In this exciting podcast, we are joined by Bruce Pon, co-founder of Ocean Protocol, to discuss how to monetize and tokenize data. Almost 6 years ago Bruce and Trent McConaghy, previously on Insureblocks regarding “The Data Economy”, got into the blockchain space by seeing how the concept of Bitcoin could be applied into non-financial use cases like data.

 

What is blockchain?

Bruce, refers to blockchain as a general purpose technology. He states there are only about 30 to 35 general purpose technologies that have ever been discovered on Earth, by humankind. You start off with agriculture such as the domestication of plants and animals to the steam engine of the industrial revolution to electricity and railways to the last century. In this decade we’re going to see things like AI, blockchain, bioengineering infuse themselves across the entire world.

At the highest level, blockchain is one of those fancy technologies that is going to change the world over the next 30 years. At a more in-depth technical level it is a way use technology where you don't need to trust an authority.

Bruce read an interesting concept which states that it was science in the Enlightenment era which took us away from believing in authority, the Supreme kind of knowledge of authority from priests and/or kings. That Enlightenment era made us take a different methodology for understanding the world around us, which was the scientific method. Blockchain is taking us away from believing that we need a central intermediary to hold things of value for us like a bank, like a government, or any other enterprise that holds for instance our data. Blockchain allows for data to now be held in a way that there is no authority to control your own data.

Just like the internet 30 plus years ago allowed the general public to get access to information in a way that was never before possible. Blockchain is going to allow us to get access to control our own assets in a way that was never before possible.

 

Ocean Protocol

In 2013 Trent McConaghy and his wife found the idea of Bitcoin as an interesting global database that allows people to have perfect knowledge about who controls what? Along with Bruce they found that this could be applied to intellectual property with copyright. Who owns the copyright? Who owns the rights to control the distribution of music or books?

In 2014, they started a company called ascribe to do exactly that to try to put intellectual property copyrights, trademarks, all these types of things on the Bitcoin blockchain. 18 months later they realised that Bitcoin wasn’t the appropriate infrastructure for metadata for copyrights. They then created BigchainDB, a database that was built on blockchain technology to store metadata to solve the problem with ascribe. After running 50 to 100 industry proof of concepts they came to realise that who needs data with provenance? Who needs control of their data? It is either the people providing the data and/or trying to sell the data to the AI consumer. As it is AI that is actually absorbing all the data in order to feed its algorithms. The more sources of data, the better the AI algorithm. If provenance, ownership, and origin of data can be ensured then you have the potential to change the economic model for society when it comes to non-financial use cases such as intellectual property.