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FAQ
- What should I expect?
- How do people form a crew?
- How do we know what mission to take?
- Do crews change depending on the mission?
- How are rewards shared?
- How do you create data tokens?
- Where can I store data tokens?
- What determines the price of data assets?
- How does someone purchase my data asset?
BUILD
- Starting your first mission
- Tracking your mission’s progress
- Publishing your data asset
- Fees
- Sharing rewards with crew members
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Introduction
Ocean Missions is a community of professionals working with blockchain data to extract valuable insights about NFTs, DeFi & Cryptocurrency.
It’s built on a key idea. The idea that those who build the data assets (e.g. data sets and algorithms) own them and sell access to them using Ocean Protocol.
Terminology
Here are some common terms you may see on this page and around the Ocean Missions community.
- Crew – Project Teams a.k.a guilds working on data projects
- Mission – Data Projects that crews work on
Getting Started
- Join the Ocean Missions community
- Discover interesting missions to work on, or suggest your own
- Join/form a crew and start working on a mission
- Publish your data assets on Ocean Market
- Promote your data asset to potential buyers
- Improve your data assets over time
FAQ
What should I expect?
If you’ve ever worked using Microsoft teams or Slack to collaborate with others, working within the Ocean Missions ecosystem will feel familiar.
We use Discord instead and have different channels for different topics just like you would on Teams or Slack.
We have also got some useful templates to help manage your missions more effectively.
How do people form a crew?
Head over to #find-crew-members on Discord.
You can either recruit new crew members for your mission, or you can share your skills so other crew members can find you.
If you don’t want to start your own mission, another good way to join a crew is to keep track of a mission you’re interested in via our Discord. You can proactively reach out to the crew working on it showing them how you can help out.
Keep it simple, often long-term collaborations start with a short but valuable conversation.
How do we know what mission to take?
This is up to you. Take a look at #new-missions on Discord and see if there’s anything that captures your interest.
While not all missions need many people to collaborate, generally speaking the better the combination of use case + team, the more likely a mission is to produce a valuable result.
Remember that what you are producing is a data asset that others will either buy or not, so building a data asset which buyers are likely to find valuable should be a key priority.
Another thing to keep in mind is the mission you choose to work on should excite you. We all know that finishing a project is a lot harder than starting it, so take the time to identify an end goal which you can work towards and be proud of when you finish.
Do crews change depending on the mission?
Sometimes they will and sometimes crews may decide to stick together.
The Ocean Missions ecosystem is about fostering open collaboration, so ultimately you decide which missions to work on.
How are rewards shared?
Crews decide how to share the rewards among themselves. We have some guidelines to help make this process easier for you and to save you time.
Agreeing on a rewards distribution schedule
Someone with lots of experience may contribute more value to a project in a shorter amount of time, making their time ‘more valuable’ relatively speaking than someone who is just getting started.
To simplify this process we’ve created a ‘multiplier’ in the Mission Tracker Template which is used to help determine the ‘relative power’ for each member’s time.
For example an experienced person (Person A) may have a multiplier of 1.5 meaning that 1 hour of their time contributes 1.5 units towards the project.
Person B who has a multiplier of 1 would need to work 1.5 hours to receive the same amount of rewards as Person A working 1 hour. You can play around with the Mission Tracker Template to see how this works (remember to make a copy of it first).
This is no different to what we see in a regular working environment and ultimately it comes down to what the crew agrees as being a fair and reasonable arrangement. If members can’t come to an agreement, they can always leave and start their own mission.
We’ve created a Mission Agreement template to help crews get this in writing prior to committing multiple hours on a mission.
How to track member’s contributions
We’ve created a Mission Tracker Template which helps simplify the tracking process for crews.
Having an up to date record of how much time each person is contributing to a mission and what they are doing is really valuable for the whole crew. It helps you understand what has been worked on and how long it takes for tasks to be complete.
It also helps to handle unforeseen circumstances where new crew members may join and existing ones may leave. By keeping a record of all crew member’s hours it helps to ensure a fairer distribution of rewards in the end.
How are rewards distributed to crew members?
There are a few ways to transfer rewards among your crew and some of this will come down to how you publish your data asset.
For now though, crews will have to distribute rewards in a mostly manual way (i.e. sending tokens to crew member’s wallet addresses like a regular crypto transaction).
We have created a Mission Agreement template crews can use to help document this agreement and as an additional fallback, all transactions are recorded on the blockchain. You can look them up using Etherscan.
We believe this should be sufficient to protect early members while more robust mechanisms (e.g. Gnosis Safe) are built and implemented in the future.
How do you create Data Tokens?
There are two ways of publishing your data assets on Ocean Market and each treats data tokens slightly differently.
When you publish your data asset using the variable pricing method, Ocean Protocol mints new data tokens for your data asset.
When you publish data assets using the fixed price method people can simply pay for your data asset using Ocean tokens (there’s an update scheduled for release in V4 which will simplify the back end processing of fixed price transactions even further).
See how to publish a data asset on Ocean Market for more.
Where can I store Data Tokens?
Because data tokens are based on the ERC20 token standard, you can use them in the same way as any ERC20 based asset (e.g. storing and sending them through your Metamask wallet).
What determines the Price of Data Assets?
When you publish your data asset on the Ocean Market you can choose to publish it using the Fixed price or Variable price method.
Pricing Data Assets using the Fixed Price method
With fixed pricing, you set the price of the data asset. This is similar to any online store. The seller sets a price and the buyer who wants the item pays for it.
Currently fixed price data assets are priced in $OCEAN tokens.
Given the price of $OCEAN changes relative to fiat, the fiat price that a buyer pays to access your data asset is affected by this. The Ocean Protocol team is soon to be releasing an $OCEAN backed stable coin which will be used to keep the price of data assets stable in fiat terms.
Pricing Data Assets using the variable price method
The variable price method is a completely different beast. It uses tools from DeFi to dynamically price data assets based on demand.
Using liquidity pools (balancer AMMs on the backend), the price of a data token will change based on how many $OCEAN tokens are staked in the liquidity pool for that data token.
Anyone can add or remove Ocean tokens from that liquidity pool impacting the data token’s price.
Variable pricing comes with risks and may have regulatory implications depending on your jurisdiction. Work is ongoing to improve this and we will keep the community updated as it evolves. For now, we recommend the variable pricing method is only used by advanced users.
How does someone purchase my data asset?
Your data asset will be listed for sale once you have published it on Ocean Market.
You can share this listing with anyone and anyone can buy access to it by paying with Ocean tokens. Ocean Market handles all of this and the Ocean tokens will arrive in the publisher’s wallet.
BUILD
Starting your first Mission
Keep an eye on the #find-crew-members channel on Discord for missions you could join.
Alternatively, you can propose new missions by completing a Mission Brief and posting it to the #new-missions channel.
Or you may already have a crew and a mission in mind in which case you can just get started.
Create new Mission
You can propose a new mission by completing and publishing your first Mission Brief.
Mission briefs don’t need to be long but they should be well thought out. The goal of a mission brief should be to provide a short summary of what you want to deliver and why.
This document is what will get other crew members excited about joining your mission so think about the things you would want to see if you were learning about your mission for the first time.
Your mission brief should identify a valuable use case. It doesn’t need to be overly complicated, in fact some of the best missions are relatively simple but highly valuable.
Remember that what you are producing is a data asset that others will either buy or not, so building a data asset which buyers are likely to find valuable should be a key priority.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the mission should excite you. We all know that finishing a project is a lot harder than starting it, so take the time to identify an end goal which you will be proud of.
Join existing Mission
You can always request to join a crew if you think you could help. One way to do this is by proactively reaching out to a crew member and sharing how you could help achieve their mission’s objectives.
Another way to join a mission part way through is to keep an eye on the #find-crew-members channel which crews are likely to use when looking for additional members/skills.
Crews using the Mission Tracker Template can add new members partway through a mission and ensure those who have done work previously are still entitled to their fair share of the rewards.
Remember that crews can manage their missions differently so joining a mission that’s in flight may not always look the same in every situation.
Tracking your Mission’s Progress
Keeping track of progress is an extremely valuable exercise when working among distributed teams. It helps to align all the different members and keep everyone on track.
We have provided some guidance and templates to help streamline this process for crews.
Tracking Deliverables
Crews are free to use the tools available to them such as Jira, Trello, Notion, Google sheets and many others to keep track of progress.
If in doubt, we recommend using “To do”, “Doing”, “Done” and assigning one owner to each task.
Different missions will have different reporting requirements depending on their complexity, number of members and so on…
So it really comes down to what each crew believes is best for them and their mission.
Tracking Member Contributions
The default mechanism for determining crew member’s contributions is the time they invest in the mission.
The Mission Tracker provides flexibility around how rewards are shared based on the level of experience, or ‘relative value’ a crew member contributes.
We’ve created the Mission Tracker Template which helps simplify the tracking process for crews.
It also helps to handle unforeseen circumstances where new crew members may join and existing ones may leave at any time.
By keeping a record of all crew member’s contributions it helps to ensure a fairer distribution of rewards overall.
Publishing your data asset
We recommend using the testnet (e.g. Rinkeby Testnet) on Ocean Market when publishing for the first time.
This will enable you to get used to the user flow without having any real funds at stake.
How to Publish a Data Asset on Ocean Market
You can publish your data asset on the Ocean Market either by using the fixed price or variable pricing method. See our tutorial showing you how to upload a data asset to Ocean Market.
Fixed Price
With fixed pricing, you set the price of the data asset. This is similar to any online store. The seller sets a price and the buyer who wants the item pays for it.
When publishing the data asset you will set the fixed price in Ocean tokens. A buyer wanting to access your data asset will need to pay the fixed amount of Ocean tokens to access your data asset.
Given the price of Ocean changes relative to Fiat (e.g. EURO, USD), the Ocean Protocol team is currently working on the release of an $OCEAN backed stablecoin which will keep the price of your data assets fixed in fiat terms.
We will publish more details on this once we know more.
Variable Price
When publishing data assets using the variable price method you will need to set your starting price in $OCEAN and this will determine the initial amount of liquidity (in $OCEAN) you will need to provide to the liquidity pool.
Variable pricing comes with risks and may have regulatory implications depending on your jurisdiction. Work is ongoing to improve this and we will keep the community updated as it evolves. For now, we recommend the variable pricing method is only used by advanced users.
Fees
There are two categories of fees you want to familiarise yourself with when publishing data assets on Ocean Market, network fees and transaction fees.
Network Fees
If you’ve completed any blockchain based transactions before you will know there is a fee which is paid to help secure the network. This is no different when publishing data assets because Ocean Protocol interacts with the blockchain.
In recent times network fees have become expensive for Ethereum but other networks like Binance Smart Chain and Polygon (both of which are supported by Ocean Market) are more affordable.
We encourage all publishers to use a testnet (e.g. rinkeby) before publishing a data asset on Ocean Market as it will enable you to familiarise yourself with the experience without having any real funds at stake. You can get free testnet Ocean tokens here.
Transaction Fees
When publishing your data assets on Ocean Market you will be asked to set some transaction fees. The default amount for all these fees is 0.1% but can be configured to your liking.
Community Fee
This fee goes towards the Ocean DAO to fund ongoing development of the Ocean Protocol ecosystem.
Marketplace fee
This fee goes to the marketplace owner for hosting the marketplace. For Ocean Market this Fee goes to the Ocean Community (as above).
Swap Fee (variable priced assets only)
This fee is paid to liquidity providers proportionally to their share of the liquidity pool. This fee will apply to liquidity providers both when entering or exiting the liquidity pool for your data tokens.
Does not apply to fixed price data assets.
Sharing rewards with Crew Members
If you’ve completed a Mission Tracker and Mission Agreement then sharing the rewards is as simple as distributing them to your crew members as you’ve agreed.
The address used to publish the data asset on Ocean Market will be the one receiving spent data tokens (variable pricing) or Ocean tokens (fixed pricing).
Payments can then be sent to crew members just like any regular crypto transaction (e.g. using Metamask).