DataX and Its Role in the Emerging Data Economy
Data has emerged as one of the important assets in the last decade, and the Facebooks and the Googles of the world are enough to ascertain this fact. The rise of these brands was enabled by the massive amount of data that they collect, process, and use to their will. They use it to promote their business interests at the expense of users.
The centralised approach has given rise to these large conglomerates that at best take advantage of their users by selling their data to the highest bidders and — in the worst case — can’t even protect the private data of users against data breaches arising from cyber-attacks.
Although the decentralization drive has been accelerating globally, as users understand the value that their data creates, we are still far from the point where we get paid for providing the data. Creating a new data economy from the ground up is the answer, and the foundations are ready with the blockchain technology. But, having all the tools to earn monetary benefits from your data is one of the essential elements for the data economy to work.
The time has come when we can create a widespread data economy that is much more inclusive and can be a source of income for many people. Moreover, the past two years have boosted the number of people buying, selling, and trading crypto. There was a welcome move by El Salvador, which became the first country to recognize Bitcoin as a legal tender.
Such instances have brought the concept of decentralization much closer to the general public while contributing to the development of Web 3.0. In the context of data economy, you have great ecosystem projects like the Ocean Protocol, which acts as an enabler. A substantial network will need a lot of essential pieces to enable users to become an active part of the brewing data economy.
These reasons gave rise to the idea of DataX — a suite of data finance (DataFi) tools that aims to create a financial layer on datasets and data services. In simpler words, DataX is like a boat that empowers data owners and data investors to sail through the data economy space with ease. The idea is to offer users last-mile services and increase interoperability to invest, speculate, and trade between cryptocurrencies and datasets.
At its current development state, DataX aims to be a core component of the Ocean Protocol ecosystem, providing essential tools to fuel the growth of the new data economy. DataX’s most important feature is its ability to create money markets on datasets and make them liquid assets. For this, the DataX suite currently offers two valuable platforms; TradeX and StakeX. Let’s look at them a little more closely.
TradeX
TradeX is a decentralized exchange (DEX) interface that allows you to buy, sell, and trade datasets using ERC20 tokens. The goal is to efficiently enable data investors and traders to buy, sell and trade datasets with minimal transaction costs and the best user experience. We aim to simplify user onboarding to help mass adoption of the new data economy.
For instance, using our proprietary smart router contracts, TradeX will let you swap datatoken to datatoken, ERC20 tokens (like ETH, USDC, etc.) to OCEAN tokens, along with other similar operations in the data realm.
StakeX
StakeX is a platform that allows you to stake your OCEAN tokens in large data pools to earn swap fees and staking rewards. It is a product exclusive to the stakers, contributing to the data economy. Data Stakers who stakes on high-quality datasets stand a chance of earning substantial swap fees and data farming rewards (with upcoming Data Farming initiative by Ocean Protocol). StakeX will play a significant role towards adding massive value to datatokens once the Data Farming initiative is launched.
DataX currently supports Ocean Protocol deployment on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Energy Web and Moonbeams networks.
The Road Ahead
As DataX moves towards the path to unlocking a new data economy, it becomes our foremost duty to offer value to the users. We are creating tools that simplify user onboarding and accelerate the adoption of this new data paradigm. We are currently developing tools that contribute towards the growth of the Ocean Protocol and the new data economy as a whole.
To stay up-to-date on our progress, follow us on Twitter, or join our Discord Channel for all the latest updates!
