Oasis Labs Moving Big into Ownership Economy

Expanding Parcel to enable data tokenization

Oasis allows developers, individuals, and companies to create so-called Parcels.. Here they can have private data marketplaces, data governance, and tokenization of data. A package of data can become an NFT that users can trade within the platform. 

This year many people have heard about NFTs as digital artworks or collectibles. However, what a non-fungible token represents is ownership over a related piece of data. This can be an image or animation, but also all kinds of other data. Video games, movies, but also liquidity positions in DeFi protocols can become an NFT. Oasis Labs is taking this idea even one step further, and is packaging data into an NFT. 

One of the challenges ahead will be to create trusted on-ramps for off-chain assets. This would allow an NFT to represent a person’s financial data. This would in turn be desirable for lenders, analysts and credit scorers. The second challenge will be to make sure users maintain full ownership over their NFT data. Nobody wants others to copy for example their bank account or insurance data. This isn’t only about ownership, but also about control and privacy. Oasis promises to tackle these issues, using their Parcel API. 

What types of services would make sense

The main task of Parcel will be to represent off-chain data on the blockchain, using NFT technology. There are multiple use cases. Real estate companies could tokenize property deeds, and then mint many tokens for an asset to fractionalize ownership. Game developers could create marketplaces where players sell in-game items, and artists could mint tokens that represent their revenue and royalties. The idea of these Parcels is that it allows users to interact with blockchain technology without having to expose users to the complexity of it.

However, Oasis doesn’t want external forces to peek into real estate deeds and other private information. It’s okay if people can tell that you own a certain NFT artwork, but it becomes problematic when they can confirm that you own real estate. Encryption helps. Data in a Parcel functions as data in a black box. Third parties only gain access when the user, the owner of the NFT, allows this. Data tokens become keys to certified information, and this ensures that access can be granted without transferring ownership. 

Read more about Oasis

Oasis Labs published the Parcel primer, explaining the technicalities behind their innovative solution in detail. Developers are invited to create dapps using Parcel and the tools in the Oasis Labs ecosystem. Oasis Network has its own grant program for developers.