Signaling is a mechanism designed to allow Cartographers to incentivize the growth and geographic coverage of the FOAM network. To Signal, a Cartographer stakes FOAM Tokens to a Signaling smart contract by reference to a particular area.

When this post was published there were 171 Signal holders, with 1,199 Signal NFTs deployed since launch in October 2018. This activity can be tracked via the SignalToken contract.

Today, we have released a new way of visualizing these Signals, through a heatmap view. This heatmap view can be accessed directly via map.foam.space

What is a heatmap?

“A heatmap is a visualization used to depict the intensity of data at geographical points.”

– Heatmap Layer, Google Maps

When building a heatmap layer for Signals, there are two values of a Signal to take into consideration: stake and radius. Below we will explain our choices and the reasoning behind it.

What is the intensity of a Signal?

intensity == staked value of a Signal*.

*with some computation/interpolation depending on zoom level

Further, to differ intensity from a Signal to another the heatmap is using following color range:

Color range of Signals intensity

The more a Signal has been staked, the more the color gets from blue to yellow (from top to bottom).

How is the radius of a Signal used?

Even if radius of a Signal is not used to calculate the intensity, it’s still an important part to render the Signal heatmap.

The larger a radius of a Signal, the larger the area of a heatmap*

*with some computation/interpolation depending on zoom level

In the example above, the difference between intensity/stake and radius become apparent:

The Signal in Davis has 4000 FOAM staked and a radius of 2km, resulting in a yellow color but smaller heatmap area.

The Signal in Sacramento has 50 FOAM staked and a radius of 15km, resulting in a blue color and larger heatmap area.

Make sure to activate the ‘Signal Heatmap’ layer to access the view

You can navigate the two points above directly on the FOAM Map and try it out yourself here:

https://map.foam.space/#/at/?lng=-121.6421283&lat=38.5386563&zoom=10.65