Primer on DataDAO
In this post I will share the concept of the DataDAO project we are releasing today, the inspiration, narrative and roadmap.
Inspiration
Today’s data economy is controlled by platforms and tech giants. Users of a product are usually handing over an ocean of data points about their preferences, usage and sometimes private information, without getting a return, besides using a freemium service. By now it’s clear to all that if you don’t pay to use the product — you are the product, and indeed, most of these platforms business model is based on datamining, advertising and all sort of databased models
The Shift
Crypto networks emerge to make a revolution in every domain of our lives.
Bitcoin and later Ethereum introduced the concept of trustless value exchange and then programable money. Ocean Protocol expended on the same notion and introduced the ability to trade data as a new type of asset class, tokenized via Ocean Protocol’s v3 DataTokens. a peer-to-peer, one-to-one direct data exchange protocol.
Automatic Market Making mechanism, (AMM’s like Uniswap, Balancer) introduced the ability to pool together funding in order to create a liquidity pool that serves as a decentralized asset exchange vehicle. This mechanism allowed the pooling of capital from multiple sources, as big as few USD, into a valuable large pool that generates fees to it’s liquidity providers.
The value of each isolated individual liquidity is not valuable in it’s own, but the ability of them to pool together unlock a tremendous amount of value
DataDAO is taking the next phase in the evolution of decentralized data marketplaces, and creates the infrastructure for pooling data together, co-owning and monetizing it. A new Many-to-One data exchange protocol.
The mission
DataDAO mission is to allow the pooling of data assets into a meaningful and valuable dataset who’s value is greater than the sum of it’s parts alone. Laying the foundations to a fairer and more inclusive value distribution in any product or platform, to the members who actually generate it.
It also serves as a demand generating tool — anyone in need for specific data set can source this data from the community, and the community can join forces together to create it.
Compiling together element from DeFi, decentralized governance and data marketplace, we believe all the pieces that are needed to bring such a product to market exist, and with the right design, technology stack, and crypto economics / incentive mechanism, we can showcase the value such a tool can unlock.
The fact a DataDAO by definition is a P2P tool, the expensive process of sourcing and generating a dataset can be significantly reduced, cutting operational costs in everything related with data curation , data aggregation, data annotation and labeling, shifting more value to the buyer and creators.
Roadmap
We launch the tool in alpha as part of our submission to the Data Economy Challenge of Ocean Protocol.
In it’s first public iteration, we aim to test the water by announcing the project launch campaign — Ocean Wiki — an attempt to source “everything about X” dataset, and examine participation, user flow and gain valuable feedback from the community, that will be used in the next phases of developments
Next step planned will be our Alpha MVP — we will process all the learnings from the launch campaign, and narrow down a specific use case that is solving a concrete problem — it could be a specific dataset in need, or a specific type of action needed (i.e — curation, labeling, annotation). We then plan to iterate on the first version and improve it to release a tool that solve that problem, leveraging the DataDAO design.
We already have a list of key questions and issues to be solved — how do you ensure a specific dataset is valid ? how do you avoid spamming ? how do you solve the issue of high transaction gas costs ? what prevent from a contributor to remove his data after getting access to the DAO pool, and other valid questions the project will need to tackle in this journey. We have plans to tackle all of the above and more, and it will be included in the project roadmap
We also have the key design milestones mapped — from decentralized data storage, scalability solutions, staking mechanism, data validation functions and other roles a node operator will take in the DataDAO economy, and we expect this list to further grow and change as the project grows.
What’s next?
We have tons of ideas and possible directions, but we think at this early stage, the only thing we need to do is listen to the market and identify the best path forward. Having said that, we do know of several key principals in our journey to achieve the project mission:
1. Community — a crypto project is all about it’s community, and our first goal is to gather a core group of contributors and people that are passionate as we are about this
2. Focus — We want to succeed in solving problems and therefore we are aiming to be extremely focused on a key problem to tackle. This will help validate the model, the need and will open a whole lot of opportunities to further grow.
3. Decentralization — this is an open-source project and as such our doors are open to all from day1. Yet, we believe that in the first steps a project needs steering, and we plan to lead it up until a stage it is stable enough and gathered enough interest from the community to take it onwards through decentralized governance.
Call to action!
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