Singapore - September 24, 2020 — Ocean Protocol is partnering with Balancer Labs to launch Ocean Market, an open-source community marketplace for data and the world’s first Initial Data Offering (IDO) launchpad. Powered by Balancer’s Automated Market Maker (AMM) technology and Ocean Protocol’s datatokens, Ocean Market offers automated data price discovery , OCEAN staking, and authentic data curation.
Ocean Protocol helps developers build marketplaces and other apps to privately & securely publish, exchange, and consume data. Balancer is a protocol for programmable liquidity. Its highly flexible AMM technology has led to more than 700M USD in assets under management.
Ocean Protocol chose Balancer AMM technology for the release of Ocean Market for several reasons. First, Balancer lightens the liquidity burden for publishers. Balancer AMMs uniquely allow non-equal weights among tokens. This allows pools with 90% weight to the datatoken and 10% to OCEAN. This is 1/5 of the OCEAN needed compared to typical 50-50 pools. Second, Balancer gives the possibility for dynamically changing weights to bootstrap liquidity and mitigate impermanent loss. Finally, the teams have collaborated for years, most notably in Ocean Founder Trent McConaghy’s capacity as an advisor to Balancer Labs.
Data marketplaces are essential to Ocean’s mission to equalize the opportunity to access and monetize data. Past data marketplaces have had several issues: centralized control which requires the data publisher to trust the marketplace operator, loss of privacy, difficulty in determining price, and more.
Ocean Market resolves these issues. It makes it easy to publish data services as ERC20 datatokens, to auto-price data, to discover data, to purchase datatokens, and to consume datatokens as data services. This is all performed on a decentralized blockchain substrate. Privacy is preserved with compute-to-data technology, and price discovery is done through Balancer AMMs. Developers and entrepreneurs can fork Ocean Market to build their own data marketplaces.
Data is a 377B EUR market in Europe alone. But how to price it has been a long-standing challenge. Ocean Market solves this definitively using Automated Market Maker (AMM) pools powered by Balancer.
“Adding liquidity to these data pools is OCEAN staking, as well as authentic data quality curation signals. It’s been a pleasure to work with Fernando and the rest of the Balancer team to enable world-leading data marketplaces, and to help provide feedback towards their next generation of technology.” —Trent McConaghy, Founder, Ocean Protocol.
“At Balancer Labs, we continuously explore new ways to apply AMMs. Ocean Protocol’s usage of Balancer AMMs promises to add a massive new asset class — data — to the DeFi’s assets under management. Thousands of new data assets will lead to thousands of Balancer AMMs — a very long-tail of AMMs, the first of its kind for any AMM protocol. Trent and his team have been excellent collaborators in exploring use cases, integrating Balancer, developing Balancer drivers, and providing feedback to improve Balancer and make it more scalable. We are extremely excited with this launch!” —Fernando Martinelli, CEO & Founder, Balancer Labs.
This integration marks a collaboration of two years of collaboration between the teams.