Today, Status and FOAM announced a technology partnership to explore using FOAM for integrating geospatial functionality into Status. The companies will together ensure technological compatibility and explore direct integration of FOAM protocols with the Status App. Both organizations also view this as the beginning of longer term work where we can explore together what a more decentralised, secure, and open internet really looks like.

Motivation

Finding relevant peers, products and services on a decentralized network is going to become increasingly more challenging as Ethereum scales and we introduce more and more people around the world to open networks and direct connections without trusted intermediaries.

The team at Status is very keen to see services like decentralized accommodation and ride-sharing built entirely on Ethereum, accessible directly from your mobile phone, with no servers anywhere. However, this requires having access to user location data, which is a privacy concern — in addition to all the issues the FOAM team has identified with GPS and the systems and companies built around it.

Partnering with a team capable of providing provably decentralised geospatial functionality using smart contracts that can be integrated easily into Status, and is opt-in from the user’s perspective, is a very exciting development along the road to a completely #CryptoLife. Join Status for their hackathon in Prague the weekend before DevCon 4 (Oct 26–28th) to help build the next wave of great, decentralised applications.

FOAM

FOAM is an open protocol for proof of location on Ethereum. Our mission is to build a consensus driven map of the world, empowering a fully decentralized web3 economy with verifiable location data. FOAM incentivises the infrastructure needed for privacy-preserving and fraud-proof location verification. The starting point for FOAM is static proof of location, where a community of Cartographers curate geographic Points of Interest on the FOAM map. Through global community-driven efforts, FOAM’s dynamic proof of location protocol will enable a permissionless and privacy-preserving network of radio beacons that is independent from external centralized sources and capable of providing secure location verification services.

Status

Status is an open source, Ethereum-based app that gives users the power to chat, transact, and access a revolutionary world of DApps on the decentralized web. With the high-level goals of preserving the right to privacy, mitigating the risk of censorship, and promoting economic trade in a transparent, open manner, Status is building a community where anyone is welcome to join and contribute, and collaboration with other open source projects in the Ethereum ecosystem is key.

This blog post was co-authored by the FOAM and Status teams.