Ocean Protocol Update || 2024

Accelerate Predictoor, C2D Springboard, Ocean Enterprise

## Contents
1. Introduction
2. Goal: Accelerate Ocean Predictoor
   - Background
   - Plans 2024
3. Goal: Launch C2D Springboard
   - Background
   - Plans 2024
4. Goal: Roll Out Ocean Enterprise
5. Ongoing 
   - Data Challenges
   - Data Farming
   - Ecosystem support
6. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Ocean Protocol was founded to level the playing field for AI and data. In previous years, the Ocean core team built a core tech stack with broad applicability in AI x crypto. In 2023, we tested hypotheses towards growing traction. From that, the three brightest spots are Ocean Predictoor, Ocean Compute-to-Data (C2D), and Ocean Enterprise. For 2024, we focus on these.

The rest of this article is organized as follows. Sections 2, 3, and 4 elaborate on goals for Predictoor, C2D, and Ocean Enterprise respectively. Section 5 covers ongoing work: Data Challenges, Data Farming, and ecosystem support. Section 6 concludes.

2. Goal: Accelerate Ocean Predictoor

2.1 Predictoor Background

In Ocean Predictoor, people run AI-powered prediction bots or trading bots on crypto price feeds to earn $. The “earn $” part is key, because it fosters usage.

Predictoor involves two groups of people:

• Predictoors: data scientists who use AI models to predict what the price of ETH, BTC, etc will be 5 (or 60) minutes into the future. The scientists run bots that submit these predictions onto the chain every 5 minutes. Predictoors earn $ based on sales of the feeds, including sales from Ocean’s Data Farming incentives program.
• Traders: run bots that input predictoors’ aggregated predictions, to use as alpha in trading. It’s another edge for making $ while trading.

Predictoor is built using the Ocean stack. And, it runs on Oasis Sapphire; we’ve partnered with the Oasis team.

Predictoor Traction. Predictoor has highly promising traction: starting from zero volume on mainnet launch in October 2023, volume has grown to > $15M / day. [Source: DappRadar].

Predictoor is rocking! So we’re doubling down on it in 2024.

2.2 Predictoor Plans 2024

With this context in mind, here are Predictoor goals for 2024. We’ll work to get users making serious $, then we’ll scale up.

Goal 1: Users making serious $. Right now, Predictoor’s growth is based on predictoors making good $. We want both predictoors and traders making serious $. So, the key trick is for traders to make serious $; then they’ll spend $ to buy feeds; which leads to serious $ for predictoors. We’re doing this by dog-fooding: working to make serious $ trading with Predictoor feeds. Everything else follows.

Here are the sub-steps of goal 1:

• 1.1 Make $ trading: internal. Conduct experiments iteratively until we make $ trading in some combination of {trading venue & pair, prediction strategy, trading strategy, other}. Results are highly promising, and getting better weekly. Simultaneously, build a first-class data pipeline and analytics dapp, to better answer the question “how much $ am I making” and drill-down questions. The dapp will start with predictoor bots, then expand to trading bots.
• 1.2 Make $ trading: external. Update Predictoor product so that community can follow the make $ strategy from (1). Eg add feeds, change prediction bot, change trading bot. If needed, have new smart contracts. Continually improve data pipeline and analytics dapp.
• 1.3 Make more $ predicting: external. Each feed is currently priced 1 OCEAN/day, which under-values the feed compared to $ being made by traders, and therefore means lost $ opportunity for predictoors. A better pricing approach will address this. We will explore possible approaches (e.g. auctions), and roll out the best one in the Predictoor product.

At this point, the Predictoor product architecture enables predictoors and traders to make serious $ on any given feed, or combination of feeds.

Goal 2: Scale up. Here are sub-steps:

• 2.1 Reduce trading friction via TG bots & more. Coming into this step, both predictoors and traders onboard via READMEs to run Python bots. For predictoors this is generally fine, since they need to change code to improve modeling or trading strategies if they want an edge. However for traders, we can make it easier to run bots with “good default” strategies. This in turn increases sales volume. Therefore the goal of this step is to make it easier for traders to run bots. A key strategy will be to leverage Telegram (TG) bots.
• 2.2 Grow # feeds in DeFi. Once predictoors and traders are making serious $, we will significantly expand the number of feeds within DeFi: more tokens, more exchanges, more time scales, signals beyond just close price, and more. E.g. from 20 to 20,000 feeds. This will increase the $ made by traders and by predictoors.
• 2.3 Grow to new verticals. As that starts to hit diminishing returns, we will expand beyond DeFi: weather, climate, energy, real estate, logistics, agriculture, food prices, gas prices, and more. One possible starting point is prediction weather prediction for a couple cities; then expand city by city; then to every square km on earth.

Goal 1 is for “0→1” to get product-market fit, and goal 2 “1→n” for scale-up.

Stretch goal: world model on ground-truth physics. We’ll train a single AI model across all feeds. This model will continually ingest the physics of the world to predict its next state. Truly a *world model*. We’ll also give it all the training data that current LLMs take. The net result: a model with vastly more data than current LLMs, and ground-truth physics in all that additional data. Prediction is intelligence. This is Predictoor’s endgame.

It’s a big vision! Goals 1 and 2 alone will occupy us for all of 2024 and much of 2025. The stretch goal will follow.

3. Goal: Launch C2D Springboard

3.1 Core Stack Background

At the core of the Ocean tech stack are datatokens and Compute-to-Data (C2D). Datatokens enables token-gating of AI models, predictions, and more. They enable data wallets, data exchanges, and data DAOs. C2D is pragmatic and useful privacy approach, complementary to other privacy approaches.

C2D Details. Let’s drill into C2D further.

• Why C2D. Private data is valuable: using private data can improve research and business outcomes. But concerns over privacy and control make it hard to access.
• What is C2D. Compute-to-Data (C2D) grants access to run compute against the data, on the same premises of the data. Only the results are visible to the consumer. The data never leaves the premises. Decentralized blockchain technology does the handshaking.
• C2D Benefits. Ocean C2D enables people to sell private data while preserving privacy, as an opportunity for companies to monetize their data assets. C2D can also be used for data sharing in science or technology contexts, with lower liability risk, because the data doesn’t move.

Left: C2D Conceptual Flow. Right: C2D2!

Internal discussions. In Ocean core team, we’ve long understood the unique selling points of C2D. It’s why we built it in the first place, way back in 2019! Over the years, we’ve had continuous interest in using it, such as our collaboration with Acentrik (a part of Daimler). However, we saw that we hadn’t fully leveraged its potential, as we’d invested our time on other features.

Besides C2D, we’ve see many friction points in using the stack.

Community feedback. Over the past several months, we interviewed community members for feedback, especially to gain insights on how to best enhance the core stack. Some feedback has already translated to completed actions such as improving Ocean docs. The two main themes from the community were: (a) clear demand to make C2D great, and (b) developer experience is still high friction.

3.2 C2D & Core Stack Plans 2024

The community feedback was consistent with our own discussions, and helped us to confirm what mattered. This in turn informs our plans for 2024. Thus, here are C2D / tech stack goals for 2024, culminating in a C2D springboard.

Goal 1. Unified backend. From community feedback we learned that deploying and maintaining the various Ocean components (Aquarius, Provider, Subgraph, C2D) is too complex. In 2024, we will simplify this process by merging all of them into a single, more manageable component. This upgrade means easier installation with just one command and a user-friendly admin dashboard, set for release in Q2 of 2024.

Goal 2. C2D.2. The current C2D, while powerful, has friction in creating and deploying algorithms. So we’re integrating C2D into the newly-unified backend to simplify its use. This means straightforward installation and maintenance, along with easier ways for users to write and deploy algorithms and ML models. This update will be launched in Q3 of 2024.

Goal 3. Build a “C2D springboard” to further empower our Ocean community. This platform will make it easy to showcase the capabilities of your AI algorithms for specific use cases, reminiscent of Ocean Market, but heavily tuned to C2D workflows. The product is set to launch in Q4 of 2024.

As we roll out these updates, we’ll continue to leverage Ocean’s Data Challenges to catalyze development of AI algorithms for each.

4. Goal: Roll Out Ocean Enterprise

Ever since the release of Ocean v4 (spring 2022), there has been growing interest in the businesses community about Ocean’s capabilities, especially Data NFTs, datatokens and Compute-to-Data (C2D).

Traditional businesses operate in highly regulated environments, where strict compliance to industry regulation such as GDPR, EU Data Act, and MiCA have a major impact on operations and product development. Ensuring compliance can hinder innovative solutions from going into production.

Starting this year, a new endeavor called Ocean Enterprise will launch. It will help businesses take Ocean-powered solutions into production. Ocean Enterprise comprises both a group of collaborators and a tech stack.

• The collaborators are a diverse group of organizations spanning eight countries and seven industries. This group has already established the Ocean Enterprise Collective to gather requirements, design and develop a tech stack
• The tech stack is an enterprise-ready, compliant version of Ocean. It will be based on the existing Ocean stack. It will incorporate additional new enterprise-specific features to allow businesses to securely collaborate, share and monetise their data in a fully compliant manner. The first release will be later this year.

Work on the new Ocean Enterprise version began quietly several months ago. Stay tuned: more details will be announced in the following months 👀.

5. Ongoing

In addition to the core initiatives above, we will continue with ongoing efforts in Data Challenges, Data Farming, and ecosystem support. This section elaborates.

5.1 Data Challenges

Ocean Data Challenges are competitions for data scientists to build predictive models, do analytics, or otherwise.

We’ve been running them since 2022. We will continue them in 2024, though as mentioned above, now tuned towards C2D.

5.2 Data Farming (DF)

DF is Ocean’s incentives program. Typical APYs are 5–20%.

DF currently emits 150,000 OCEAN weekly rewards. As the schedule outlines, rewards will double to 300,000 OCEAN weekly in mid-March 2024, and double again to 600,000 OCEAN weekly in mid-September 2004.

• 50% of weekly DF rewards are for Passive DF, i.e. locking OCEAN.
• The other 50% for Active DF, where users have to engage more actively for rewards, such as running prediction bots.

As with previous years, for 2024, Passive DF will remain unchanged, and the specific activities within Active DF may evolve.

5.3 Ecosystem support

Ocean has a lively ecosystem of dapps grown over years, built by enthusiastic developers. The Ocean ecosystem also contains many data scientists and OCEAN holders who do predictions, data challenges, Data Farming, and more. Furthermore, Ocean has an excellent community of ambassadors.

For 2024, the core team will continue to support the Ocean ecosystem & Ocean Ambassadors.

Some featured dapps from Ocean’s ecosystem.

6. Conclusion

In 2024, we will double down on Predictoor’s exponential growth, launch a “C2D springboard”, and roll out Ocean Enterprise. We will continue to run Ocean Data Challenges, Data Farming, and support our lively ecosystem.

This product update stands for our roadmap to making Ocean Protocol more accessible, efficient and powerful — all in the name in traction.

Notes

[1] This step only comes now, because we first needed to establish an architecture where both predictoors and traders can conceptually make serious $. If we did this UX work earlier, we’d have spend time optimizing a UX that any step of goal 1 might have become obsolete.

About Ocean Protocol

Ocean was founded to level the playing field for AI and data. Ocean tools enable people to privately & securely publish, exchange, and consume data.

Follow Ocean on Twitter or Telegram to keep up to date, and Predictoor’s Twitter for its news. Chat directly with the Ocean community on Discord. Track Ocean progress directly on GitHub.