What We’re Doing in 2022, and Why
Ocean 2022 Summary
These learnings and questions have led us to create a big-picture view of (a) How project teams can grow their projects, with a well-specified journey from getting early-stage grants, then scaling up with grants or investments, and (b) How individuals investors and OPF can invest in Ocean ecosystem projects. Here’s that view.
Project teams follow a journey from seed-stage grants, to scale-up grants, to investment (top row to bottom row).
Teams follow the journey from seed-stage grants, to scale-up grants, to investment (top row to bottom row). New teams start in the top right, in seed-stage grants from OceanDAO (top-down curation doesn’t scale well for the long-tail of seed stage). As the team delivers, it can graduate to rolling grants (community — center middle) or Shipyard (strategic — center right). Once a team becomes investable, then it can get investment from community (bottom middle) or from Ocean Ventures (bottom right).
Note that there are tracks for both bottom-up and top-down curation (left and right columns).
This big-picture view includes the following new components:
Shipyard. Grants curated by Ocean core team, often with milestones. It draws on learnings from the previous Shipyard program, and organic product contracts. More information coming soon:)Ocean Ventures. Investment curated by Ocean core team. More information coming soon:)Rolling grants. This will be part of OceanDAO (section 4.1), likely using Conviction Voting, as done by Giveth and Token Engineering Commons.Invest in for-profit tokens means that projects that can be investable, should get investable. This includes for-profit projects (token or company) and public-utility or DAO projects (token, maybe non-profit attached). Projects can create tokens with a DAO attached by launching a 1Hive Garden. At some point, there will likely be (fair) constraints on how long a project may get grants if the project can be investable.
In summary, here’s what Ocean 2022 holds: (a) Ocean V4, Gaia-X, and an explosion of ecosystem products, (b) H2O, Data Farming, and veOCEAN staking, (c ) OceanDAO with active treasury management, and (d) a refined path for teams to progress from early-stage grants through to investment.
Ocean Protocol Foundation (OPF) has had several sub-teams for years. For 2022, we have made each team more independent as Lighthouses. Each lighthouse has its own well-defined scope of activities (“API” ) and budget, which helps each team to go faster.
The lighthouses are:
Danube Lighthouse. Data-exchange products (section 2) including backend, frontend, and Gaia-X related. Business development activities. Shipyard grants (some section 5). Led by Razvan Olteanu.Nile Lighthouse. Staking including veOCEAN and Data Farming (section 3). OceanDAO including treasury management, batch grants, rolling grants (section 4, some section 5). Led by Trent McConaghy.Niagara Lighthouse. Marketing and communications. Led by Monica Botez.Yukon Lighthouse. Administration. Ocean Ventures (details in section 5). Led by Bruce Pon.