Ocean Protocol AMA with Crypto Society Recap -featuring Bruce Pon

Crypto Society

14 min readFeb 5, 2021

Bruce Pon,

Hi Everyone

Nice to be here

Bilo 2000,

Here is a link to Bruce’s Bio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nJFM2RMHZCF_vLtZdbGEw7Qec_iqJVYm/view?usp=sharing

Bilo 2000,

Welcome Bruce. It is both an honour and a pleasure to have you here with us today!

Bruce Pon,

I heard good things about this group

Bilo 2000,

It’s all true😁

For our first question, What is the Ocean coin used for? Can you describe the Tokenomics?

Bruce Pon,

Sure

In 2017 when we were working to design $OCEAN, the field of token engineering was very young and fresh.

In fact, Trent McConaghy kicked off the token engineering movement along with Mike Zargham and a couple of others. $OCEAN was originally designed as a utility token for activating Ocean smart contracts.

But in the meantime, the uses have expanded. $OCEAN can be used to:

1. Default pairing for any datatoken for staking

2. Buy / sell Datatokens

3. Vote on OceanDAO proposals

4. Emissions of OCEAN for network rewards

5. Used to pay fee commission in the Ocean Market, a portion of which is burned.

The token supply has been set since 2017 to 1.4 billion $OCEAN — when we did the initial fundraising.

In this model, 10% of tokens went to the core team of 50 at that time, 20% to investors, 20% to the Foundation for community efforts and 50% to the network rewards.

To date, 610m tokens have been minted, with 420m in circulation. The remaining tokens are held by Ocean Foundation and will be transferred to the community led OceanDAO, hopefully in 2022.

OceanDAO got kicked off in December 2020 and operates as a grants DAO. Grants can be given to people that perform useful activities on the network. The optimal balance is where the token supply grows with the value of the network and serve to accelerate adoption of the technology. Ultimately, it is the community that will decide the token inflation rate in the long-term.

Bilo 2000,

That’s fantastic. We see that there is a very large Ocean community and its growth has been very organic

Thanks for all the info

Recently it was announced that Secret Network has partnered with Ocean Protocol. It is no secret that we at CS are huge fans of both projects. Tor is often engaged in our chat and may actually be here right now maybe? How did this partnership come about?

Bruce Pon,

Tor Bair told a story on Secret Podcast on how we met.

Let me see if I can fish out the link

I was in MIT in 2015 giving a lecture and he was a student in the audience. He came up afterwards very excited and I encouraged him to join a blockchain project in Boston or if necessary to move to San Francisco. It turns out that Enigma was being built based on research at MIT and Tor found them. He is one of the best community leaders in the space and we took a lot of inspiration from his example in building the Ocean community.

From there, we’ve kept a friendly, collaborative relationship with them throughout. We were looking for ways to collaborate but until both of our technology stacks were built and mature, it was like pushing a square peg into a round one.

Now that both projects have hit a level of project maturity, partnering with Secret Network is a natural choice and progression to grow our ecosystems and give developers more possibilities to build web3 applications.

Here’s the link — https://soundcloud.com/sharing-secrets/ep-12-bruce-pon-ocean-protocol

$OCEAN is supported on the Secret Ethereum bridge, which can be used to secure their network. We’re researching further ways to integrate Secret Network with Ocean Protocol, so that data publishers on Ocean Market no longer have to choose between convenience versus full trustlessness. The collaboration gives us the opportunity to add Secret’s world-leading privacy infrastructure to Ocean V3 to offer users more options for secure data sharing.

We also really appreciate that they sponsored a bonus prize for the Ocean Data Economy Challenge.

Bilo 2000,

Yes I saw that. It’s a great choice for a partnership. Tor and you together = Success for sure

The Ocean Marketplace launch created a wave of fomo towards OCEAN as well as data sets. I am sure there were many unexpected outcomes from the launch, including some bad actors that took advantage of others and I’m curious as to what the biggest lessons learned from the early betaphase by Ocean Protocol and what has been done to remedy them?

LB,

@thisistor

Bruce Pon,

The reception to Ocean Market was definitely a surprise.

On the first day, we had dozens of data sets. Within one week, 500 with over $2m in liquidity provided by the community. In the second week, we had 21,000 users with a peak of 7,000 in one day. In the third week, we had maxed out all our resources. We asked the community to slow it down, so we could catch up. But in the meantime the high ETH gas prices slowed things down.

Just as every market experiences growing pains when it launches, we saw similar dynamics happening to datasets. We saw wild swings in prices for days because people were adding in and taking out liquidity from datasets, essentially rugpulling on each other and giving many people a bad experience. The concept of staking on datasets is good, but people weren’t aware, and neither were we, that the dynamics that had played out through early 2020 on Uniswap would also happen on Ocean Market.

Bilo 2000,

ETH Gas price doesn’t seem to be improving 😕

Bruce Pon,

We’ve saw a whole bunch of things that we didn’t expect so early, including intellectual property violations and objectionable content with letters received from lawyers. To fight this, we implemented a crowdsourced blocklist that is public and community managed. We were lucky to respond quickly on this one because we didn’t want Ocean Market to get a bad reputation as a place where IP violations run rampant.

Tor Bair 𝕊 [Secret / SCRT],

Hi @brucepon, you’re killing it :)

Bruce Pon,

Hi Tor

Bruce Pon,

To better identify publishers and a whitelist of authorized data partners, we’ve integrated with 3box, which allows for publisher profiles and verified social links. These verified profiles are now the main trust signal in Ocean Market.

Nice to see you here man (@TOR)

Something more fundamental. We tied the price of the dataset to the liquidity pool, which means that there can be a disconnect between the “real” value of the data and the price on Ocean Market — good or bad.

Some cases happen where a dataset is priced at, say $10,000 — but its real world value might only be $100 — so obviously, a consumer won’t buy it. We’re working out these kinks so that there’s a better demarcation on consumption and pricing.

And with Ethereum gas prices so high, it’s uneconomical to use Ocean Market for many. We are putting the highest priority on getting Ocean smart contract and Ocean Market onto other chains. We’ve announced a project on Kusama, in cooperation with Moonbeam, which will bring the transaction costs down significantly. Look for other announcements where Ocean is ported to other EVM compatible chains.

Bilo 2000,

Thanks for that. This was very informative and encouraging to read as many where concerned by this and am sure will be glad and reassured if they weren’t already.

Was the move to create the Ocean based stable coin, $OCEANO, part of that learning experience?

Bruce Pon,

Our number one priority is to make sure that Ocean technology is fully integrated and seamless with DeFi. For this, we will be promiscuous with all DeFi projects so that developers have the broadest range of building blocks to build web3 applications.

One advantage of the $OceanO stablecoin is that publishers and consumers will be able to price and buy datasets with certainty on price. Given the inherent fluctuation in the value of $OCEAN on exchanges, $OceanO serves to give people stability and confidence when consuming or pricing assets.

If there are other DeFi native projects that want to collaborate, we’re going to be very supportive.

Bruce Pon,

Nice gif

Bilo 2000,

We have a few in mind😉 will chat to you about them

Talking about OceanO, what was it that helped make the decision to partner with OpenDAO and UMA Network for assistance in its creation?

Bruce Pon,

OpenDAO came to us with a proposal and given their track record and development skills, we agreed to proceed to support bringing the $OceanO stablecoin to market.

They could have done it without our involvement

Bruce Pon,

The creation of synthetic $OceanO gives people full control of their assets while extending the potential use cases of the Ocean token.

So we applaud OpenDAO for initiating this and using the innovative technology developed by UMA Protocol.

Bilo 2000,

Thanks Bruce.

Recently it was announced you created a partnership with Moonbeam. I’ve read in Documents previously that you have interest in bridging to the Cosmos ecosystem. And of course, there is the working group with Secret Network. What other areas of interest are there for Ocean Protocol in the cryptosphere? xDai-STAKE? Matic? The 2nd layer Ethereum compatibility of Plasm Network? Solana?

Bruce Pon,

Ocean Protocol is an L2 protocol meaning that it can live on many different chains. The easiest are EVM compatible chains.

Polkadot / Kusama, Cosmos, Secret, xDAI, MATIC and many other L1 chains can be suitable for Ocean.

Before deciding to work with Moonbeam, we seriously considered xDAI first.

Bilo 2000,

👀

Bruce Pon,

But with the Polkadot developer community expanding so rapidly and so quickly, it makes sense to ride with the ecosystem where the most experimentation can happen the fastest.

But look out for more. We might aim to have Ocean ported to other L1 chains in 2021.

Bilo 2000,

👀👀👀

Bruce Pon,

The key realization is that we can’t solve the data sharing problem alone. We need the developers to try out different ideas. And if we bring the primitives, building blocks and integrations, there’s more chance for serendipity to happen

Bilo 2000,

Thanks — Data sharing is the most essential basic part of everything isn’t it? Securely sharing and monetizing data will shatter all glass ceilings.

Bruce Pon,

That’s the plan

Bilo 2000,

We all know Polkadot will be a big deal, and many projects will want to have a bridge to it. That said, Kusama will come first. Is Ocean Protocol planning on launching a data market on a Kusama-based network, or is it waiting for Polkadot?

Bruce Pon,

Kusama is more experimental and edgy and the pace of development on Kusama happens faster. Given how fast web3 moves, this is the right network for Ocean to deploy to now.

We’ve been friends with Polkadot since 2016. We were one of the first partners that Polkadot put on their website and were excited that Polkadot offers state-of-the-art technology, excellent performance and low transaction fees to allow our Ocean Market to thrive.

When Polkadot is ready, there will be Ocean smart contracts and Ocean Market deployed.

Bilo 2000,

Fetch.ai has been mentioned by Ocean Protocol team members as a great example of compute-to-data. I heard that compute-to-data is coming sooner than expected to Ocean Protocol. How far off is this landmark, and will Fetch.ai be an earlier supplier of AI-as-a-service?

Bruce Pon,

Ocean V2 was released in mid-2020. It added the ability to buy & sell private data while retaining privacy, via the Ocean Compute-to-Data feature. We’re working on bringing this feature to Ocean Market in Q1/2021.

With Fetch, it’s a similar story as with Secret. We’re waiting for the right time to collaborate meaningfully. I’m optimistic that it can happen in 2021.

Bilo 2000,

Great! Fetch is another favourite of ours

Bilo 2000,

Given the privacy data sharing nature at the centre of Ocean Protocol, has Ocean protocol been thinking of working with an oracle solution?

Bruce Pon,

Oracles are essential in a web3 world.

I believe that we are already integrated with Chainlink

One of the possibilities is to turn Chainlink feeds into monetizable data streams on Ocean Market. This would be fantastic for the entire ecosystem.

Bilo 2000,

That’s great. Thanks Bruce for answering these questions. Do you have anything you would like to add that we haven’t discussed above before we open the chat up to live questions and those wishing to say hi?

Bruce Pon,

I’m good.

I like taking questions

Bilo 2000,

We will now open up the chat

🍀LAN ANH 🍀 ( $OCEAN $ORAI $NEO)🎅🎁❄

HELLO BRUCE PON 🖖🖖

You can choose 1 of 2 questions to answer:

1. On the Ocean Protocol website there is a new option for COLLABORATORS. How can a person collaborate with you? What are the requirements to be part of your team?

2. There are many projects dedicated to the field of data. How does Ocean Protocol plan to stand out in such a competitive market? What are the strengths of the Project?

Bruce Pon

1. We opened up a page where collaborators can self-identify themselves. They only need to find the repo in Github to do it.

Ocean Protocol stays essential by staying permissionless, but also driving at a fast pace.

🎑🎑The Hien Pham🎑🎑,

Adoption & Awareness about Platform is very important for any Creator as well as Users! So, What are your plans to attract More users as well as Creators with Non-crypto users too ?

Bruce Pon

This is a macro challenge for the entire community. We’re only now getting broader awareness and more importantly acceptance for BTC.

ETH is next

Then we’ll have the rest of the web3 stack coming along. It’s a long journey, but all of you are in the right place to watch, participate and make it happen

Crypto Lone Wolf 🦈,

Let’s admit it, with cryptocurrencies volatility is part of the fun (of course being a good trader) with that feature out, hoe is Ocean Protocol still interesting for traders and investors? How do them earn revenues?

Bruce Pon

Stake on Secret, Bancor, and AllianceBlock to earn yield. Stake on Ocean Market.

We’ll be launching a data farming program in 2021. Stay tuned.

Max Mills | DEXTools CM,

Other than automotive, healthcare, and logistics, what are the next major industries do you see Ocean entering next?

Bruce Pon

I think cities and government use cases can come to the forefront. Let’s see how fast they can move.

Một Chút Phở,

If any industry want to partnership with ocean protocol, how it be??tell me the Process…

Bruce Pon,

integrate with us. It’s that simple

Tolga,

Great article by Diksha on Ocean Protocol blog “How Search Engines use our Data against us”

What do you think about Clubhouse? What can voice data and eventually big voice data might be used or misused by tech companies? As a statistician I really wonder how Ocean reacts to data sets in methodology.

Bruce Pon

Clubhouse is an interesting new platform. I think that voice recordings is something where there’s a clear value in AI — how many audio recordings are out there that can be turned into value by having a transcript.

Clubhouse is going to be a really good platform for experimenting with communities.

Early, but exciting.

Djabarou Niederheide,

What was your biggest challenge creating Ocean and what u would suggest new creators?

Bruce Pon

It’s such a difficult journey. Unbelievably difficult. You need to assemble a team of competent folks who are values aligned. You also have to be naive because if you really think about the problem you’re solving — if you’re not an optimist, it’s better not to start

Gwendolyn Will

Can you tell us about the motivation and benefits for investors to keep the OCEAN token in the long run? What plans do you have to help drive the demand and scarcity of the OCEAN token?

Bruce Pon

If Ocean becomes the default cryptocurrency for the Data Economy, hodlers will probably be well-rewarded

Oleta Dickens

I would like to be a part of your project team . Are there any ambassadorial deals or job a crypto enthusiast like me can be part of and what are your requirement?

Bruce Pon,

Ambassador roles are always open. You need to go through the Ocean Academy. Once done, Ambassadors pick new ambassadors.

TheCryptoKareBear JeramooCaribou $B,

Private data is the most valuable data because it can be used to improve research & business outcomes. However concerns over privacy & control make it hard to access. Question, Are there ways these concerns could be addressed with Compute-to-Data?

Bruce Pon,

Compute to Data solves some of the problems. but there are others like integrating with protocols like Secret, Oasis and others.

I think I’m done with most of the questions @Bilo_2000

Anatolian Fire,

I really like Ocean Protocol datatoken list page. I wonder why all tokens have 6 letters and 2 digits as ticker?

And do you have plans to be tokenized version of Statista?

Bruce Pon,

6 characters was a design decision to reduce cognitive load. Others that implement forks of Ocean Market can do-away with the 6 characters if they want

Daniel P

Hey Bruce, thanks for your answers so far. One question from my side: I checked the roadmap and in Q2 you are going to introduce more flexible fees. What exactly does this mean?

Bruce Pon

Means that publishers can decide how much to charge and how much each staker gets per transaction. Right now, there isn’t any cut taken from liquidity transactions — but maybe the publisher thinks this gives stakers a better deal

Wolf of Wallstonks

thanks @brucepon ! What do you think how Ocean will effect industry 4.0 ?

How can different platforms benefit from connecting to your OCEAN PROTOCOL?

Bruce Pon

Data drives Industry 4.0.

J. Albrecht

Hello Bruce Pon! Nice to meet you and your awesome project! Do you think, what do you think how OCEAN will be in 5 years ?

Bruce Pon

5 years is a long time away. When I think about what we accomplished until now, I think that in 5 years, the idea of the Data Economy will be accepted by everyone. How far we go along this path is another question. But no doubt, we will have $1 Billion in NFTs and data on blockchains

❣️Charmaine Eulalia ❣️,

@brucepon you mentioned moving to another chain if community developers wanted to be funded to do that. Will that trigger a new coin to be issued to OCEAN holders or make the current OCEAN coins? E.g. this happened with TRIG and TRIGX — no direct transfer. Coin holders were left with coins that were worthless. Obviously companies like Amazon have loyalty with shareholders, but the same can’t necessarily be applied in this instance.

Bruce Pon

Ocean on ETH with ERC20 is the default for $OCEAN, regardless of how many other L1 chains are integrated. Token bridges are straightforward and tested by now (see SCRT Network), so no need to worry

Bilo 2000