Providing an Awesome overview of all projects building in the Ocean Protocol Ecosystem
Anyone who has followed the growth of Ocean Protocol understands that apart from its talented core team, the Ocean Protocol Foundation has a strong community of passionate and intelligent developers, marketers, volunteers, evangelists, and supporters. The OPF, boasting a self-sustaining long-term economic model, has supported multiple initiatives through its Shipyard program, and now continues to provide funding to builders and innovators through its OceanDAO grant program.
Of the recent community projects, Ocean Pearl adds much-needed clarity and organization to the all-important OceanDAO program, as well as a detailed overview of a growing ecosystem.
Ocean Pearl, incubated in the Ocean Ambassador program, was itself recently awarded a grant from the OceanDAO, paving the path to becoming a financially independent open-source project.
What is the Ocean Ambassador program and how is it tied to Ocean Pearl?
Ocean Protocol’s outreach objective has been focused on incubating innovation, as they famously encourage builders to fork their own data markets and push the data economy even farther. The Ambassador program, besides enhancing the OPF footprint across social and media channels, is to identify specific issues that may prevent growth or adoption of the Ocean ecosystem, and stir debate or direction to tackle them indirectly or directly.
This is what happened with Ocean Pearl, as there was no single point of reference to know all the awesome stuff that’s happening in the ecosystem at any given moment. The team provided direction, set a PoC, recruited talent, and made it blossom into a new venture.
The Tech ship of the Ambassador program has been active for well over a year, focusing on integration work, collaborations, and bootstrapping other projects. The front-end innovation core team takes projects under their wing to help with funding, proposals, creation, and everything required (apart from legal issues) to support new ideas and turn them into independent organizations.
The beginning of 2021 coincided with a buoyant crypto market, and hiring developers possessing particular skillsets to work on such incubated projects quickly became a challenge, but not a deterrent.
After months of planning, creating, tweaking, and implementing, the Ocean Ambassador crew is proud to present Ocean Pearl as its first cornerstone project. It is a project tracking platform for the Ocean ecosystem that creates a seamless overview of what is happening in the complex web of Ocean activities.
Ocean Pearl is a system that tracks the development of OceanDAO projects dynamically
There are rigorous standards to be upheld and copious amounts of activity to engage in for any grant-based program, and the OceanDAO is no different. Applicants must submit their proposals, voters need unfettered access to read them and ask questions, attend meetings, and ultimately cast their vote for which project will receive funding. This process could take up hours if not days. Ocean Pearl’s innovative and streamlined design gives applicants and voters a simpler way to submit proposals, review them, keep track of the delivery of grant recipient progress, evaluate additional fund proposals, and much more.
A quick visit to the site reveals the multitude of participants in the DAO. Using the very simple and clean UI, one can scroll through projects in the ecosystem, current and past. Each project has its dedicated page with key metrics as well as OceanDAO proposals, total funding secured, whitepapers, and any other relevant links.
Ocean Pearl acts as a DAO information aggregator, tracking past and current projects in the form of an Awesome Repo. But this is just one aspect of what Ocean Pearl aims to be.
Ocean Pearl’s vision
It is impossible for any single individual to be on top of all things happening in the vibrant Ocean ecosystem. At any given moment there are interviews conducted by the core OPF team, collaboration announcements, events, marketplace updates, OceanDAO meetings, liquidity pool changes, staking information, ambassador activities, upcoming AMA’s, and more.
Ocean Pearl will collate all this into a complete and simple source of information where people can find exactly what they are looking for and not miss out on important matters. It strives to become a hub that captures anything and everything related to Ocean Protocol under one roof.
Ocean Pearl launched its beta version in June 2021 and is working on smoothing out rough edges by improving user experience and quality. It has recently won back-to-back grants in the OceanDAO round five and six to help realize its full potential. Its objective is to become completely independent of all external support and be financially self-sufficient.
The Ocean Pearl, like many of the projects incubated inside the Ocean ecosystem, is community-driven. This is an important factor when considering the future path of the system, as the decentralized community ultimately decides what it needs to avoid misaligned incentives and objectives.
Looking to join a creative group?
Ocean Ambassadors work closely with one another and are actively looking for talented developers and outreach professionals to help expand the group and amplify the vision of bootstrapping projects that will contribute to the Ocean ecosystem.
Commitment to push through to completion is a requirement in the fast paced Web3 space but the amazing support system in place assures collaboration along each step of the journey. If you are interested in contributing alongside innovative, data-driven web3 professionals and enthusiasts, please contact albert@oceanprotocol.com.
Ocean Pearl is structured much in the same way and includes seven core members spread around the globe who dedicate what time they have outside of their full-time commitments to work on it. Everything created from the Ambassador program, including Ocean Pearl, is accessible on GitHub where developers, programmers, and students can find community curated lists from tooling, libraries, and opensource projects to build upon. Anyone can hard fork and build an iteration… e.g. organizing a DAO!
