Ocean Product Update || 2021

What We’re Building in 2021, and Why

Published in

Ocean Protocol

11 min readFeb 12, 2021

Summary

This post describes Ocean’s 2021 product roadmap. It reflects our shift from achieving early product-market fit (0 →1), to that of traction (1 →N). The roadmap includes fixing gas costs via multiple chains, fine-grained permissions, solving rug pulls, data NFTs, and Data Farming to incentivize data consumption. There will be continued improvements in the core Ocean developer tools, Ocean Market, and OceanDAO.

Note: this post has been continually updated throughout 2021, as targets get hit and scheduling gets updated.

Outline

The rest of this post is organized as follows. We describe Ocean’s maturation from targeting product-market fit (0→1) towards traction (1→N). We then describe how we think about traction, then drill down in further and further detail from key performance indicators, to traction hypotheses, and finally to the 2021 product roadmap by quarter. Let’s get started!

From 0→ 1 (The Past)

From Ocean’s inception until the end of 2020, the focus for Ocean was getting product-market fit (“0 → 1”) around unlocking data [1]. In early 2020, we published our 2020 roadmap, and by the end of 2020 we had met it.

Let’s review the major items. In fall 2020, we released Ocean V3. It was a huge release for us. It included two products to publish / buy / consume / stake on datasets and data services:

Ocean Market webapp — for data publishers, consumers, and stakers
Ocean developer tools — core software libraries & contracts for developers to integrate with other apps or build wholly new apps

In Dec 2020, we released:

OceanDAO — a community-curated grants DAO for growth & long-term sustainability.

The reception to all three products has been enthusiastic. There are tens of teams building on Ocean core software, Ocean Market has hundreds of datasets with more than €5M TVL [2], and OceanDAO has a steady cadence of monthly funding cycles to teams which promise positive value. There’s also steady chat in Telegram and Discord channels surrounding all three products, and a vibrant weekly videochat town hall.

The most important outcome was: we had a live, and lively, decentralized data marketplace. This was only possible because we were able to extensively leverage Web3 infrastructure for data markets. Each dataset is an ERC20 token (datatoken). MetaMask became a data wallet, for data custody and data management. Balancer became a data DEX. People staked on data AMM pools, to curate. The perennial question “how do you price data?” got answered definitively: the market prices the data.

To 1→ N (The Future)

The focus for Ocean from 2021 onwards is traction (“1→ N”). $OCEAN is engineered to grow as traction grows. 2021 is the “year of scaling”. And so is 2022, and 2023, and 2024. You get the idea!

We’ve already started on the traction path, by having rapid iterations with users, to get feedback and translate that into improvements in each of the products (and all the planning, design, and construction that happens in between). For example, Ocean Market has seen remarkable evolution in just the few months it’s been live, due to these rapid cycles — from bug fixes to handling fraudulent actors to better-aligning incentives of publishers with stakers.

Here’s our traction strategy, inspired by the book Traction: Have target key performance indicators (KPIs), have hypotheses to grow them, try the most promising ones, and double down on the best. Repeat the cycle when there are diminishing returns.

Our main KPI is data consume volume, expressed in $ or OCEAN. It’s defined as consume volume = (# times a data asset was consumed in a time interval) * (price of that data asset, in OCEAN). Another possible KPI was $OCEAN, however its speculative component makes it less actionable.

Traction Pillars

There are many hypothesis to drive the KPI of consume volume. We group them in three pillars: (I) Bottom-up, (II) Top-down, and (III) DeFi.

I. Bottom-up: Ocean Market users, developers, startups. Main activities:

Drive growth of Ocean Market. Improve user experience (UX), including reducing gas costs. Help data publishers & consumers make money.
Help people build with Ocean libraries. Improve developer experience (DX). Be easy to integrate in AI flows, via simple python interface.
Fund teams for building, outreach, and unlocking data via OceanDAO.
Integrations. Deploy on more chains: Eth mainnet→ many (details here), integrate to more crypto protocols & apps.

II. Top-down: enterprises, governments. Main activities:

Business development and services support, POCs that lead to live deployments. Work with consortia like Gaia-X.
Service partners. Using more service partners to support enterprise and product activities, to offload reliance on a single core team.

III. DeFi. Main activities:

Work closely with DeFi projects. For each, get OCEAN as a first-class citizen, then follow up with datatokens. Conduct many experiments, from stablecoins to insurance, and double-down on what works best.
Data Farming. Like liquidity mining but focuses on data consume volume. Details here.

These pillars complement each other. All three have real-world use cases. All three involve users that have data, and want data. Bottom-up has rapid feedback loops, and exponential growth. Top-down has larger numbers with brand names, but higher latency. The DeFi vertical has the best of both:)

2021 Ocean Product Roadmap, by Quarter

We see that Data Farming will greatly help to fill the network and drive traction. To get there, pre-requisites are: fix gas costs, solve rug pulls, and mitigate impermanent loss. It’s high effort but high payoff, and therefore require planning and steadfast execution over time. This complements other key features like C2D and fine-grained permissioning.

Below are our 2021 plans, organized quarterly. We update them periodically throughout 2021 as we learn more, in the rapidly evolving crypto environment. The plans focus on Ocean products; dovetailing this there are extensive activities in ecosystem, enterprise, and communications towards the 2021 traction goals.

Q1/2021 Targets

These are targeted by Q1/2021 end. The highlights are fixing gas costs (Polygon), and Compute-to-Data in Ocean Market. The ✅ indicates done.

✅ Compute-to-Data in Ocean Market. Enable buying & selling of private data from Ocean Market webapp itself. [Outcome details]
✅ Better dev onboarding. Reduce friction for ocean.py and ocean.js quickstarts.
✅ Fix gas costs: Polygon. Gas costs on Ethereum mainnet have become exceedingly high and may not abate. We are addressing this by deploying Ocean contracts and running Ocean Market on >1 chains. Moonbeam and other chains are in the works. Each chain will include an OCEAN bridge to Ethereum mainnet. At least one will be ready by end of Q1. [Outcome details]
✅ Ocean Market: fewer bugs, faster. This includes continued bug fixes, use TheGraph for Total Value Locked (TVL), and more.
✅ Gaia-X etc. Help to advance Gaia-X consortium for European data infrastructure, and related ecosystem entities.
✅ OceanDAO: streamline flow to reduce friction for people creating proposals and voting. Grow the amount of funding, while ensuring quality projects.
✅ Toggle pricing. Make it easy for 3rd party markets that use Ocean Market code to turn on & off AMMs, fixed-price, free, etc.
✅ Ecosystem, enterprise and communications activities that dovetail the products.

Q2/2021 Targets

These are targeted by Q2/2021 end. The highlights are fine-grained permissioning and making assets not siloed across chains. The ✅ indicates done.

✅ Start V4 work. Initiate work on Ocean V4. Its key features: solve rug pulls & mitigate IL, data NFTs, and better community monetization. By end of this quarter, complete alpha smart contracts.
✅ Refine C2D. Build off previous Compute-to-Data work to stabilize further and add features based on learnings.
✅ Fine-grained permissioning (in 3rd party Markets). This includes option to encrypt metadata, and fine-grained permissions via RBAC (Role-Based Access Control). With this, marketplaces can control which actors can publish assets in that marketplace instance, view assets, and consume data assets. This is for 3rd party markets; Ocean Market will remain as open-ended as possible. [Outcome details]
✅ Multi-chain assets not siloed by enabling Ocean Market users to see data assets across >1 chains at once. [Outcome details]
✅ Pricing: free. Better support “free” pricing flow for use cases in enterprise data sharing, and open data.
✅ Gaia-X etc. Help to advance Gaia-X and related ecosystem.
✅ OceanDAO, Ecosystem activities: continue growing and improving. [Outcome: OceanDAO mid-2021 roadmap progress]

Q3/2021 Targets

We aim to complete the following by the end of Q3/2021. The ✅ indicates done.

✅ Continue V4 work. Continue work on Ocean V4. By end of this quarter, complete beta smart contracts.
✅ Start Data Farming (DF) work. Do detailed planning around DF. Write DF scripts, and documentation. Recall that DF can only run scale when rug pulls and IL are better addressed (Ocean V4).
✅ Refine C2D iteratively based on learnings. This includes publishing a large set of scikit-learn algorithms via Ocean Market, and an ocean.py quickstart on C2D showing how to remotely build an ML model. [Outcome details]
✅ Refine fine-grained permissions iteratively based on learnings.
✅ Binance Smart Chain. Deploy to BSC, to help drive traction. [Outcome details]
✅ Moonriver. Deploy to Moonriver network, to help drive traction. [Outcome details]
✅ Gaia-X etc. Help to advance Gaia-X and related ecosystem.
✅ OceanDAO, Ecosystem activities: continue growing and improving. [Outcome: OceanDAO late-2021 roadmap progress]

Q4/2021 Targets

We aim to complete the following by the end of Q4/2021. WIP = Work In Progress.

✅ EWC. Deploy to Energy Web Chain to help drive traction. [Outcome details]
✅ Continue V4 work. Continue work on Ocean V4: security audits for smart contracts, and update Ocean Market and js/py drivers. By end of this quarter, be ready to launch early in the new year.
✅ Continue DF work.
✅ OceanDAO, Ecosystem activities: continue growing and improving.
✅ Gaia-X etc. Help to advance Gaia-X and related ecosystem.

Q1/2022 Targets

Yes we know this is 2022, not 2021! But this quarter is the culmination of a ton of work from 2021, namely V4. Some other things by collaborators got moved from Q4/2021 to Q1/2022.

V4: Solve rug pulls, mitigate impermanent loss. We introduce two new mechanics: (a) a one-sided staking bot inside a datatoken’s pool, which oversees the issuance of that datatoken; and (b) publishers get a small % of datatokens vested over time. It has several benefits. First, it greatly reduces risk of rug pull by publisher. Second, its design keep the price constant when people stake and unstake OCEAN in a pool, in turn reducing impermanent loss issues. Overall, it better aligns the incentives of publishers, consumers, and liquidity providers / stakers / curators. More details to come:)
V4: Data NFTs (part of V4). We NFT-ize base IP to enable transfer of the base IP itself, to support >1 revenue streams on the base IP, to accumulate value to the base IP before monetization, and to leverage the recent growth of tooling in the NFT ecosystem. ERC20 datatokens remain as before: licenses to use the base IP.
V4: Help community monetize. Now, 3rd party marketplaces can earn fees on from swapping, staking, and consuming, and have more control over fee rates. It updates ocean contracts, ocean.js, and ocean.py, and will have a security audit. V4 also includes architecture for >1 datatoken type, for more flexible fees, pay-as-you-go C2D, and more.
Federated Analytics & Learning. Enable doing analytics and AI model-building across multiple data silos at once while remaining decentralized. Integrated as part of Ocean Compute-to-Data. Via Raven Protocol (collaborating with Ocean core team).
OCEAN-backed stable asset (H2O). Solve for both (a) reduce volatility of dataset prices in Ocean Market (b) staking demand in Ocean Market pools drives OCEAN demand. A solution is a non-pegged stable asset. Via New Order (collaborating with Ocean core team and Reflexer Labs).

On the heels of these, we aim to launch:

Data Farming. As soon as possible after Ocean V4, we will launch Data Farming to incentivize data consume volume and “fill the Ocean”. It will proceed in phases to test the tech end-to-end, test incentives end-to-end, and then go to scale over the long term. We’ll release more details as we approach release.
H2O in Ocean Market. Uses OCEAN-backed non-pegged stable asset to remove the price volatility of data assets caused by OCEAN price fluctuations.

Conclusion

Up until the end of 2020, our goal was to get initial product-market fit for Ocean (0→1). Now that we have a foothold on that, our focus going forward is traction (1→N). This article presented the KPIs, emphasizing data consume volume. It discussed the 3 traction pillars: bottom-up, top-down and DeFi. A key goal is Data Farming, which incentivizes for data consume volume. Working backwards we address gas costs, rug pulls and impermanent loss. Along the way we add critical features like C2D in Ocean Market and fine-grained permissioning.

Appendix: Roadmap with Dependencies

The following image illustrates the roadmap presented above, but adding dependency information. It highlights critical paths, and groups streams of work by color.

Notes

[1] “0 to 1” is a concept popularized by Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

[2] For an up-to-date value of Total Value Locked, please refer to the stats at the bottom of https://market.oceanprotocol.com/.

Updates

Tweaks during Q1:

Added “Roadmap with Dependencies” section
Removed “Ratings & Comments” feature. Not a priority for 2021.

Early Q2 update:

Summary: more “flexibility” work in Q2 to ease building the rest, and swap permissions with data farming

Added “Better dev onboarding” to Q1 (new)
Pulled “Fine-Grained Permissions” forward to Q2, from Q3
Added “Data NFT” and “Help Community Monetize” as part of V4

Mid Q3 update:

Summary: solve rug pulls sooner, to launch DF sooner

Added “solve rug pulls & mitigate IL” as part of V4
Moved back “OCEAN-backed stable asset” and “Stable asset in Ocean Market” to focus on V4 / DF
Added “Binance Smart Chain” to Q3
Replaced generic “data services” with “IDS Connector”
Added “Federated Learning” to Q4
Removed “Market: trustless & convenient urls” feature. Not a priority for 2021.