[Founder Talk] How Blockchain unlocks value in data with Bruce Pon from Ocean Protocol

Today’s guest is Bruce Pon, CEO of BigchainDB and founder of Ocean Protocol. We began our conversation by probing into the value of data as an asset, what are the problems preventing the value of data being unlocked and how Ocean is solving that problem by building a protocol for data sharing, how it envisions global adoption through community building and industry partnerships. We discussed about the Ocean token – its usage, value creation and learnings from its IEO and ICO. Finally, we imagined a future where Ocean Protocol becomes the de facto protocol for access control and an Ocean DAO driven entirely by its contributors.

A personal disclaimer before we begin – I am a holder of Ocean Token since March 2019.

Key highlights from our conversation

Data is worth at least as much as land Data is the new asset that people are going to be able to monetize, securitize, use as collateral. The hypothesis is that data is worth at least as much as land which is estimated to be worth $7trillion by an economist. This belief is further reinforced by the fact that the top 10 most valuable companies in the world today are mostly internet platforms, information platforms.

Blockchain is the middle layer between data provider and data buyer The key problem with centralised data marketplaces is that they need to have custody of your data which results in the need for trust – data providers need to trust that the data marketplaces can manage your data well, keep it secure and provide you with a full audit trail. This often limits data sharing. What blockchain can do is to act as a trusted middle layer – the custodian for data, providing the data providers the full control of their data.

The Ocean Protocol is fundamentally an access control system.

Currently, there aren't any other protocols that look at data sharing as an access control problem. Ocean is the access control layer. In five years, what I want is Ocean being seen as the protocol that everybody follows to use for access control.

The usage and value accrual of Ocean Token At the very core, any crypto token can be used as a means of exchange. In the case of Ocean token, it is the means of exchange within Ocean Protocol. So that's the base level.

Second thing. And this is since the inception of the proof of authority network, you can use Ocean tokens to kickstart smart contracts on our proof of authority network. So right there was utility of this kind of a native token for a unique network.

Moving into the future, we're going to have some other exciting kind of uses of the Ocean token. Number one is we're going to kickstart the network rewards. This is 51% of the total supply that we've talked about from the very beginning. That is kind of a discount token model that allows value to come back into the ecosystem if people are using the protocol. And then there's another use case where we have for the Ocean token, which is governance. That's a little preview of what we're going to be releasing later on this year.

In the blockchain space, you can't separate speculation from utility from kind of global adoption. I think it all plays together. I see speculation very, very optimistically. It is viewed as this interplay between builders, speculators and the existing kind of traditional world where we are trying to disrupt.

Content at a glance with time-code

(01.36) Bruce’s background story (03.18) BigchainDB and Ocean Protocol explained (05.57) Data as an asset is worth at least as much as land (07.38) Core problems in data that Ocean Protocol is solving (17.56) How Ocean Protocol is designed to overcome trust, privacy and security of data (20.30) Uses cases and industry partnerships of Ocean Protocol (24.59) Importance of community for decentralised projects like Ocean Protocol (27.30) The usage and value accrual of Ocean Token (33.03) Learning from Ocean’s failed IEO (36.47) The value of speculation within Crypto (39.38) The future of Ocean Protocol imagined

Episode linksBigchainDB: https://www.bigchaindb.com/ Ocean Protocol: https://oceanprotocol.com/ Ocean’s blog post on IEO: https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/what-happened-with-the-ieo-54cc5c6c3db9

ChainLink: https://chain.link/