[Proposal] Cluster Finance - Shopify of data unions

OceanDAO Round 7
#1

Name of project: Cluster Finance

Website : Cluster Finance

We are a new project and asking funds for first time in OceanDAO

Funding Requested

32000 OCEAN

Proposal Wallet Address :

0xcAADbCb7cF04f08c222Cd0ee07Beca405cc6F6E4

The proposal in one sentence :

Cluster is a easy to use non-crypto friendly data union toolkit built on Ocean Protocol. Think ‘shopify’ or ‘stripe’ but for data unions with native Ocean Protocol integration.

Which category best describes your project? Pick one or more.

Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean.

Project Description :

Cluster finance aims to be a toolkit for developers around the world to easily build data centric apps like data unions and social networks on Ocean Protocol. For example, if Facebook decides to give more power to users by sharing ad revenue and data control rights to its users, then they would ‘clusterify’ their platfrom with few lines on code using our toolkit and monetise their data on Ocean Protocol with built-in revenue share and data ownership features. It’s as simple as that.

Cluster comes with many in-built features

  • Maintain fractional ownership
  • Revenue split with users
  • Finer access control over data
  • Lifetime royalty on user contribution
  • Data curation and filtering for PII
  • In-built support for regulatory compliance

So, what could be built or integrated with Cluster?

  1. Social networks (e.g. Facebook)
  2. Video/audio streaming apps (e.g. Netflix)
  3. Data Unions (e.g. Swash, GeoDB),
  4. Telegram/Discord bots that incentivizes productive behaviour in groups.

Possibilities are many.

What problem is your project solving?

Ocean Protocol has developed very intuitive tech for sharing and monetising datasets in a permissionless and trustless manner while maintaining data privacy and data ownership. However, the current tech stack caters mostly to individual datasets. This is beneficial and has use cases for institutions and corporations with numerous and large datasets. But, it does not cater to smaller datasets like someone’s credit scoring data or individual’s smart watch data.

This is because an individual’s dataset is tiny and not that valuable. Institutions and data scientists cannot extract enough value out of it. Because AI needs data. Solution is to create a data union which aggregates similar datasets into a giant dataset which becomes valuable for a lot of use cases.

But there is no simplified toolkit (drag, drop - shopify style or code snippets - stripe style) that devs can use to create data unions apps or integrate data unions into their existing apps. We aim to build that and solve this problem.

What is the final product?

web based platform

How does this project drive value to the Ocean ecosystem?

Cluster will provide a toolkit and platform for devs to integrate their existing apps or create new data union apps directly on Ocean Protocol. This will not only open data flood gates on Ocean Market but will also help with the adoption.

Currently, there are very handful of data unions built on Ocean like Swash and DataUnion.app. It’s because creating data unions is difficult. But with Cluster, creating data unions will be a breeze (thats our ultimate goal). This will increase no. of apps building on Ocean Protocol.

More apps on Ocean Protocol will bring and attract more users on Ocean Protocol, leading to more usage and hence giving way to adoption.

Calculations for ROI

Let’s take example of one of the popular data union dapp being built on Ocean Protocol - DataUnion.app

Total funding for dataunion until now has been about 87300 OCEAN (source - Dataunion proposal from Round 6). And they are doing amazing job at building it. But, it is one data union dapp. Ocean needs tens of unions for mass adoption. Clsuter can unlock that.

Conservatively considering that Cluster will help create 10 more data unions on Ocean Protocol. If these apps started from scratch and asked for funding from OceanDAO till now, it would have costed OceanDAO about 873,000 OCEAN. But with Cluster they dont need extra work to be done on Ocean Tech. All they have to focus on building their user experience and growing their userbase.

So Bang here comes down to 873,000 OCEAN
Buck = 32,000 OCEAN

So ROI = bang / buck = 873,000 / 32,000 = 27.28

Our estimate of % chance of success = 50%

So expected ROI = 0.5 * 27.28 = 13.64

Project Deliverables

We will use this grant funds to built a javascript library that incorporates following features -

  • web3 wallet creation and binding to a cluster
  • create and register a cluster (cluster is a data union)
  • create datatokens for new clusters (using Ocean Protocol in-built)
  • register new members to cluster
  • adding data points to cluster

Project Roadmap

Our best estimate for deliverables is end of September 2021 or earlier.

2 Likes
#2

Awesome proposal and a great idea - data unions are the future!

We are actually also scaling out to new data unions with DataUnion - VisioTherapy and Sensor Nation are going to be using our technology and concepts to develop their own data unions with our help.
Would love to talk and know how we can collaborate.

1 Like
#3

sure. I will reach out to you over discord later.

1 Like
#4

Hey,

I think your ROI calculation is misleading. Your line of argument is:

You then go on to consider that bang is the above value:

My concern with this calculation is that the cost of building DataUnion.app is NOT the value it delivers or extracts in reality (it may be more or less but most likely not the same). Indeed for many software companies the value capture, creation, and the cost are independent variables. In a lecture at Stanford, Peter Thiel makes this very clear: https://youtu.be/gQPlhycLmMk?t=55

Hence for Bang, I’d recommend taking a value of a comparable market or business and then applying it to yours. E.g. when Netflix was in its infancy, analysts used the numbers of e.g. DVD shops like Blockbuster to estimate the market’s potential. A similar comparison would benefit your proposal and make it more likely to be accepted.

#5

Good point @TimDaub. We used DataUnion as reference because thats the closest product that our technology will enable to create easily. So that devs doesn’t have to go through the same efforts and pain that DataUnion(dot)app devs had to go through.

In that case, realistic bang calculation would be the mulitple of the one that dataunion.app uses. In their round 7 proposal they used 610,553 $OCEAN. And as per our calculation our success definition is to create atleast 5 such dataunions and that would make this bang to (5 * 610,553 = 3,052,765 OCEAN) which actually increases the bang from previous calculations. But, we don’t over calculate the bang. So, probably will go with the previous one. But realistically all these are hypothetical numbers and one cannot calculate such numbers accurately. Our goal is just to show that there is more value that is being delivered than the amount that is being spent. And thereby returning surplus value back to the Ocean ecosystem.

#6

Hey,

I think another good way of estimating the market size for data unions is by comparing what you’re trying to achieve with existing companies/projects.
I think it’ll be a rather tedious process as there isn’t good data available (at least judging from my 5 mins of checking), but what I think you could do is e.g. find out the evaluations/revenue/etc. of:

  • hCaptcha
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk
  • Google reCaptcha

However, in this analysis, it’d be even better if you considered what would happen if the produced data remained within the data union. For Mechanical Turk for example, I guess the workers earn no share in their work and they won’t own the data collectively. For Google reCaptcha, it’s likely that much of this data is reinvested into self-driving cars or Google Maps meta data creation as these months it’s all been about traffic lights, house numbers, cars, busses, etc… hCaptcha even has a buy site.

Anyways, just food for thought.

1 Like
#7

I like where this could be heading and will support your proposal. Thanks for making such an interesting contribution and good luck!

#8

Hey @ClusterKing, I did not get any message from you yet.