What is Ocean Protocol?
The Ocean Protocol token, or OCEAN, is the utility token powering the Ocean Protocol. The latter is a data-based ecosystem built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
OCEAN is based on the ERC-20 token standard. It mainly serves as a way to pay for data within the Ocean Protocol ecosystem.
Moreover, it enables users to sell data on the Ocean Protocol platform. In addition, it functions as a governance token that allows holders to manage the Ocean community funding.
There is a total supply of 1.41B (1,410,000,000) Ocean Protocol tokens. Since there is a limited supply of tokens, it's possible that the OCEAN price will grow as the asset becomes more scarce.
According to Ocean Protocol, it will take 50 years for all of these tokens to become a part of the circulating supply. They have been allocated as follows:
- 60% - Keepers;
- 20% - Co-Founders;
- 15% - SAFTE Holders;
- 5% - Ocean Protocol Foundation.
Just like the majority of cryptocurrencies out there, Ocean Protocol price experiences volatility. If you want to find out more about the current OCEAN price, check out the graph above.
What are the Main Features of Ocean Protocol?
Ocean Protocol is a data marketplace. It brings value to its users by providing a way to monetize data with the help of blockchain technologies. Thus, it enables a transparent and secure way to share data and earn rewards while maintaining full control over it. To put it simply, this means that only the owner of the data can modify, transfer, and publish the data.
In addition, data owners have complete control over data sharing parameters such as price, access, restrictions, and more.
There are 2 core roles within the ecosystem of Ocean Protocol:
- Publishers, who provide the data and put it behind a crypto-based paywall. They use an ERC-720 token standard to store their data in an NFT format. Publishers receive payment for their data in the form of Ocean Protocol tokens.
- Consumers, who buy access to the information provided by the publishers. This data comes in the form of a datatoken - an ERC-20 token linked to a unique piece of data. However, it’s crucial to keep in mind that datatokens are a type of license to access data but not the right of ownership over said data.
Anyone can become a publisher by publishing data services just like anyone can consume these data services via datatokens.
While any type of data can be stored on the Ocean Protocol, it’s especially useful for storing AI data.
Ocean Protocol brings a lot of value to data scientists and AI experts who need large amounts of data to continue with their research. As such, the platform provides access to unique data sets they wouldn’t have otherwise.
Data can be bought and sold on the official Ocean Marketplace. In addition, users can also design and build their own custom data marketplaces by forking the Ocean Marketplace code.
There are 5 types of fees within the Ocean Protocol ecosystem:
- Publish Fee - charged to publishers only when they submit a new dataset;
- Consume Fee or Order Fee - charged to consumers whenever they access the data via their datatoken;
- Swap Fee - charged to users who swap their datatokens for base tokens, and vice versa;
- Provider Fee - charged for computing resources and paid out to the third-party running the Provider;
- Community Fee - charged to all users during swaps and sent to the OceanDAO for reinvestments.
Please keep in mind that not all of these fees have been implemented into the platform yet.
As discussed in the What is Ocean Protocol section, the project is powered by the Ethereum network. Besides, it’s secured via a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm.
It’s important to note that, initially, the Ocean Protocol was operating via a sidechain based on a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism. However, this method of achieving consensus was discarded as it threatened the Ethereum-compatibility of datatokens.
One of the main goals of the project is to help people to unlock the value of data through a unique data-sharing ecosystem.
Ocean Protocol supports these networks: Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon Mainnet, Binance Smart Chain, Energy Web Chain, Moonriver, Ropsten, Rinkeby, Mumbai, Moonbase, and Ganache.
Who Developed Ocean Protocol?
The Ocean Protocol crypto project was launched in 2017 via an Initial Coin Offering.
It’s a Singapore-based company co-founded by entrepreneurs Bruce Pon, Cristina Pon, and Trent McConaghy.
Bruce Pon received his education from the IMD Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an accomplished project manager with years of experience at Daimler AG. Besides the Ocean Protocol, he also founded a consulting company - Avantalion Consulting Group AG, and a blockchain-based software company - BigchainDB.
There are 28 members within the core team of the project that is responsible for the development of the Ocean Protocol. Moreover, it receives irreplaceable feedback from more than 35 advisors from successful blockchain companies like CoinShares, Spherity, Atazzo, MOBI, and many more.
The Ocean Protocol crypto project is partnered up with various projects including Daimler, MOBI, DAC, Polygon, OpenDAO, 0Chain, and many others.
Before jumping into Ocean Protocol (or any crypto project), please make sure to do proper research. The graph above provides core statistics about the OCEAN price and other token details.
