How this Web3 Project is Unlocking a Trillion-Dollar Data Economy with Data NFTs

Learn why data could become the most promising NFT utility that sets the foundation for a valuable trend: Data Finance (DataFi).

Data – an exploited asset worth trillions

Data is all around us. It is generated by people, companies and devices. The amount of data our world produces will go up forever, but it is not under our control yet. Data can be used to power innovations that shape our future, like artificial intelligence. For this reason, the World Economic Forum recognized that data is the world’s most valuable resource.

Our current data economy is broken. People give up their data for free and companies sell it. We don’t realize that our data has been used until we receive spam mail, advertisements or learn that our identity was stolen. Also, most data is not accessible at all. It remains locked by companies that are missing the tools and financial incentives to publish their data. 

But there is a technology that could disrupt the way we control the access and monetization of data. It’s called ERC721, or more commonly referred to as NFTs. 

NFTs – a new chapter for the data economy

In 2021, the mass adoption of NFT Tokens was driven by speculation around digital art. The access rights to Cryptopunks or Bored Apes were sold for millions of dollars. The unique ownership license to the images were regulated by non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with royalties paid to the artist on every transaction.

Digital art is just the beginning. Essentially, NFTs can license and regulate access to any type of data. Whether this data is an image of a monkey that is used as a profile picture, your data record on Facebook or a dataset of traffic images that makes self-driving cars safer.   

Data might just become the most promising asset tokenized through NFTs. Arguably, it’s also worth more than the entire art and collectibles market combined. 

Ocean Protocol – building a Web3 data marketplace

In 2013, Trent McConaghy and Bruce Pon built a startup that tokenized digital art on the Bitcoin network. Since Ethereum didn’t exist at that time, this means that both Trent and Bruce can be considered the inventors of the NFT concept.

Since then, their journey led them to launch Ocean Protocol, a Web3 project that allows anyone with an internet connection to tokenize, access and monetize data through blockchain. For this, the World Economic Forum awarded Ocean Protocol as Technology Pioneer in 2021. 

The beta of the Ocean Data Marketplace was launched late 2020. At the beginning, the market experienced an unexpected demand of cryptocurrency enthusiasts that speculated around almost 500 tokenized datasets with a multi-million dollar transaction volume.

Now, the Ocean Data Market is up for a major update in Q1/2022 and will make investing into data assets safer and more intuitive. The Ocean Data Market v4 will also introduce the possibility to create Data NFTs and issue data farming rewards for its users.

Data NFTs – a game changer

NFTs are a powerful token standard that disrupt data access and data finance (DataFi).  

The team at Ocean Protocol are soon introducing the tools for data owners to create NFTs for their datasets. NFTs will essentially control the way data is shared and monetized. Data NFT owners also have the opportunity to sell sub-licenses to the data in the form of Datatokens. This means Data NFTs actively generate revenues for their owners, which unlocks a massive potential. After all, data is the world’s most valuable resource.

Here’s an example: An author writes a book and tokenizes his work through a Data NFT on the Ocean Data Market V4. A publishing house “buys the rights” to the book by purchasing the Data NFT. Ocean Protocol’s Marketplace allows the NFT owner [the publishing house] to create sub-licenses for others to access the book. The license to access the book is represented by Datatokens [ERC20] sold to buyers.

Learn more with Data Whale!

Are you interested to learn more about Ocean Protocol and Data NFTs? Visit https://datawhale.ai and complete our tutorial on how to use the Ocean Protocol Data Market. Above are opinions only, we are a community project.