Auto News

Daimler trials blockchain data exchange with Ocean Protocol

mercedes daimler

Today, the blockchain and AI organization Ocean Protocol announced it completed a pilot project with Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler for decentralized data exchange. 

Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol that enables enterprises to share data and monetize it. What does that mean? Companies have silos of data that they may want to share. For example, if your company has some analytics that shows certain user behavior, how does that metric differ from other companies’ experiences? 

But your competitors won’t want to share their data with you. What if instead your competitor lets you run analytics or AI on their data purely to calculate the metric without the data leaving your control. They get to review the algorithm first before using their data to ensure access is very limited. The third party only has access to data for the calculation, it doesn’t get to see the detail. That’s what Ocean Protocol’s Compute-to-Data solution offers. 

Daimler South East Asia and Ocean Protocol ran a proof-of-concept project to test the blockchain capabilities for data exchange among internal as well as service partners. The trial tested onboarding, user authentication, and data sharing while ensuring security and control over data. 

The collaboration involved using all of Ocean’s solutions, including the blockchain network, access control, data discovery, decentralized storage, and the newly released Compute-to-Data.

“The Decentralized data marketplace is an interesting proposition and gives us an exciting opportunity for aggregation of data with a clear compensation approach. Using Ocean Protocol, we want to implement this in a secure and transparent way,” said Frank Schur, Senior Manager IT Technology & Cross Functions, Daimler Singapore. 

Last year Insureblocks spoke to Ocean Protocol co-founder Trent McConaghy. He highlighted how Google’s or rather Alphabet’s autonomous driving division Waymo had a decade head start on incumbents. How can the big car manufacturers catch up on building and analyzing the road data that Waymo has accumulated? By collaborating.

Founded in 2017, Ocean Protocol is collaborating with some big names including dexFreight, the MOBI consortium, Roche, and Xprize, among others. Last year, the company partnered with sgCarMart to build a used car data blockchain.

In other news, two weeks ago, Daimler announced that it would be working with NVIDIA for an in-vehicle computing system for automated driving functionality.

Meanwhile, Daimler has a handful of blockchain initiatives and is exploring the technology for efficiency in business processes. Some of the projects include a supply chain blockchain, a tokenization project with BBVA, and a car wallet. Daimler is a member of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance. 


Image Copyright: Daimler