The number of tokens you stake behind a point determines its visibility on the map: the more you stake, the more the point persists as you zoom out. But because FOAM uses a TCR staking model, it also creates a potential reward for cartographers who take it upon themselves to verify that each entry is accurate.

If you find an issue with any point on the map, you can challenge its existence by staking tokens against it. A voting process follows, and if the FOAM community finds you in the right, you are rewarded the amount of tokens you staked in the challenge – which is subtracted from the stake behind the incorrect point. As a result, those who create points on the map are incentivized to do so correctly [1].

The incentive to add points to the map comes from (1) desire to advertise what matters to you, in line with why most businesses want to be displayed on Google Maps, and (2) adding value to the map in the form of better data. As more tokens are staked to create points they are pulled from the “float”, making them illiquid and unavailable to trade. This driver of scarcity, in aggregate, should support the value of FOAM tokens, especially if the utility of the map grows to the point where staking one’s ground becomes a business imperative.

The aforementioned staking process is what FOAM calls static proof-of-location, referring to points on the map that don’t move. While still experimental, in its first 5 months, FOAM’s 1,200+ token holders have staked over 40 million FOAM behind almost 8,000 points on the map, according to data collected by Blocklytics.org. FOAM is one of the first TCR curation models in the wild, and is certain to evolve over time as more data comes in. Already, the early statistics provide a promising window into how it’s doing.