Singapore, August 25, 2021 — OceanDAO’s ninth round is now open for submissions with $300K USD available and up to $17,500 USD per project. Proposals are due by September 7th at midnight GMT. The community voting period begins on September 10th. OceanDAO is a grants initiative to help fund projects oriented towards the emerging data economy. More information on the submission process can be found on OceanDAO’s website.
OceanDAO’s funding has surpassed $1M USD in the form of 88 grants since its launch in December 2020. The end of the eighth round marks the first time OCEAN, the means of exchange within Ocean Protocol, has been removed from circulation or burned after not being captured by submissions. As a result of this burn, the total amount of OCEAN in circulation decreases, indicating that the OceanDAO mechanism design is working, with the community as its backbone.
Alex Napheys, OceanDAO Community & Growth Lead, remarked, “The Ocean Protocol community is excited to continue on the path towards self-sustainability via the OceanDAO. Operating monthly, the OceanDAO aims to foster a new era of the open Data Economy. By submitting grant proposals, voting for the best ideas or attending our weekly Town Halls, we encourage all to participate in governing the future of Ocean Protocol.”
The governance behind OceanDAO evolves with each round, aimed towards solving the Web3.0 Sustainability Loop. In recent rounds, the following updates were implemented:
- Downvoting so voters and projects can give both positive and negative signals, for improved curation
- “DAOBot” to automate previously-manual information processing steps, towards full decentralization
- Project Standing Dashboard to report active project updates, so voters better understand a proposal team’s progress from previous grants
- Reporting of Project Team Structure and Advisor involvement for transparency
- Longer voting period, giving voters more time to deliberate
- Governance design call: an open forum to discuss OceanDAO roadmap, rules, mechanisms, and governance. All suggestions are welcome. This call will be held on the 4th Tuesday of every month.
OceanDAO is focused on investing in specific categories that help grow the Ocean Protocol ecosystem, including: building and improving applications or integrations to Ocean, community outreach, making data available on an Ocean-powered marketplace, building and improving Ocean core software, and improvements to the OceanDAO.
OceanDAO financially supports projects across all aforementioned categories to meet their objectives. Recent OceanDAO grantees, among others, include:
- DIMO Electric Vehicle aims to develop a web app to onboard more users, allowing them to share data directly from their #electricvehicles & publish it to Ocean Market.
- HealthLink plans to engage/grow an existing medical community to leverage OCEAN in bringing healthcare data on-chain and accrue value to end-users, who are typically excluded from the traditional healthcare data economy.
- RAZ Finance proposes simplifying ESG and investment data management while making the impact on financial performance transparent and verified.
- Ocean Vantage aims to build a syndication network for real-time financial analytics, catering to analysts that need to extend their reach in servicing more than 22M active traders.
The community behind OceanDAO consists of data scientists, engineers, builders, educators, and more. OceanDAO holds monthly rounds, during which teams can apply for grants. The community votes for projects that offer the best chance for growth and sustainability based on the following criteria: return on investment towards growth and alignment with Ocean’s mission. Town Hall meetings are held every week and are open to the public to discuss the status of projects and the future of the DAO.
OceanDAO has seen over 130 proposals since December 2020. You can find the complete list of projects funded since OceanDAO’s launch here. Follow OceanDAO on Twitter for updates. OceanDAO is the community funding initiative of Ocean Protocol, the data exchange protocol.
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#About Ocean Protocol
Ocean Protocol’s mission is to kickstart a new Data Economy that reaches the world, giving power back to data owners and enabling people to capture value from data to better our world.