Which data assets are most likely to sell on Ocean Market?
By taking a 30,000ft view of the Ocean Protocol ecosystem over the last 6 months we’ve looked into who might be the most likely data buyers and data providers to kickstart the data economy. This work has led to the creation of Ocean Missions, a community of Data Scientists working with on-chain & web3 data to build and publish data assets on Ocean Market.
In this article we zoom in further to identify the data assets most likely to sell on Ocean Market. To achieve this we look at what buyers must have to purchase data assets on Ocean Market, we break down data buyers into two target groups and identify the data assets each group is likely to purchase.
It’s hoped that if we can successfully execute on the plan below, we can help lay the foundation for the data economy.
Data buyers MUST have these things to buy a data asset on Ocean Market today…
If you want to buy data assets (dataset or algorithm) on Ocean Market today, the following must be true.
- You are aware of Ocean Protocol &/or Ocean Market
- You are in possession of (or at the very least can access) $OCEAN tokens.
- You have set up and you are comfortable using metamask, walletconnect or portis with DApps.
- You believe you will get more value out of purchasing the data asset than the price you pay for it.
We can see that our potential buyer base has been refined from ‘those interested in buying data’ to something like ‘those who are familiar with Crypto/Ocean, comfortable using DApps and have a need to buy data using cryptocurrency’. This is helpful. It means we can limit our scope, be more targeted and it allows our investments of time and effort to have a greater impact.
I want to pause for a second and acknowledge that these restrictions needn’t be so tough. Earlier we wrote about how someone could propose a ‘Web2 payment gateway’ that could interact with Ocean Protocol on the back-end. This could unlock a path to market for a much broader group of data buyers. This is still a plausible path to market but not one that will be addressed in the remainder of this article.
Ocean Market’s Data Buyers can fall into 2 groups
Ocean Market is the marketplace built by Ocean Protocol as a proof-of-concept marketplace to help facilitate early experimentation with Ocean Protocol. Therefore the traffic for Ocean Market is most likely to come from those who are already interested in Ocean Protocol.
While Ocean Market could evolve into a comprehensive data marketplace, it’s unlikely users looking for a specific data set (e.g. property prices in Italy) would be browsing Ocean Market at this stage.
Given the proximity of this group to Ocean Protocol, let’s call them the Ocean enthusiasts.
We know from the earlier section in this post that a number of factors must be true in order for someone to purchase a data asset from Ocean Market today (comfortable using wallets and need data etc). So the second group is still likely to come from within Crypto & Web3 circles and be comfortable paying with Crypto.
They may however not be familiar with Ocean Protocol. This group needs to have their attention brought to a particular data asset on Ocean Market that they could be interested in buying. It’s like saying “Hey, I have this data asset that’s going to help you achieve X, it’s here on Ocean Market where you can buy it using crypto”.
Because this group is familiar with crypto but not yet aware of Ocean Protocol, let’s call them the Crypto enthusiasts.
What Data Assets are Ocean Enthusiasts most likely to buy?
The Ocean Enthusiast market is a much smaller group than the Crypto Enthusiasts group, but unlike the crypto enthusiasts group we don’t need to put as much effort into attracting and converting them into buyers.
This group has an active interest in Ocean Protocol already. They are likely invested in it and are looking for further insights to improve their Ocean experience. This could be in regards to staking insights, data asset purchasing opportunities, Ocean DAO insights or other things of that nature.
This observation (while cherry picking stats for effect) is supported by the fact that Datawhale’s data set is the most purchased on Ocean Market (with 63 sales). This data asset is described as a directory which “provides you with valuable insights to the top Data Token liquidity pools on the Ocean Protocol Marketplace”.
What Data Assets are Crypto Enthusiasts most likely to buy?
This market is made up of those who are active in the crypto market (to the point of being comfortable interacting with dApps) and are comfortable paying for quality data.
It includes crypto traders, investors, NFT collectors, data scientists, DAO members and journalists.
This could include information on the voting behaviour of a particular DAO, sentiment data for trading bots, data to help investors find undervalued NFTs, Metaverse real-estate and so on. Whatever the data is, the value these buyers expect to gain from accessing it needs to be higher than the price they pay (or they won’t buy it!).
One could even go as far as creating an API with a bunch of crypto specific data and list it on Ocean Market. They could have one listing for 29 $OCEAN giving the buyer 1 month’s access and a second listing for 299 $OCEAN giving the buyer 1 year’s access. This would in effect be creating a SaaS product for your API on Ocean Market and allowing you to access the crypto buying market. You would only need to sell the data asset enough times to cover your running costs, the rest is profit.
How to Start Building your own Data Assets
There’s nothing stopping you from uploading or creating your own data assets now and selling them on Ocean Market. If you have data assets that you think could be of interest to the buyer groups above you should consider publishing them.
We know this is all a little daunting though and sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin. This is one of the reasons why we started Ocean Missions. Ocean Missions is a community for those building data assets with on-chain and web3 data.
We’re just about to start building the first data asset within the community so if you’d like to join a group of people doing this for the very first time, come and join us on Discord. If you don’t want to be hands on but still want to follow the project you can follow us on Twitter.