Ocean Protocol was co-founded in 2017 by an experienced group of consultants and entrepreneurs, who together have a wealth of experience in developing and growing high tech businesses.

The Ocean Protocol core team includes: Bruce Pon, an experienced international project manager and current CEO of BigchainDB; Trent McConaghy, an experienced engineer and AI expert; Cristina Pon, marketing director at both Ocean Protocol and BigchainDB; and Razvan Olteanu, who has more than 20 years of technical and management experience in senior roles.

The Ocean Protocol core team is currently composed of 15 individuals, and the platform is supported by a massive list of advisors — many of which are experts in AI, blockchain, big data and business, and have developed and managed their own successful companies.

Ocean Protocol unlocks access to data that would previously be unavailable or challenging to access, by allowing anybody with sought-after datasets to tokenize their data and make it available on the Ocean Market.

This produces an additional income stream for data publishers while giving scientists, researchers, data analysts and anybody else access to more reliable data.

Ocean Protocol provides the tools needed for firms to build and launch their own data markets, by either directly forking the Ocean Protocol, or by using the supplied Ocean Protocol React hooks. It also provides extensive documentation to assist with this process.

Holders of OCEAN tokens can directly participate in the datatoken economy by staking their tokens on datasets on the Ocean Market. Stakers then become liquidity providers in the selected OCEAN-datatoken pool, and earn a fraction of the transaction fees generated by the pool.

As of November 2020, a total of 414 million OCEAN tokens are currently in circulation. This is out of a fixed maximum of 1.41 billion tokens, which was set in the new Ocean contract deployed on August 21, 2020.

It will take a total of 50 years for the full OCEAN supply to be released, whereas a total of ~600 million tokens are expected to be in circulation by May 2022, and 1 billion tokens by January 2031.

Of the total Ocean supply, 20% is allocated to the project founders, 15% to acquirors (SAFTE purchasers), 5% to the Ocean Protocol Foundation and the remaining 60% will be distributed to keepers (those that run Ocean network nodes).

OCEAN is currently an ERC-20 token operating on the Ethereum blockchain. As a result, it is backed by Ethereum’s extensive proof-of-work (POW) mining and node network, which protect it against a variety of attacks.

Ocean Protocol previously operated on a proof-of-authority (PoA) sidechain, but this was scrapped to ensure datatokens remain compatible with the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

According to a 2019 blog entry, Ocean Protocol applied military-grade security practices when designing its smart contracts — ensuring they can be securely upgraded and deployed without opening up any attack vectors.

Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) tokens can currently be traded on more than two dozen exchanges, including several top tier platforms — like Binance, KuCoin, Bittrex and Poloniex. As of November 2020, Binance is the most liquid centralized exchange for OCEAN, whereas Uniswap is the most liquid decentralized exchange for OCEAN.

OCEAN currently cannot be purchased directly with fiat currencies on any supported exchanges. But you can buy Bitcoin with fiat instead, and then exchange this to OCEAN.

Read about Uniswap (UNI) — the governance token of the Uniswap decentralized exchange.

Check out district0x (DNT) — a network of decentralized marketplaces.

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