Ocean Market: find, publish, and trade DATA like stocks (2024)

Hello, this is the Library of Creations, where we simply show creations. Can be paintings, businesses, ideas, anything created by the mind of a human.

For this article, we are going to be talking about Ocean Market.

If you’d prefer the video version of this, here is the link.

My goal is to explain Ocean Market at a very general, non-technical level so that even a 10 year old could understand.

Ocean Market is an open-source community marketplace for data.

That may be a little confusing because you may think, “what’s so useful about data, why would anyone want to buy and sell data?”

Maybe you’re not thinking that, maybe you know how valuable data is to big companies like Google and Facebook.

Well data is not just valuable to those big companies. Ocean Market is going to make it obvious that data is valuable to everyone. At the same time, they are taking power away from huge companies that currently own all the data and giving everyone a chance to own the data they think is valuable.

So, I think about this from the perspective of: who is going to use this and what will they get from it?

Well, regular people and organizations are going to be using Ocean Market.

Organizations have been buying and selling data for a long time now. However, they never bought and sold data in a marketplace that is so open and decentralized.

Prior to Ocean Market, regular people haven’t had access to buying and selling data. This is huge. Data is one of the most valuable assets in the world and it only gets more and more valuable. So giving this power to the public in a decentralized way is going to change society for the better. I’ll go a bit more in depth why I think that.

In my mind there are three big reasons why both regular people and organizations will be using Ocean Market:

Just like with a company on the stock market, now people will be able to invest into data assets that they think are valuable in the same way that people invest into companies because they think they are valuable or profitable. In short, they like the data.

I suspect organizations will do the same thing. However, I think they will do less investor type buying and more buying because they can actually use the data, which I’ll talk about a bit later.

With tons of data being thrown out there, a lot of people and groups are going to invest in it because they are passionate about the idea. Imagine you are the CEO of some big company and you survived cancer at some point. If you saw an opportunity to invest into something that can greatly benefit people currently dealing with cancer, would you do it? Absolutely!

It doesn’t even have to be that deep though, some people may see data that is going towards psychedelics research. Maybe they have no connection to psychedelics, but they heard that these new methods are being used more and more to help people with mental health issues, so they decide to invest money to that cause by buying data tokens offered because of the Ocean Market.

I think it will be the same for organizations. Maybe investing money into the data tokens of other groups can be a kind gesture or a way to show partnership. Organizations in the same area of work could boost each other up by investing in each other, breaking the cycle of organizations that have monopolies on everything.

Facebook would hate this kind of talk, but it is inevitable and much better for the world.

One up and coming example of this idea is a project called VitaDAO. They will allow researchers and scientist to provide data to the community and then the community will buy ownership of the data in order to fund research and other scientific processes. This will greatly accelerate scientific progress which in turn means less people dying early and less people suffering…which is good because pain sucks. If you want to know more about that project, you can check out the video here.

In my opinion, this is pretty much the most important part because it makes the data useful. If the data was posted, but no one could use it, what would be the point?

Honestly, the use-cases here are endless. Both regular people and organizations could use posted data for so many different reasons.

All the information you see on devices is because of data. Posts you make on Facebook are stored as data. Your account info is stored as data. When you go to the doctor, any health issues you may have are stored as data. Video games save your progress by storing data relative to what you have done so far. Data is everywhere in the digital world and used by every single system.

Ocean Market sparks interest in the eyes of artificial intelligence companies because data is what feeds those kinds of companies. The AI needs as much data as possible to learn as much as possible, the same way humans learn.

So, I went over the use-cases, but never covered how it really works. How can you own data?

Any data that is posted has an associated data token with a name. This is similar to how companies on the stock exchange have a ticker symbol. You can find the data token and then buy it.

There are several complexities to these tokens, I’ll overview a few of those.

1: The prices of the tokens can be fixed, for example, it could cost one single OCEAN token to buy one data token OR the price can be dynamic and determined by the market, which has its own complexities.

2: If desired, a data token can have a liquidity pool for investors. You can Google liquidity pools if you’d like, but that’s a huge topic.

3: I’m not sure if it is out yet, but I know Ocean plans to give data providers the option to make their data private, but still posted on the market. So, if the data was public, anyone that bought it could download it and see it. However, if the data was private, people would not be able to download it or see it, but they could still use it, ensuring privacy. I believe they are calling this compute-to-data. You can’t see it, but you can use it.

I think a lot of the complexities of this idea scare people away because it’s a lot to learn. However, the important thing to remember is that you can buy data just like a stock and after buying, you can use that data if you desire.

So, even just now I made that a bit too complicated. To sum it up, I would say that Ocean Market allows you to buy, sell, and use data.