German Central Bank awards tender to altcoin

  • The Deutsche Bundesbank has awarded the Ocean Protocol the contract for the conceptual design of a decentralized data network.
  • The Ocean Protocol was the only company that was able to offer a technical solution that was outside the conception phase.

Already three days ago, on October 28, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the central bank of the Federal Republic of Germany, made public the award of a contract to the Ocean Protocol in a public tender. Contrary to the current worldwide trend of researching digital central bank currencies, the Bundesbank aims to develop “a decentralized network, which allows equal participants a permanent, symmetrical data access for the realization of real-time updates of statistics under preservation of data sovereignty”.

The selection decision was based on the requirement, as the Deutsche Bundesbank determined, that the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) “should be associated with a distributed database in a high-performance manner”. As it is further outlined in the requirement description, the system to be developed had to be in the position to process and distribute “large data sets lastingly decentralized”.

At this point the criterion of the data quantity to be processed led to the exclusion of the majority of the enterprises considered in the selection decision.

Another important exclusion criterion was product maturity. According to the Deutsche Bundesbank, a minimum standard had to be met and the first successfully implemented projects and use cases had to be presented. With this criterion, BigchainDB GmbH with the Ocean Protocol was the only company that could offer a technical solution that was outside the conception phase, according to the Bundesbank.

In the result of the market investigation procedure the consultation by the BigchainDB GmbH represents the only possible contractor for the bank. Reason for this are beside missing comparable competitors above all the technical however position characteristics, which exist for the company due to the “Ocean Protocols” and the underlying patented data base technology. The protocol unites the elements of a distributed database with characteristics of a DLT and therefore forms the ideal starting point for the bank to develop a prototype of the network model.

Neither Ethereum, Polkadot nor IOTA – Bundesbank selects the Ocean Protocol

Even though it is not known which other companies and projects applied for the tender of the German Federal Bank, it is remarkable that a rather unknown altcoin project, which is ranked #65 in terms of market capitalization, was awarded the contract.

The news came a few hours after Ocean, a platform that facilitates the creation of marketplaces for private and secure publishing, sharing and usage of data, revealed the V3 iteration of its protocol. Ocean v3 aims make it possible to democratize the value of data and artificial intelligence (AI).

The trusted, decentralized data service combines big data concepts and artificial intelligence to create a platform on which data can be freely exchanged while protecting the privacy of users. To this end, Ocean v3 is launching the first AMM (Automated Market Maker) for data in collaboration with Balancer Labs, enabling individuals and start-ups to monetize data.