A data-marketplace for buying, selling datasets and earning interests through staking powered by Ocean Protocol.
Link to the app
Intro
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes
With the advent of technology and its penetration into the daily life of people, there has an exponential growth in the consumption and generation of data. Data generated from various sources is proving a key factor for deciding for product design, decision making, root-cause analysis. But, a major part of this data remains unpublished and hence, is missing from being explored, analyzed, and monetized. Wouldn’t be it awesome if anyone can publish the data they have or search for the data they need and maintaining anonymity!
Problem
A data-marketplace has to provide substantial assurance to the users that their identity is securely handled. So, maintaining anonymity and privacy is very critical and can be a dealer breaker.
A data-marketplace has to ensure protection against the bad actors in the system who try to harm the ecosystem through data stealing, service disruption, impersonation, etc.
It is an incredibility complex to decide the price of datasets. Garbage for someone can be gold for someone else. So, it is vital to have a mechanism that correctly and equitably determines the pricing of datasets.
The list of problems is not exhaustive but gives a brief idea about the challenges a marketplace has to overcome to provide services to the users.
Solution
Blockchain technology has been developed to keep the ecosystem decentralized, provide security, and keep applications temper free.
Powered by these features, Ocean Protocol provides components to build a data economy which helps to overcome the challenges mentioned above. Datapolis is a data-marketplace built using the Ocean Protocol tech-stack and thus leverages the features of blockchain technology.
Features
- Privacy and anonymity: Users can simply connect their web3 wallet to explore, publish, buy datasets. No centralized server for user authentication and identity management!
- Dataset pricing: In Datapolis, each dataset is associated with an ERC20 token called Datatoken. To buy a dataset, users need to buy associated datatoken through an Automated Market Maker (AMM) — which is Uniswap in this case. To know more about pricing please follow this link here.
- Incentives for staking: Users can earn rewards through commissions by providing liquidity in the datatoken pools. Typically, these pools are a pair of OceanToken-Datatoken but, it can also be ERC-20 Token — Datatoken.
Use cases
- Data-scientists can buy the datasets to build train the machine learning models and build AI product
- Blockchain enthusiast: Anyone can stake the tokens in the liquidity pools to provide liquidity and earn incentives for the same.
- Anyone can publish the data asset they have and monetize the data.
How it works
Users simply connect their crypto wallets like metamask to search the datasets, Buy or Publish assets.
User needs to obtain the datatokens to buy any published asset on the marketplace. This is possible by exchanging the existing Ocean Tokens or any ERC-20 token (if the exchange has pair and enough liquidity).
The data published on the Datapolis is owned by the publisher. i.e. Publisher is the custodian of the data. Datapolis knows only the meta-data of the published asset. The URLs of the datasets are stored in encrypted format in the meta-data and thus, providing security against stealing the data.
