What is Ocean Protocol’s Data Marketplace?

Ocean Protocol's Ocean Market Homescreen

What Is Ocean Protocol’s Data Marketplace?

Ocean Protocol’s data marketplace (Ocean Market) allows data creators and consumers to buy and sell Data Assets, just like Opensea allows NFT creators and collectors to buy and sell NFTs.

What are Data Assets?

Data Assets can fall under two categories, Datasets or Algorithms. 

  1. Datasets
Publishing Data Sets on Ocean Market

Any dataset you own the rights to such as a CSV or .json file can become a data asset on Ocean Market. This file might contain a long list of sea creatures, research data from your dissertation or ML training data used to analyse the NFT market. 

Data buyers can purchase access to these datasets via Ocean Market. 

  1. Algorithms
Publishing Algorithms on Ocean Market

An algorithm can also be a data asset on Ocean Market. This algorithm may be set up to run on a dataset (such as the transaction history of Ethereum) and return user retention data for a popular Web3 app like Uniswap.

Data buyers can purchase access to these algorithms via Ocean Market too.

How to Protect Sensitive Information in the Datasets you Publish on Ocean Market

When you publish a data asset on Ocean Market you don’t actually have to move the data anywhere. It can stay within your trusted environment.

As the publisher you can restrict the amount of access data buyers can have by only permitting certain algorithms to run on it.

You could go as far as restricting a buyer’s access to running a single algorithm that was written by you.

Compute to data on Ocean Market

This gives publishers the ability to fine tune access control to their datasets by allowing only the algorithms they have written or approved.

Selling access to your Datasets and Algorithms for Crypto

Data buyers pay to access your data assets using the Ocean token (ERC20).

Once you publish a data asset on Ocean Market you will automatically start receiving the proceeds of any sales in your Ethereum wallet (e.g. Metamask). 

This unlocks the ability for data publishers to begin earning a passive crypto income through selling access to their data assets.

Buying & Selling On-Chain Data Assets

Blockchain applications like Uniswap are attracting more and more users and they are producing a lot of valuable on-chain data that you can access. 

You could create a data asset which contains the entire transaction history of every Uniswap transaction updated daily. 

Uniswap app home screen

You could then create and approve algorithms that calculate the 30d user retention, average revenue per user, customer lifetime value and more. 

This is just one example from a single Web3 app, but the potential for this type of work is growing and will become more and more valuable as the blockchain industry matures.

Ocean Missions is an Ocean DAO run initiative to help kick start this opportunity and connect data buyers and sellers around on-chain data assets on Ocean Market.

If you’d like to learn more about Ocean Missions you can follow us on Twitter or join us on Discord.