tl;dr: Ocean Protocol may end up being as big as the ocean.

My current crypto love affair, aside from Nexus Mutual, of course, is Ocean Protocol.

I’ve blogged about Ocean recently a few times, including A Digital Maritime Strategy and the Need for Open Data Oceans and Digital Shipping Containers and the Data Economy.

However, after reading Ocean Market: An Open-Source Community Marketplace for Data and then visiting the actual Ocean Market, I felt like I had seen the future.

After exploring the market and staking a small amount of Ocean (disclosure: I own a nominal amount) I could proclaim myself a proud member of the “Ocean Navy” (which is what the community of passionate believers around the project call themselves.”

Here’s why…

What Makes the Ocean Market So Unique

In the Ocean Market, anybody can become a data provider. That includes you and I.

Publishing Data

For example, you could download your data from Facebook, where you don’t earn any money on it, and then upload it to the Ocean Market as “My Facebook data history.”

Then, someone who wanted to do analysis on your Facebook data could buy it. Boom…you’ve monetized your data.

Admittedly, that’s a small, possibly ridiculous example, but hopefully it demonstrates the concept because it extends much further out.

Your organization’s corporate data, which is now a cost center for you, as you pay for storage, can become a revenue stream.

I’m not 100% clear yet how data is protected/secured after it’s purchased. For some data sets, there is something called “compute to data” which keeps the data anonymous, but for the others, you may just be selling it. Theoretically, someone could re-sell it or re-publish it to monetize it again, but I suppose you’ve already captured some value, which is more than you are doing today.

In addition to becoming a data provider, you can “stake” your Ocean tokens agains the validity/credibility of someone else’s dataset.

Staking for Data to Earn Fees

So, in the case where I publish my Facebook data feed, you could stake your tokens behind it which, in effect, is saying, “yes, I know this provider and I am vouching for his credibility, so you can trust that the data is good.”

Once you do that, you will receive a proportional amount of the fees generated from the sale of the data. So, if you stake an amount of Ocean equal to 5% of the total stake, you will get 5% of the fees. If 10,000 people buy my data, you’ll earn 5% of the total fees generated.

As of this writing, there are a total of 397 data sets & datatokens published by 224 accounts, amounting to 1,803,910.079 OCEAN ≈  2080.035 ETH in 305 data set pools and 54 data sets have no price set yet.

Lastly, the amount of Ocean staked on a given data set can serve as a proxy for the overall quality of that data, since poor data from providers of low reputation will not acquire the stakes of others.

The Earliest of markets

So, yes, it’s early and yes, there are plenty of things to be worked out, but this Ocean marketplace represents a “break out” from the data silos which are controlled by a handful of corporations.

Simultaneously, it represents a liberating and empowering force for everyone who generates data (which is everyone) to be able to earn income from it.

That, in my opinion, is a truly disruptive force because it flips our current model of the data economy on its head.

That’s why it’s a big deal.

And it’s why I’m excited.

Disclaimer: NONE of this constitutes financial advice. Invest at your own risk. These are early stage technologies. Caveat emptor.