ManaTee — An Ocean <-> Slack Odessey

Unlock power of Ocean Protocol right within your slack workspace

slack <-> manatee <-> ocean

I have been trying to tinker around and play with Ocean Protocol’s tech stack for a while now. I started sailing into Ocean Protocol sometime ago in August of 2019 when one of the core dev and my friend introduced me to the project. Crypto was interesting to me and I invested a bit into few lucrative and powerful projects including Ocean Protocol. What caught my attention in Ocean was combination of emerging domains and vision of founders Bruce Pon and Trent McConaghy. Normally, I don’t publish a write up on my projects but this one is special to me not only because of the efforts I put into it but also because of what came out of it.

I chose to build on Slack because of two hypothesis -

Users are comfortable operating in their familiar environment. They do not prefer to take efforts to install a new program or adopt a new interface.

Web3.0 adoption will improve by creating Bridges and interfaces connecting web2.0 tech to web3.0 tech like browser extensions, app plugins, cli modules etc.

Keeping above hypothesis in mind, I started brainstorming ideas to create something meaningful for the #dataeconomychallenge conducted by Ocean Protocol.

After researching where data users and tech crowd hang out online, I narrowed down my choice to Slack. But, instead of creating a conversational bot or slash command operated bot, I wanted to give users some native marketplace experience within slack. And diving a bit more deeper, I came across a brand new feature of Slack allowing users to build an App Home, which is basically a UI built with collection of static building blocks like text inputs, select box, buttons, images etc. By itself, these are static components but they are flexible enough to interact smartly when controlled by your app codebase, giving users a native marketplace feel.

Here’s a video of how ManaTee looks like and it’s capabilities.

demo of ManaTee app

This is just version 1.0 and I do plan to add more features to it -

• Ability to configure different networks and search across those networks.
• Ability to filter search results based on different criteria like category, price, tags, author etc.
• Ability to set alerts to watch out for needed data assets currently not available) as soon as they are published.
• Ability to consume right within workspace (currently this ability is limited by slack itself due to security issues, but there are work arounds that can be implemented)

I hope you liked ManaTee ☺️✌️ and feel free to mention any missing feature that you might feel is needed in comments below.