[Messari AMA] Bruce Pon, Founder of Ocean Protocol

Messari hosted a public AMA with Ocean Protocol’s ($OCEAN) founder, Bruce Pon in the Messari community group. This is a transcript of the conversation.

Messari: Bruce, thanks so much for joining to field some questions and talk about Ocean—very cool project, I’m excited to chat.

Bruce Pon: Great to be here.

Messari: Before we dive into some low-level questions about the team, the protocol, etc., can you share a high-level overview of your background, the ethos of Ocean, and what motivated you to launch the project?

Pon: Sure. We think that everyone feels viscerally that data should be theirs. Whether as individuals or companies. But today, no one feels in control. We realized that if we could unlock data for AI uses, it could break open a new Data Economy.

A Data Economy has signals on data pricing, quality of data and allows people from anywhere to access the data they need. At the same time, those that share would be able to control who gets access to their data and maintain security and privacy.

Our experience in 5 years of blockchain - ascribe (putting intellectual property on the blockchain), BigchainDB (decentralized database) pointed us to the power of using blockchain technologies to unlock AI and data.

Messari: We have a couple questions about AI in here, which we'll get to later on. But about ownership: Some people feel nervous about the responsibility and ownership controlling their own financial assets, something inherent to the crypto space. Should people feel similarly about owning and controlling all of their own data?

Pon: Absolutely. The UX is young and immature right now. A Data Economy will need a host of services to obfuscate the blockchain-y aspects and make it accessible to everyday people on the street. This morning, I was having a discussion with a partner at Accenture about this topic. They want to gain insights on consumer behaviour on behalf of their clients while complying with GDPR. How do you get PII and personal data without actually storing it?

We brainstormed ideas on how a UX could look where someone has an App to look at all the requests for their data - from for-profit companies, researchers and NGOs - and then be able to accept or deny requests, for compensation or for free.

The good thing is that we have a lot of learnings from the internet, mobile apps and psychology in the past 20 years to know how people interact so the UX problems can re-use a lot of the learnings to on-board new users.

But we also have other challenges like "not your keys, not your crypto", etc. that relate to operational security. Most people are blissfully oblivious to the risk and attack vectors (i.e. SIM ports) that can happen when value is at risk - so there is a huge mindset shift coming.

Messari: I'm glad you mentioned GDPR because I wanted to ask about regulations and compliance. We all know that regulatory considerations are always a bit of a headache for teams building in this space. Can you share a bit about Ocean’s compliance experiences in general? And I’m also more specifically curious to know details of how you're working through the ways that Ocean is affected by GDPR.

Pon: GDPR is something that we've put a lot of thought into. First when we were building ascribe and BigchainDB, and now with Ocean. At the heart, is that the owner of the data should control it fully. Vitalik wrote a tweet about having data will become a liability in the future. We agree.

Ocean handles GDPR this way - data should always remain at rest, where it is stored. Through the access control and permissioning mechanisms that Ocean offers, researchers can move algorithms and compute to the data to get trained. Once trained, the result set is the only thing that leaves. This means that the data is used, it's valuable and it can train models, but it's also safe and not exposed.

This respects the data owner's rights fully and sidesteps liability related to GDPR.

In the meantime, researchers will now be able to access data that would have been locked up in the past, because the owners would have been scared to share it for risk of losing control. This "liquidity" for data sets allows for pricing and quality signals to start to form around data so that a nascent Data Economy can grow.

Messari: That makes sense. I want to chat about AI a bit... let me find the question. How does Ocean think about decentralized data used to train AIs? How does that change the way in which the data are used and what decisions data owners make?

Pon: Right now, 99.999% of data is stored in centralized web2 environments - on premise, AWS, Azure. It's going to stay this way for probably a decade. Maybe more. So part of the journey of the team has been to acknowledge this. Companies aren't going to lift-and-shift their most valuable data into web3 decentralized infrastructure in the near future. We need to give companies and individuals a way to share data - on their terms and not shoehorn them into the brave new web3 world.

Ocean provides a solid bridge between the web3 decentralized world and web2 existing world. As more data moves into web3, we're already configured to handle it but there's a lot of tech that needs to be built to make AI effective at scale in decentralized infrastructure. Our integration with services like ChainLink, IFPS and BigchainDB are the first steps.

Messari: Here’s an interesting question: as Ocean builds this peer-to-peer data economy, can you speak to considerations around potentially enabling use of Ocean without using "crypto"?

Pon: We want to give people the choice. As I said, the p2p economy is where we're heading. But right now, where we are is the client-server world. Our architecture respects this reality. With our beta release in early April, developers can use the full suite of tools to build private, consortium networks and applications that don't need a token.

With a release of our livenet, people will be able to bind the Ocean Token with the smart contracts to fully access the web3 advantages of decentralized orchestration of services and access control. We have a lot of companies coming to us who don't want anything to do with crypto, but they see the advantages of the technology. We can still build useful applications for them. We hope that other developers can serve these types of clients also with our extensive documentation.

Messari: I see, that makes sense. Ocean isn't the only team thinking about a peer-to-peer data economy though. Can you speak to what makes Ocean unique? What's your edge?

Pon: This might sound wonky but we enable entire data service supply chains by connecting services in web2 and web3 seamlessly. Let me unpack.

Right now, if you are a data scientist, you need to go to multiple sites to get data. Multiple tools to clean and process it. Multiple tools to apply models and algorithms. And then other outlets to publish and show your work.

Ocean allows data scientists to construct a seamless "pipeline" of actions that connect these disparate components into one "data service supply chain". It's a wildly powerful idea because once you program a data service supply chain, it can run on its own. Like an excel macro. Not only that, the DSSC (for short) itself is an asset that a data scientist could then securitize, sell or license.

Imagine having a script that pokes around accessing all the resources that are required to analyze MRIs? Imagine that you have an AI-tool that constructs these pipelines based on a Google-like search or Quora-like Q&A? It means that a normal person off the street could say, "I have $1000 to solve the problem. Go find the data, assemble the AI models, and show me the results."

It makes AI accessible to anyone. Wildly powerful

Messari: I see. What kind of data providers and consumers do you expect to use and test the DSSC in its early stages?

Pon: Hackers. Developers that are comfortable with data science tools but also are crypto-fans so they understand the ethos and power of owning data, models and DSSCs. We will also build these tools for larger enterprises and governments - many of whom don't currently have the in-house skills to construct them.

Messari: I want to touch on the IEO now. There are a few questions in here about the Ocean token, funding, and IEO regarding: what happened to the price, why Bittrex and not another exchange, token vesting, etc. I’ll note that we discussed some of these questions at some length already in an edition of Messari’s newsletter. Without repeating everything in the newsletter, can you speak to these questions a bit? Maybe add a little more color to how Ocean thinks about the project pre- and post-IEO.

Pon: A lot of people backed the project. In the public exchanges, the token prices has significantly underwhelmed and a lot of people have been hurt. The entire team is working hard to rebuild trust and plow forward to add demonstrable value.

Over the past weeks, we've worked really hard to make sure that we use the lifeline the community has given us to deliver the maximum value possible.

Messari: Touching on both the IEO and Ocean's roadmap: What do Q3 and Q4 2019 look like for Ocean?

Pon: We have worked the past 3 weeks to refine the roadmap. In the coming weeks, we will announce an update on the roadmap that will allow people to start working on Ocean sooner. We appreciate the feedback of the community on the roadmap and we want to maximize the time for developers and enterprise to work on a livenet so that use cases can be articulated sooner and the value proposition becomes clearer to everyone.

On top of this, we will have a global program to unlock data, leveraging our community, 200+ ambassadors and advisors.

Messari: On behalf of the team here at Messari and everyone in the community chat, thanks so much for chatting, Bruce. In closing, do you have any final thoughts on anything that was (or wasn't) asked? And before I open up messaging abilities for everyone else, can you can you share the best places to learn more, follow the team, and continue this conversation?

Pon: Developers: github.com/oceanprotocol, docs.oceanprotocol.com

Thank you for the chance to answer these questions. We're excited to be a member of the Messari registry. And we look forward to keeping the community informed of our progress.

Messari: Thank you!

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