Ocean Protocol: Easy-To-Use MarketPlace, July AMA
Biweekly update 10th July — 24th July
Hi, everyone. Welcome, all the fans of the decentralized world. Ocean is here again. We are devoted to telling you the most exciting updates on Ocean Protocol. To cut a long story short, these guys have profiled themselves.
First, the development team have done a great job with Common MarketPlace — developers improved it. You would wonder what features have been added. Look! The group added more real-time feedback during the whole process in the UI. Moreover, the burner wallet has been added. This type of wallet is aimed to allow every user to download a free file without needing to sign up, set up a browser, etc. To be honest, when we tried to use Ocean for the first time, we were faced with the difficulties. Imagine how it was hard to use it for any basic user. So, now, we are thankful to the developers for this improvement. In our view, the Common MarketPlace becomes easy-to-use, and it can help Ocean to pull in people from all over the world. Well done, Ocean!
Second, we were happy to hear July AMA (Ask Me Anything). There are lots of questions and, of course, all of them are transcendent. To put it briefly, we chose the most important ones and wrote them below. However, we feel the need to say about IEO right now. As you could remember, not long ago Ocean Protocol holds an IEO. According to AMA, it raised 1125 BTC, and 85% (940 BTC) was disbursed for Foundation expenses within three weeks of the IEO. These included: BDB/DEX services contracts for building the network, ecosystem and business development, legal teams in US/SG and other jurisdictions, security, PR, marketing, and other launch services.
To conclude, the Ocean team made a significant improvement with its Common MarketPlace. We see that these guys collect eyes and we glad to view it. You should know we await good news from the Ocean foundation eagerly.
Development
GitHub metrics:
Development is ongoing. Commits on public GitHub appears regularly, several times a day.
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
- Refactored whitelisting to ensure that only specific entities can download a dataset
- Security tested by CertiK, who gave the smart contracts a very high positive score of 98%
- Worked more on implementing Layer 2 updates, moving towards bringing compute to data
- Refactored Brizo to make it more flexible — bringing all the commons methods that can be reused in multiple components to several utility libraries, plus making the code cleaner
- Released a number of updates in the Commons Marketplace, including:
- Tweaks to all of the relevant Ocean Protocol components in the background (Aquarius, Brizo, Secret Store, Squid-js) to be able to provide a faster data consume flow
- Re-seeding all existing assets stored in Nile Beta Commons Marketplace into Pacific Mainnet, meaning all assets have received a new Decentralized Identity (DID)
- Deploying Commons across multiple networks for testing purposes (including Pacific, Nile Beta Testnet, and Duero Testnet)
- Introduced a number of new features to Commons Marketplace, including:
- Creating a Report Dataset feature, with which community members can report datasets or poor quality or containing illegal content for team review
- Introducing a burner wallet feature, which significantly reduces the barrier of entry to access Commons data by removing the need for MetaMask
- Releasing the AI for Good channel
- Further defined architecture around OEP 8 (Metadata)
- Furthered research around Proof of Retrievability and creating a verifier network with incentives.
You can read more detailed information about Commons Marketplace updates and new features here.
The Commons Marketplace in Pacific Network
- Consume Flow Improvements
The developer team tweaked all of the relevant Ocean Protocol components in the background (Aquarius, Brizo, Secret Store, Squid-js) to be able to provide a faster consume flow. The team also added more real-time feedback during the whole process in the UI. In combination, these steps introduced a much more stable consume flow and a dramatic decrease in real and perceived time required to download an asset in Pacific.
- Burner Wallets: Commons Without Any Setup
Since the launch of Commons, a Web3-capable browser with a wallet setup was required before full functionality became available. Without a wallet, and without a Web3-capable browser, the search feature was possible, but publishing or downloading data sets were not, because those processes require a cryptographic signing process — something which can only be done with a Web3 wallet.
Developers found this to be one of the main pain points users had when interacting with a marketplace providing free and publicly available data. Using the right browser, relying on a browser plugin, setting up a wallet, possibly managing crypto tokens, and connecting to the right network proved to be tricky for the target groups.
Ocean has started adding some improvements to remedy this, and so that Ocean developers will be able to debug more quickly:
New Ocean Versions component on commons.oceanprotocol.com/about
But telling users to read some version numbers and act on it can’t be the solution. Ocean went back to the drawing board, created some concepts and prototypes, and in the end built a solution providing the smoothest user experience by eliminating any setup: introducing the so-called burner wallet concept. If you just want to browse and download some assets, this solution is all you need and you don’t even have to think about it.
- Meet The New Default
Any visitor to the Commons Marketplace will be switched to a burner wallet by default. In the background, a wallet is created in your browser from a random mnemonic with Truffle’s HD Wallet and pass that wallet to Web3 as the provider. Ocean then load its first generated account and also send some Pacific ETH (not to be confused with Ethereum Mainnet ETH) from the Faucet to that account, in order to cover eventual Gas costs for publishing and consuming.
Ocean tries to give you some persistence across sessions though, by storing that seed phrase in your browser’s localStorage, and on next visit Ocean will generate your wallet again from this seed phrase, so you’ll get the same account again. This persistence is needed so Ocean can provide you with some basic level of personalization, e.g. the History page will show the assets published by you, meaning by the Web3 account you are using.
Phew, that’s a lot of tech going on in the background — so let’s get back to the UI! All those tasks are moved aside and are not visible to end users. They essentially transform the previous view where consuming was not possible without a Web3 browser or MetaMask:
Into this view, unlocking the consume flow even for non-Web3 capable browsers without any user action required:
Social encounters
July AMA with Bruce and Aitor
Ocean posted the July AMA with Bruce and Aitor where they answered all the questions. So, you can read the full version here. However, we include the most interesting questions and answers.
J: This question is related about tokens distribution from @a_shishki. What av% of btc did Ocean team cashed right after ieo?
B: From the IEO, 1125 BTC was collected after fees from Bittrex International. 85% or 940 BTC was disbursed for Foundation expenses within 3 weeks of the IEO. These included: BDB/DEX services contracts for building the network, ecosystem and business development, legal teams in US/SG and other jurisdictions, security, PR, marketing, and other launch services. Specific to BigchainDB and DEX, once BTC has been distributed to them — they are responsible to manage their treasury independently of the Foundation. But the expectation is that they will continue to contribute to Ocean for at least 18 months and in parallel, develop sustainable business models. 15% of 185 BTC remains in Ocean treasury for grants, operational expenses, security audits, financial audit and legal.
J: Thanks Bruce. The next one is quite a long question. In the USA, there is a Federal Big Data Research and Development Plan. Within the plan, it is stated: “An open systems approach and a federated implementation would greatly enhance the ability to share and combine datasets within and among agencies and with the public”. Does Ocean Protocol have any specific strategy for setting the foundations to connect datasets between agencies and also with the public? This question isn’t necessarily just about the USA, but governments in general or government supported institutions. And btw questions are from (@DubbelUP) oops!
B: Thanks Jake — We’re seeing many governments and NGOs wanting to unlock public data that has been stuck in their in-house systems, inaccessible to researchers and scientists. We’re aware of these types of initiatives in Singapore, Dubai, across Europe, Canada and now the US. The architecture and source code of Ocean is open to everyone. As we develop and mature the product, we hope that governments, enterprises and developers start to assemble the building blocks that we and other projects have laid out, to liberate data. Outlier Ventures has spoken a lot about the Convergence Stack of web3 technologies and Ocean is one of the core components. There’s a host of technologies coming online from the web3 stack in the next months that will give everyone the capability to take control of their data so I’m optimistic that national initiatives can gain momentum.
Ep. 67 — The Data Economy — Insights from Ocean Protocol
“AI is the last mile to unlock the value of data- feeding large amounts of data into AI can help to unlock value and build new applications.”
Finance
Roadmap
- Seed November 2017
Ocean Token seed distribution
Technical Primer
Marketplace Framework
- Whitepapers February 2018
Released Technical Whitepaper & Business Whitepaper
- Pre-Launch March 2018
Ocean Token pre-launch distribution with 3500 Contributors in 100 countries
Activated community & built up the team
Announced partnership with IBM Watson AI XPRIZE
Advisor Program launched with 40 advisors in 20 cities
Bounty Program launched with 15 bounties and 88,000 PROCN tokens offered
- Plankton August 2018
Spree test network created
Ocean Enhancement Proposals introduced
Pleuston, a proof-of-concept data marketplace
- V1 Alpha (Trilobite) December 2018
Spree test network updated
Development and documentation of Ocean network components
Building global community: 130+ events, 35+ advisors, 120+ ambassadors in 40 countries, 15+ bounties
Partnerships & collaborations: MOBI Grand Challenge, Fitchain
- V1 Beta (Tethys) April 2019
Nile beta network deployed, with Service Execution Agreements, Access control, Metadata store
Commons marketplace
Project Manta Ray, a data science workflow powered by Ocean Protocol
More collaborations announced
- V1 2019 *
Production-ready Ocean network
Case specific marketplaces
Web 2.0 integration (for compute and storage services)
Improved Service Execution Agreements: staking conditions; slashing conditions; bounty rewards; competition rewards
- V2 2019 or 2020 *
Proof of Authority network
Initial PoA network governance enabling contract update prioritization and upgrades, and network optimization
Token migration from ETH Mainnet to Ocean PoA
- V3 TBD *
Verification and Validation of conditions and service (cryptographic proofs)
Incentives / network rewards for different actors (including verifiers)
Web 3.0 integration (for example: with other decentralized projects)
- V4 TBD *
Bounties on-chain (DASH style model)
Clan governance (enable marketplace specific governance, group governance, etc.)
- V5 TBD *
Fully permission-less Ocean Protocol
Balanced governance: transparent process for updating protocol that balances stakeholder needs (keepers, service providers, curators, validators)
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Considering that Ocean Protocol is not an old project and its IEO was conducted only on 2nd May 2019, Ocean has a great community.
Social media dynamics:
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Ocean Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
