Ocean Shipyard — The First Wave
Learn about the inaugural batch of projects in Ocean’s early-stage program
We are excited to announce that after countless hours of reviews, interviews, due diligence, and brainstorming — the first wave of Ocean Shipyard has officially kicked off. We received a whopping 60 applications from teams excited to BUIDL on Ocean Protocol, for which we are grateful. Out of 60 applications, we have shortlisted six teams to be included in the first wave of Ocean Shipyard.
The total funding for this round is about $157,000 in OCEAN tokens. Upon successful completion of pre-determined milestones and deliverables, Ocean Protocol Foundation will release funds to participants. This ensures that teams are motivated to build and deliver on time, assuring proper usage of funds to foster the ecosystem.
Apart from funding the teams, Ocean also provides them with mentorship from our team and advisors to advance their product and company.
Other perks include (and not limited to):
- joint marketing opportunities
- introduction to top crypto VC funds for seed round
- possible admission into leading incubators and accelerators
- possible next round of funding
Ocean’s Head of Ecosystem Sheridan Johns says, “Ocean is extremely pleased and proud to welcome such a diverse and accomplished group of outstanding projects to the inaugural batch of the Ocean Shipyard program. Each of these carefully selected projects is ideally positioned to help drive the sustainability and growth of Ocean Protocol in various ways. We look forward to working closely together with them over the coming months to help them scale and flourish.”
Without further ado, we’re pleased to present the newly inducted members of Ocean Shipyard.
DataUnion.app
DataUnion.app is a crowdsourced data annotation platform. By using a reward system based on Ocean’s datatokens, anyone can contribute and become a stakeholder. Their first data vault is for images. Images are uploaded and annotated by contributors, after which they are verified. Contributors receive datatokens as a reward and become stakeholders in the dataset. This combination of mechanics creates an intrinsic motivation to contribute positively. Their primary goal is to empower people to use their data for a better future.
DataUnion.app’s Value for Ocean
This project brings a lot of value to the Ocean ecosystem by incentivizing our community to participate in data annotation services and bringing meaningful data and services to Ocean Protocol. In the longterm, they want to migrate to a DAO, similar to OceanDAO, to facilitate self-sustaining growth.
Molecule
Molecule is a virtual accelerator platform that helps scientists translate their discoveries into novel therapeutics for patients. Molecule is building a Web3 marketplace to decentralize ownership dynamics in drug development. Drug development consists of two core value drivers: data production and intellectual property rights. Opening and tokenizing IP rights is challenging because most ownership and funding models may be considered securities. At its core, Molecule aims to create new fluid structures to fund early-stage pre-clinical data creation by scientists that enable an open data economy around new therapeutics. Combining this with composable tokenized frameworks on an open speculative market, they hope to overcome reproducibility issues around harmful data — one of the most significant problems in research today.
Molecule’s Value for Ocean
Molecule intends to pioneer a novel IP ownership and data production mechanism (SAFDs) to empower new early-stage therapeutics, a +$100B market. To accomplish this, they want to leverage Ocean to develop new co-operative ownership and funding structures for biopharma research data, starting in longevity (geroscience). They will launch one of the first tokenized data co-operatives on Ocean tied to a real-world therapeutic research project: VitaDAO. VitaDAO will bring a new stream of datasets onto Ocean and enable a new fundraising mechanism for generating such novel datasets, thereby opening up a new tool for crowdfunding to produce exceptional data.
Oort
Oort Digital, a DeFi aggregator for NFTs, is a super account that allows people to do anything with their NFTs — no need for a bank. Compared to DeFi, the NFT ecosystem is still in its infancy in both applications and market cap. But the maturity of the NFT space is upon the horizon. NFTs have a great potential to supercharge DeFi, and the growth experienced in recent years is promising — DeFi has exploded from below $482 million to over $21 billion in the past year.
Oort’s Value for Ocean
Oort intends to create an NFT lending platform that allows anyone to lend their NFTs and receive compensation in return. Using Ocean data, Oort wants to make price oracles for NFT valuations. This idea opens up a slew of opportunities for Ocean to be used as price oracles along with data feeds monetization platform — not only for NFT and collectibles but even in DeFi space.
PostHuman
Models like GPT-3 are extremely powerful generalists, which will likely only improve in the next few years. The benefits of such models ought to be equitably shared by humanity at large. Unfortunately, training and inference from models are presently strictly controlled by large centralized institutions like Microsoft. However, if models are trained in a zero-knowledge environment, countless miners, who all know their work will be rewarded, can conduct the training. PostHuman leverages GPUs’ availability worldwide to train useful transformer models and invites miners to bet their compute on models they feel will be used the most. PostHuman proposes a marketplace utilizing ZK-FT, where anybody can build upon any existing model by further fine-tuning it (on the same or different data) and be rewarded if the model proves useful.
PostHuman’s Value for Ocean
PostHuman will leverage Ocean Protocol to create the backbone of zero-knowledge model publication on their marketplace. Additionally, all inference requests will be on the Ocean network due to the model’s decentralized and zero-knowledge nature. It will not be possible for an individual to run inference on a published model outside the ocean ecosystem. Therefore, every inference request will utilize Ocean tokens for payment, dramatically increasing demand/value as more useful models are published in the marketplace.
Swash
Swash unlocks and democratizes new streams of the data economy for web users while disrupting the legacy models for data brokering and online advertising. Swash is creating a transparent data crowdsourcing and crowd-selling solution in the Web3 model. Users can profit directly from their data and attention while data buyers and advertisers reach wider audiences, improve efficiency, and obtain users’ consent.
Since its Beta launch, Swash has attracted over 7,300 organic users. In May 2020, Swash was selected by Outlier Ventures from over 270 startups to join their coveted accelerator program. Recently, Swash has been presented in industry events and praised by thought leaders on several occasions, including Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Coindesk, and Hackernoon.
Swash’s Value for Ocean
The type, volume, and quality of Swash data are unique and attractive to many data consumers. Swash is already well-versed in the ecosystem and shares similar vision and values with Ocean Protocol. The growing number of Swash users will benefit Ocean as well. This is the first use case at the application layer where two leading decentralized data platforms, Streamr and Ocean, are utilized, sending a strong signal to the market. The data crowdsourced from Swash users can be sold in a marketplace on Ocean and accessed by third-party data analysis projects to run their algorithms to extract insights. The resulting revenue can be distributed among contributors: users, analysts, Swash, and Ocean.
Transport Genie
Animal welfare is a long-standing issue in the agrifood industry, as companies attempt to balance the need for large-scale livestock production environments with animal welfare legislation. Presently, animal welfare concerns are costing the global food industry billions of dollars in fines, lost revenue, and brand dilution. Transport Genie is solving this problem by creating bespoke IoT sensors with a precision monitoring solution. Transport Genie believes in Ocean’s ability to enable a decentralized and secure data marketplace where their customers can be compensated while also allowing their customers to have non-custodial data control.
Transport Genie’s Value for Ocean
This collaboration will enable Ocean to source new data feeds directly from Transport Genie’s IoT devices, thereby improving the diversity of datasets within the Ocean Market. More importantly, this collaboration will also attract and demonstrate to IoT industry veterans how they can incentivize their customers to securely monetize their private data without giving away control of the data.
Applications for the next wave of Shipyard contenders will begin this February. If you are a passionate individual or team looking to build something valuable on Ocean Protocol, this is your best chance to kickstart your dream project and be a pioneer of the new data economy. Once our next batch begins, apply to Shipyard here.
We are eager to see promising products and services come out of this round, moving us another step forward towards developing the Ocean ecosystem.
