OCEAN, or the Ocean Market app, is where both data owners and consumers can connect with data by either means of publishing it, discovering it or consume it, all of which in a private manner.

To do so, OCEAN holders must stake liquidity to data pools.

Ocean libraries is where developers build both data wallets and data marketplaces.

Ocean is built over the Ethereum blockchain and uses “datatokens” as to what can be considered gate keepers of the data sets, which means that data wallets, data exchanges and other data related services can only be accessed via leveraging.

Ocean aims at making data sets on its platform available to everyone who needs it but may not have the required resources to store to those who do, without having said data leave their hands.

By providing data, users are awarded with OCEAN, which is Ocean’s very own native cryptocurrency.

The Ocean Protocol Explained

Smart contracts ensure that each Ocean datatoken may be exchangeable within Ethereum’s blockchain as well as in its decentralized applications. To do so, three main components are needed:

1. Providers: which mind datatokens and sell the respective right of access to off-chain data sets

2. Consumers: which purchase the datatokens and thus redeem their access to the datasets in question

3. Marketplaces: where providers and consumers connect, and transactions happen

The Ocean Market works as an automated market maker an its design aims at facilitating both the mining process as well as the exchange of datatokens between users.

The Ocean Market

The Ocean Market, where datatokens are publicly available for trade, is an automated market maker (AMM) that was built to facilitate the minting and exchange of datatokens.

It uses liquidity pools which allow each trade to settle via smart contracts.

Datatokens require its provider to provide several information regarding it, such as title, description, URL where the data can be found, and a price.

When consumers redeem the datatoken, the data becomes decrypted and available for download.

The History Behind the Ocean Protocol

The Ocean Protocol is the vision of Bruce Pon and Trent McConaghy. It was founded in 2017 and is backed by the Ocean Protocol Foundation, a Singapore based non-profit organization, and the OceanDAO. It raised an estimate $26 million USD via token offerings.