Ocean on Coronavirus

Our plans to take action

Ocean Protocol Team
Ocean Protocol

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We’re acutely aware of COVID-19 and how it’s been developing across the globe. As a team of developers, seasoned entrepreneurs and technologists, we’re in a privileged position where we can leverage our networks and extended community to make an impact, however big or small it may be. Over the last few years, we’ve experienced the power of community and if there was any time for collaboration, now is that time.

We are exploring different directions relating to the pandemic and alleviation efforts in the next few weeks and will provide regular updates.

#COVIDathon

At present time, we’re teaming up with SingularityNET for #COVIDathon, the world’s first decentralized AI hackathon to help the medical community find solutions for COVID-19. Powered by DAIA, the hackathon brings together experts and principles from medicine, AI, and blockchain to reduce the risk of current and future infectious outbreaks and to cope with COVID-19. For more information, please visit daia.foundation/covidathon/.

Our view/perspective on COVID-19

The coronavirus has turned into a pandemic and upended the status quo. Countries have closed borders and instituted emergency measures that will severely impact the global economy.

In light of coronavirus, we’ve taken actions to bound the downside such as encouraging hand washing, limiting social contact, and working from home. Once we felt that the team was safe and prepared, we did some coronavirus-related modeling and then we asked, “Can we do more?” We’ve been racking our brains to find ways to help and leverage the unique capabilities that we’re building.

We think that Ocean’s privacy-preserving data sharing can help researchers to share data, while protecting patient privacy.

Let’s elaborate. China, Taiwan, South Korea, and others used data to identify at-risk persons and effectively stop the spread of coronavirus. For example, China geo-tracked everyone’s phone. Taiwan and South Korea were less invasive to privacy, but still implemented measures that would be concerning for Europe and North America. Nonetheless, in the near term, people are willing to give up privacy for a big boost to safety. That’s ok. However, over the longer term, compromising privacy is dangerous. For democracies to function, citizens need the ability to gather in private, organize protests, and speak out freely. This is only possible with privacy. The “Pandemic Triangle” post elaborates further.

Coronavirus has relevant second-order effects. First, it’s driving the rise of working from home. Second, being at home more will increase the perceived value of bits over atoms further. The digital economy will grow relative to the physical economy. These factors will make secure data sharing more important than ever.

Ocean Protocol can help with privacy-preserving data sharing and exchange, to help combat the spread of coronavirus (first-order effect) and to help with secure at-home data sharing (second-order effect).

Ocean’s technology is new and not usable at scale yet. But we are working to improve it to live up to its promise of privacy-preserving data sharing at scale. This could make a big difference to stopping coronavirus (and future contagions) beyond the short term.

There’s something else that we can do now. We can work with our community to build & deploy applications that can help against coronavirus (without any prerequisite of using Ocean per se).

At Ocean Protocol, we’re aiming for both things, and have updated our plans accordingly.

Follow Ocean Protocol on Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, GitHub & Newsletter for project updates and announcements. And chat directly with other developers on Gitter.

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