Ocean V4 Production Has Arrived

Introducing data NFTs and more options for community monetisation

Big news — Ocean V4 (“Onda”) is now live in production! This is a massive release that the whole team has played a huge part in. We’re super proud of what we have achieved over the last 18 months and we want to share some of the highlights with you in this article. We’ve introduced data NFTs, expanded the options for the community to monetize, and delivered some cool updates to Ocean Market.

Article Sections
1. The journey 
3. Introducing data NFTs
4. New Opportunities to Make Money
5. Updates to Ocean Market
6. Ocean V4 is Now Fully Available
7. Looking Ahead

External quick links: Ocean V4 contracts on production chains, Ocean Market, Ocean docs, and ocean.js & ocean.py.

The Journey

Before we get onto all the exciting new features that are made available through Ocean V4, let’s have a quick recap on the journey that has brought us here. The vision for Ocean dates back to 2017 and we had our first release in 2018. From the very beginning, we were on a mission to create a data-sharing protocol that preserved privacy and put the data owners in control. With our second release, in 2020, we launched Compute-to-Data, to enable algorithms to be run on a dataset without ever revealing the raw data. In 2020 we made another huge step with our third release and the introduction of ERC20 datatokens which tokenize access control, to boost interoperability. Another big milestone in V3 was the introduction of Ocean Market which enables the publishing, staking, and trading of datatokens. Since the release of V3, we have introduced fine-grained permissions, multichain support [2][3][4][5] and a mechanism for handling IP violations & sensitive data.

We are always keen to iterate and improve and we quickly saw elements of the V3 release to improve. For our V4 release, we chose to focus on:

1. Introducing data NFTs, to allow for more flexibility in how to handle a data asset’s “master tape” rights.
2. More ways for the community to make money! We want to help the community create sustainable projects as they published, consumed, and built data marketplaces, data wallets, and data DAOs.

Introducing Data NFTs

A centerpiece of the Ocean V4 release is the introduction of ERC721 data NFTs. A data NFT represents the copyright (or exclusive license against copyright) for a data asset on the blockchain — we call this the “base IP” (intellectual property). Data NFTs are like “master tapes” and datatokens are like CDs licensed against the master tape.

When a user publishes a dataset in Ocean V4, they create a new NFT as part of the process. This data NFT is proof of your claim of base IP. Assuming a valid claim, you are entitled to the revenue from that asset, just like a title deed gives you the right to receive rent. The data NFT smart contract holds metadata about the data asset, stores roles like “who can mint datatokens” or “who controls fees”, and has an open-ended key-value store to enable custom fields.

If you have the private key that controls the NFT, you are the owner of that NFT. The owner is the default recipient of any revenue and they can also assign another account to receive revenue. This enables the publisher to sell their base IP and the revenues that come with it. When the data NFT is transferred to another user, all the information about roles and where the revenue should be sent is reset. The default recipient of the revenue is the new owner of the data NFT.

Data NFTs introduce a new level of flexibility. For instance, in Ocean V3 each asset can only have one type of license for accessing it and it’s not possible to transfer the base IP. In Ocean V4 it is now possible to publish different types of datatokens that provide different levels of access to the asset. So for example, one datatoken could give access for one day while another could give access forever.

With the implementation of data NFTs we have followed the common ERC721 standard which brings further benefits with it. You are able to take advantage of the wider NFT ecosystem and all the tools and possibilities that are constantly growing. As a first example, many leading crypto wallets have first-class support for NFTs, allowing you to manage your data NFTs from your existing wallet.

Data NFTs have flexible metadata key-value pairs (via ERC725y standard), on-chain data availability, and GDPR compliance (via on-chain encryption, decrypted by Ocean Aquarius for rendering in frontends). Caching and retrieval is fast & convenient via Ocean Aquarius / ElasticSearch. With ocean.js & ocean.py drivers, like the rest of Ocean.

This means that data NFTs have many cool use cases beyond the initial “base IP” use! They can implement a) comments & ratings, b) verifiable claims, c) identity credentials, d) social media posts, and more. Here’s an example of data NFTs for user profile data in a dapp.

New Opportunities to Make Money

Innovative new ways of making money are one of the most exciting developments that blockchain technology has delivered, and Ocean V4 is no different. There are broadly three exciting ways of making money from Ocean — selling data, running a marketplace or providing liquidity. Ocean V4 has improved each of these by offering more revenue upside and more flexibility in how fees can be charged. Additionally, we have also introduced an additional fourth way of making revenue by running your own Provider.

The Ocean V3 smart contracts were limited in how you could charge fees, they only enabled marketplace operators to collect a fee in one place: consume. The value was hardcoded to 0.1% so there was no flexibility at all.

Ocean V4 provides more upside for marketplace operators and far more flexibility. The marketplace operator can set the fees value at the levels they choose. Fees can now also be charged separately in the marketplace where the asset was published and the one where it was consumed.

Furthermore, Ocean V4 enables third-party Providers to provide compute, for a fee. This enables a marketplace of Providers to emerge. This will work for centralized trusted providers (that the data publisher and consume must trust), but also trustless providers (via decentralization or other privacy-preserving mechanisms).

The full details of our new fee structure are explained in our docs.

Updates to the Ocean Market

While a lot of the most exciting changes introduced by Ocean V4 are introduced behind the scenes in the smart contracts (Data NFTs and more flexible fees), we have also been spending time delivering new upgrades in Ocean Market. We have a cool new publish flow, updates to the asset detail page, and an awesome NFT image generator.

New publish flow

Ocean V4 was always going to be a serious upgrade and we felt it would be fitting to give serious consideration to how we could make a new publish form that was suitable for the new journey — publishing a data NFT.

If you’re imagining that publishing an NFT must be super complicated — you’re in for a nice surprise, we’ve got a new wizard-style form that makes it wonderfully easy. The whole process, including setting up pricing, is simplified down to 5 steps. It also gives you the opportunity to review everything that you’ve entered, so you can make sure you’re happy before you start signing transactions.

Data NFT Image Generator

We know how cool it is when you can see the unique visualization of an NFT in your wallet and we felt it was really crucial to allow publishers to choose the image that is associated with their data NFT. On the publish form we have a new SVG generator, you keep clicking refresh and see the alternative styles, it’s fun to play around with. This image will forever remain associated with the data NFT so make sure you’re happy with it before proceeding.

Data NFT image on Asset Page

And what’s the point of having these cool Ocean wave pictures if you can’t see them anywhere? Well, we wouldn’t miss out on that opportunity — we’ve got them displayed in prime position on the asset page. This is a nice detail that adds an individual touch to each asset page.

Ocean V4 is Now Fully Available

Over the last few weeks, we have been testing and collecting feedback through a bug bounty program while running Ocean V4 on various test networks. We are excited to announce that Ocean V4 is now live and all the key components are deployed on Ethereum mainnet and Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Energy Web, and Moonriver. You can now check out each of them:

• Ocean smart contracts V4 are deployed to production chains Ethereum mainnet, Polygon and more
• Ocean Market V4 is live in production
• Ocean docs V4 are live in production
• ocean.js & ocean.py V4 drivers are live in production

For more details about the key improvements that Ocean V4 delivers, we recommend the following recent articles

1. Data NFTs
2. Community monetization.

Finally, Ocean V3 users got an airdrop! If you used V3 at all, you’ll want to read this.

Looking Ahead

We would like to thank all the community members for joining into the vision and helping to make it your own and to the countless contributors throughout this journey that have made Ocean Protocol, a community project for everyone.

With our foundation of state-of-the-art technology and the rapidly growing Ocean community, let’s spread the message that it’s now possible to truly own our data. We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to get involved and expand the Ocean Protocol ecosystem: publish datasets and algorithms, start your own marketplace, and run your own provider.

The Ocean core team remains as focused as ever and we are always keen to continue making improvements so please don’t hesitate to give us feedback on Discord or GitHub. We are really excited to hear what you think of all the new features and see how you use them.

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