The crypto marketplace continues to fly through some serious turbulence. OODA CEO Matt Devost recently noted, in response to the recent charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a ‘massive’ crypto Ponzi scheme: “It is all about creative destruction. It is good to wash the fraud and opportunists out of the system. The foundation of the technology is solid, so now it is time to build actual disruptive solutions that solve real-world problems.” If you take the long view, blockchain holds real promise for countless disruptive platforms across a wide range of industries.

The automotive and mobility subsectors have provided a recent case study that is a window into the promise of blockchain technologies. Two years ago, Ocean Protocol delivered an AI-based decentralized data exchange pilot to their collaborator Daimler South East Asia. Based on that pilot, the Mercedes Benz Group recently started production of the proprietary Acentrik blockchain platform. (1)

OODA Loop Sponsor

Ocean Protocol should be on your radar – and the Acentrik platform is worth a closer look.

Ocean Protocol

Ocean Protocol is a “blockchain-based organization aiming to decentralize and democratize the sharing of the world’s data in a secure and private way. It was created by a team of developers and AI scientists in 2017…with a lot of ties to various industries like Automotive & Healthcare. Ocean will enable big enterprises and individual developers alike to create data marketplaces and other apps in order to monetize and share their data. This will greatly boost the development of AI and will kickstart the data economy in a fair and transparent way.” (2)

Ocean Protocol is governed by a Singapore-based non-profit foundation, whose mandate is to ensure open access to the protocol and platform, provide data governance, encourage the network ecosystem growth, and take measures to ensure that the platform becomes ever more decentralized with time. The Ocean Protocol Foundation has contracted BigchainDB to build the core protocol, network, marketing, and community activities. (3)

Nagato Dharma at DataDrivenInvestor (DDI) provides an overall review: “I’ve been following the project for over a year now. All I can say is that the team is ethical, honest, and true to their word. They always deliver on time and put in a ton of work. They have the German mindset of “under-promise and over-deliver”. The tech is proven to be great and is recognized by governments, multiple international $100 billion market cap companies, and other organizations worldwide.

While big data is centralized in the hands of a few tech conglomerates, Ocean Protocol provides the opportunity for the average user to invest in and benefit from the future of data sharing. Developers will have, for the first time, access to a vast collection of previously-unavailable data sets. They will be able to participate in the ecosystem and share their ideas while also having a chance to get their ideas funded.

$Ocean Token

The OCEAN utility token is used as a unit of exchange for buying and selling data and AI services. In the future it will be used for the curation of data on marketplaces and maybe for the governance of the platform in the future.

Individuals and companies have long understood that their data might be valuable. But their legitimate concerns over control and privacy have hindered past attempts at marketplaces to sell their data:

Control. In crypto, we’ve seen the rise of non-custodial token exchanges, where the middleman doesn’t control the tokens. Ocean applies this same approach to data marketplaces.
Privacy. Ocean offers a solution here too. You can have marketplaces to buy & sell private data, without compromising privacy. This sounds like a paradox at first glance. The trick is to bring compute to the data. It’s for “AI eyes only”.

[At the time of Dharma’s writing in 2020], the team is working on these two products:

Data Ecosystem Platform — for access control with various developer-level interfaces. This includes the blockchain network, smart contracts, and libraries/software development kits (SDKs).
Data Marketplaces — this has two complementary sub-products built on a shared codebase. The Enterprise Marketplace is customizable for data providers, typically in specific verticals (health, mobility, logistics). The Community Marketplace is for the community to buy and sell datasets. Both are decentralized and non-custodial; there is no centralized middleman controlling the assets.

Image Source: Data Driven Investor

Data Tokens & DeFi Implementations

Data tokens will improve Web3 developer experience in building on Ocean, and better leverage Web3 wallets and other Web3 infrastructure like Uniswap.

Tokenizing the access controls. This means that a crypto wallet can also hold your data. To be precise, it holds the right to access the data (versus the data itself). This right is embodied in a blockchain-style token. Your crypto wallet gives you custody of this right. You can also transfer this right simply by hitting “send” in the wallet. The result: crypto wallets become a new approach to data management.

Data tokens are like an API for Ocean data to flow within the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. They connect the worlds of AI (Artificial Intelligence)/ML (Machine Learning) and data science to the world of Ethereum, not only as simple data feeds, but with data as a first-class financial citizen. This leads to data DEXes, data loans, stablecoins backed by data assets, data tokens in financial supply chains, and more.

Ocean is the base layer of this Web3 data economy. Ocean can serve purposes as a reserve currency (via staking), data/asset platform with unit of exchange, and as a funding platform (via bonding curves). The middle row in the image above “last miles” refers for utility: data science tools. The top row is “last miles” such as data exchanges and mining (e.g. making data available).

Marketplace Architectures – Image Source: Image Source: Data Driven Investor

Marketplaces are third party applications developed using Ocean components with a primary goal to facilitate data exchange between data providers and data consumers.

To boost 🇪🇺 AI, we want to attract more than €20bn/year during the next 10 years. AI is all about data. To use it at large scale, we need to pool it. We’ll create a single market for data in the🇪🇺 & want to trigger investments of €4-6bn in EU data spaces & cloud infrastructures
— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) February 19, 2020

‘The EU will create a single market for data where: Data can flow within the EU and across sectors, for the benefit of all. European rules, in particular privacy and data protection, as well as competition law, are fully respected. The rules for access and use of data are fair, practical and clear.’

The European Union is set to unveil its proposed regulations for Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is part of a plan to challenge the United States and China’s dominance in the sector. That includes committing billions of dollars in public and private funds to advance the science behind AI.

Dr. Irene Lopez de Vallejo was a founding member of Ocean Protocol and Head of Partnerships. In 2019 she started working for the European Union in the BDVA (Big Data Value Association) project as co-chair at TF1:SG7 on Data Sharing Spaces. She’s also a project evaluator for the European Commission for the past 20 years.

The mission of the BDVA is to develop the Innovation Ecosystem that will “enable the data and AI-driven digital transformation in Europe” delivering maximum economic and societal benefit, and, achieving & sustaining Europe’s leadership on Big Data Value creation and Artificial Intelligence.

Board members are high-rank employees of Atos, Fraunhofer, Huawei, IBM, Nokia, Philips, Siemens and others.

Ocean Protocol has been mentioned in various EU reports, its tech is being used by the government of Singapore and mentioned by the German government in the GAIA-X project.

Dharma also wrote about EU’s plans to boost the development of data and AI. You can find more info and details about Ocean Protocol and the European Union here.” (4)

Ocean Protocol has also announced a variety of partnerships to create data marketplaces in other industries, including the Energy sector.

What Next? Evaluate the Acentrok Enterprise Release for your Organization

“Acentrik, a decentralized data marketplace for Enterprises built on Ocean Protocol — is now in Enterprise release:

Ocean Protocol, the Web3 platform to unlock data services for AI and business innovation, has joined forces with Acentrik, the decentralized data marketplace by Mercedes-Benz, on its recently launched Enterprise Release. Acentrik is a fork of Ocean Market and makes use of the OceanONDA V4 smart contracts and libraries. As part of the collaboration, the most important Ocean features have been leveraged and integrated into Acentrik V1.0 as well as key adaptations for enterprise users.” (5)

Stay Informed

It should go without saying that tracking threats are critical to inform your actions. This includes reading our OODA Daily Pulse, which will give you insights into the nature of the threat and risks to business operations.