Today, Dether and FOAM announce a strategic partnership for advancing geospatial blockchain research. By joining forces and merging the parallel development of our projects, we plan to synthesize our research into crypto-spatial coordinates, while working together to find new ways that current standards can be expanded upon.

Dether is the world’s first decentralized, peer-to-peer, crypto-to-cash marketplace, enabling anyone who has a smartphone to buy and sell cryptocurrency for cash and spend it at physical stores. Dether’s mission is to give power back to individuals — especially unbanked populations across the globe — by enabling them to easily access cryptocurrency. Dether is building a worldwide ecosystem of crypto buyers, sellers and physical stores willing to trade crypto for cash and accept it as a means of payment. No bank account is needed, just a mobile phone with internet access. FOAM is an open protocol for Proof of Location on Ethereum. The full vision of the decentralized ‘web3’ economy will require verifiable location data. The FOAM protocol provides an infrastructure to support a decentralized, privacy-preserving, and censorship-resistant supplement to GPS for unspoofable location verification. For FOAM the starting point is static proof of location for Geographic Points of Interest, places and locations for a consensus driven map of the world. Through decentralized community coordination, FOAM’s dynamic proof of location will be adopted by permissionless and autonomous radio beacons, ultimately offering secure location services independent of external centralized sources, worldwide.

The partnership will first explore use of FOAM’s standards and protocols within Dether for Shops. Dether for Shops allows retailers to stake DTH (Dether’s utility token) in order to be listed on the Dether map and broadcast the fact that they accept cryptocurrency. Much like the process of searching for a nearby café or restaurant on Google Maps, users can look for a place to spend their cryptocurrency, and merchants can broadcast that they accept crypto. Because crypto-spatial coordinates (CSC), a location standard for spatial smart contracts by FOAM, have the potential to store both the location and Ethereum address associated with an individual shop, this could prove extremely useful for the Dether Map. In a large commercial center, like a shopping mall, where many shops share a physical address, using crypto-spatial coordinates would allow the map to differentiate between the Ethereum addresses of each individual store. Today, these coordinates exist only as single points. Working together, Dether and Foam could extend CSC standards to translate these points into zones, which will have potential benefits for the Dether Map and beyond.

we are aiming to find new solutions to better locate users on the Ethereum blockchain with greater accuracy — without sacrificing security.

Additionally, FOAM and Dether want to work to give individuals power back over their data. With both of our projects promoting decentralization, we are aiming to find new solutions to better locate users on the Ethereum blockchain with greater accuracy — without sacrificing security. Throughout this partnership, we will work to define use cases using both of our respective protocols and technologies, while expanding CSC standards and their potential for other dApps.