2.1 KiB
Fractional Ownership
Fractional ownership is an exciting sub-niche of Web3, at the intersection of NFTs and DeFi. IT allows co-ownership of data IP.
Ocean provides two approaches to fractional ownership:
- Sharded holding of ERC20 datatokens, where each ERC20 holder has the usual datatoken rights as described above, e.g. 1.0 datatokens to consume an asset. This comes out-of-the-box with Ocean.
- Sharding ERC721 data NFT, where each co-holder has right to some earnings against base IP, and co-controls the data NFT. For example, there’s a DAO with the sole purpose to hold the data NFT; this DAO has its own ERC20 token; DAO members vote with tokens to update data NFT roles or deploy ERC20 datatokens against the ERC721.
Note: For (2), one might consider doing sharding with something like Niftex. But then there are questions: what rights do the shard-holders get exactly? It could be zero; for example, Amazon shareholders don’t have the right to walk the hallways of the Amazon offices just because they hold shares. Secondly, how do the shard-holders control the data NFT? These questions get resolved by using a tokenized DAO, as described above.
Data DAOs are a cool use case whenever you have a group of people that wish to co-manage data, or bundle up data for larger collective bargaining power. The DAO may be a union, co-op, or trust.
Consider the following mobile app example. You install the app; it has a built-in crypto wallet; you give the app permission to see your location data; the app gets the DAO to sell your (anonymized) location data on your behalf; the DAO sells your data bundled along with thousands of other DAO members; as a DAO member you get a cut of the profits.
This has several variants. Each member’s data feed could be its own data NFT with associated datatokens. Or, there’s simply one data NFT aggregating datafeeds across all members into a single feed, and the feed is fractionalized by sharded holding of ERC20 tokens (1 above) or sharding the ERC721 data NFT (2 above). If you’re interested in starting a data union then we recommend getting in touch with our friends at Data Union.