Zone Out: A new way to own land on Ethereum

What’s Coming in the New Dether App: Part 1.2 — Using the Harberger Tax to create seller zones through continuous auctions

In a series of articles prior to our next release, we will detail upcoming aspects of the new Dether app, including decentralized certification, and what will change in the Dether wallet. In our last Dether app progress update, we detailed the purpose of having a system of zone ownership for sellers and the technical aspects of how we will use a geohash-based system to define them. But how will the property management of these areas take place?

How does the current Dether zoning system work and what needs to change?

Dether is a p2p ether and ERC20 network, where users can buy and sell crypto for fiat in over 140 countries. This means that crypto sellers need to be easy for potential buyers to locate. Sellers must stake DTH to appear on the map as a kind of “insurance” that they’re a serious seller, and they are then placed on the Dether map, indicated by a blue icon as a point of sale.

The current Dether mapping system doesn’t actually use a zoning system for tellers and shops, but a simple lat-lng system associated with a country code, and registered in a smart contract. Using the current solution, the potential Dether seller declares a lat-lng and a country (using country code of two characters). By using country mapping to verify if Dether is open in the country, we can then accept their registration on-chain. While it’s a good jumping off point for the app, it doesn’t meet all of the future needs of Dether. For one, it’s impossible to check if the lat-lng is included in the declared country, which is problematic because the smart contract could be used in an alternative way.