipping V3 and OceanDAO.

For 2021, they include scaling OceanDAO, and shipping V4 & Data Farming

An OPF core team highlight: Compute-to-Data in Ocean Market.

An OPF core team highlight: fix gas costs, via Polygon.

An OPF core team highlight: Multi-chain assets not siloed, for clean multi-chain UX.

An OPF core highlight: Fine-grained permissions.

An OPF core highlight: C2D Quickstart (ocean.py) (github.com/oceanprotocol/…)

An OPF core highlight: solve rug pulls & reduce impermanent loss.

• We’ve cracked the problem with a novel one-sided staking technique. The pool controls most datatokens, not the publisher.
• We’ve been working on this since before Q2, incl. @tokenspice modeling. It’s in Ocean V4.

An OPF core highlight: Data NFTs.

• ERC721 represents the copyright holder. This enhances flexibility, and enables the Ocean ecosystem to leverage the explosion of ERC721 tools.
• We’ve been working on this since Q2. It’s in Ocean V4.

An OPF core highlight: Data Farming

• Data Farming can only run at scale when rug pulls are solved.
• V4 solves rug pulls.
• Therefore, Data Farming at scale will follow on the heels of V4.

Here’s the updated roadmap for the OPF core team.

• A lot has been completed so far! 🏗️🏗️🏗️
• Of what’s left, the name of the game is V4 and Data Farming.

Teams 2: Third-Party Markets

OPF core team is just one team of many in the growing Ocean ecosystem. Let’s discuss teams doing third-party data markets.

Several Ocean-powered data markets are live in production or as demos. And many more are on the way, like that of publicly-traded Wisekey and other large orgs 🎁.

Teams 3: Product Contracts to OPF

A handful of teams have contracts with OPF to build specific products or add-ons in the Ocean ecosystem. They’re working on federated learning, datatoken-first wallets, Gaia-x work, and curation.

Product team @Raven_Protocol has added many AI/ML algorithms to Ocean Market. They’re now integrating their federated learning / analytics tech into Ocean.

Product team @deltaDAO built an Ocean-powered @gaiax_aisbl Gaia-X demonstrator. Gaia-X is an EU-wide data sharing consortium. Its vision aligns nicely with Ocean’s. Ocean tech & community can help to realize that vision. Try the demo for yourself at (portal.minimal-gaia-x.eu)

Product team @Datarella / @MOBIX_AI built “Deep Parking” demo, guided by @BoschGlobal, using @oceanprotocol and @Fetch_ai tech.

Product team @UTU_trust has built a portal that draws on social signals to help curate data assets. Next up is to integrate it into Ocean Market. “Did my friend Alice consume this dataset?”Try it yourself at (defi-portal.utu.io/ocean)

4. OceanDAO Teams

Last but certainly not least are the 80+ teams via OceanDAO! You can interactively explore them via oceanpearl.io/projects, which is built by the OceanDAO team @oceanpearlio!

OceanDAO team @realdatawhale are focusing on building a datatoken-first wallet.

OceanDAO team RugPullIndex is building a high-quality data ratings system. Think Nielsen for data. Check it out at rugpullindex.com.

OceanDAO team @Evotegra is building high-quality datasets focusing on traffic images.

OceanDAO team @DataunionA building an app and a, well, data union, for image labeling (dataunion.app).

OceanDAO team Project Coral @opscientia is a data DAO around open science. (opsci.io)

OceanDAO team @VantageCrypto is integrating WebSockets streaming data into Ocean, and building an Ocean-powered data market.

OceanDAO team Ocean Ambassadors (@op_ambassadors) is a large community of Ocean enthusiasts doing TG mod, Discord mod, podcasts, tech build-outs, and more.

This is just a slice of @OceanDAO teams. There are many more!

Here are some stats.

Conclusion

It’s great progress across the whole @oceanprotocol ecosystem, from OPF core team to data markets, from product teams to @OceanDAO_ teams! Congrats everyone!! 🎉

Together, we’re unleashing an open data economy. 👪👪

Appendix 1

Here’s the detailed roadmap of OPF core team. It rounds out V4 and Data Farming.

Appendix 2

@OceanDAO_ has grown up so much that it has its own roadmap too! All towards scale, sustainability, and decentralization. Here’s details.