Goodbye Centralisation. Hello Dex on Ocean Protocol.

Decentralisation of networks and entities is picking up at a great pace and it is about time to say goodbye to centralised entities and embrace decentralisation.

To enable data sharing, secure data containers were not sufficient

Before joining Dex, I worked for two years on building a secure container for sharing of data to enable data analytics and AI — a place where organisations could merge sensitive, precious data without losing control of it. I didn’t have to convince organisations and governments on the power of data, but I hit a wall when it became clear they could lose control of their data once it left their premises.

My realisation was that, for the secure container to enable such data sharing, a neutral trusted data marketplace was needed. It is while looking at examples of data marketplaces (which could be the neutral places to enable data sharing), that I encountered the work of DEX.

DEX had proven itself as a leading Data as a Service (DaaS) company in Singapore, enabling data sharing. As a data marketplace, DEX tested many models and saw the same challenges to data sharing I experienced. This became even more apparent as we built on an international data sharing programme together.

Pain Points of a Centralised Data Marketplace

In early 2017 I joined DEX as a CEO to further my vision of making data available to the data consumers in a scalable, fair and sustainable way. At DEX we were in effect creating a centralised ecosystem. This posed not only huge scaling challenges but also raised questions about our readiness for new regulatory environments such as GDPR.

In these centralised data marketplaces, issues of scale were based on the following observations and experiences:

• Trust based on relationships and not on technology
• Contracts are on paper and not easily technically verifiable
• Audit based on trust and not on immutability
• Provenance-based on implied trust
• Pricing based on the power of the company in the value chain
• Security often being wrongly equated with privacy
• Privacy based on the power of the company and their stated T&C
• Numerous consent handling and enforcing issues
• While regulated companies are over governed, other companies run away with data creating monopolies
• Misaligned powers of buyers and sellers lead to ‘winner-takes-all’ scenarios.

Moreover, such misalignment of incentives made for unsustainable centralised marketplaces and silos.

When we held a major workshop to test our central data marketplace theories, we realised that we needed to pivot to trust frameworks which shifted regulation and compliance towards technology — trust built into the technology with a verifiable audit on data use.

We understood that we could not take away control from data providers and establish a winner-takes-all data marketplace.

We needed an open data marketplace where the data exchange protocol was open for all to adopt with the removal of friction on pricing, consent, compliance etc. so that the ecosystem could focus on building the future.

From Centralised Data Marketplace to Decentralised Data Marketplace

My background is in distributed systems and computer networks and, given decentralisation of communication with TCP/IP, I kept looking at distributed (and decentralisation) protocols for transactional databases. Blockchain took our sector by the storm and naturally I was drawn to it. Having experience in building an AI-based product company and deep connections to the AI and Machine Learning world, I could see the need for building a new data marketplace that integrated the use of Blockchain technologies. I believe that this technology will have very interesting answers for the issues encountered by centralised databases and networks in general.

Back in mid-2016, I met Trent from BigchainDB and I kept in touch with their developments in blockchain and scalable databases. I found in Trent’s blogs a reflection of exactly what I was thinking as viable ideas for future developments in big data and AI. Undoubtedly, BigchainDB had the most promising solution while DEX was pivoting towards a decentralised marketplace using trust frameworks with government oversight and industry and open data.

It is at this point that my team and I decided to build the perfect partnership — DEX and BigchainDB — to create an open source reference implementation of a decentralised marketplace (DEX) with a blockchain based data exchange protocol powering it — Ocean Protocol, a protocol that will power many data marketplaces in a sustainable and scalable way.

The Decentralised Marketplace we are building

We are building an open-source decentralised data and services marketplace on Ocean Protocol to share and monetize data and services to solve problems by removing friction on pricing, consent, and compliance.

In preparation for our next phase, we are now working closely with the Singapore public and private sectors to build sandboxes for different sectors to guide the building of the protocol and the marketplace. To further ensure that the right DNA for the marketplace is set, DEX is working with the government who will provide the oversight to make Ocean Protocol the data exchange protocol for all. More details on such developments will be released soon.

We will open source all possible elements of the marketplace and protocol as we continue to build. To put it simply, you can think of us as an Apache of data and services marketplaces — It will be a participative model and we will be open sourcing the products and tools, providing services to enterprises to join the Ocean Protocol ecosystem. We stand by the belief that opening access to the world’s data we can prevent data monopolies and accelerate AI development to continuously improve and advance the society.

So, Goodbye centralised data marketplaces.

Hello decentralisation. Join us as we build the future — DEX on Ocean Protocol