Our values — Privacy, Decentralization, Security and Verifiability, Openness & Delivering

Our vision for a consensus-driven map of the world is enabled by an unwavering commitment to five core values that will continue to guide FOAM’s future development

As blockchains expand into corporate, academic and public consciousness and the full vision of the decentralized web3 begins to materialize, various infrastructure layers are required to add wide-ranging functionalities to the already-powerful concept of decentralized digital ledgers. One example is adding location functionality to blockchains: how can blockchains verify, secure, and speak about location information?

FOAM is answering this exact question by building a free, open-source project on Ethereum for spatial information that has three primary components 1) a new standard for referencing physical location on the blockchain called Cryptospatial Coordinates 2) The Spatial Index, a front-end visualizer for location-enabled smart contracts and 3) a Proof of Location protocol that uses cryptographic trust to ensure that things in physical space, both dynamic and static, are where they say they are.

This mission is backed by an unwavering commitment to five core values that will continue to guide FOAM’s development:

Privacy

Decentralization

Security and Verifiability

Openness

Delivering

These tenets provide guidelines for the core contributors/company to follow now, but also provides a set of principles to guide future collaborators as the control over the FOAM protocol is slowly transferred from core contributors out to the general community. Having a strong, transparent set of values will attract collaborators who share these same values, create a set of standards that FOAM can be held to, and lead to a seamless transition when it does begin to occur.

Privacy

Before FOAM, Location data has never belonged to the thing being located: it’s always been a temporary service provided to a claiming party that is controlled by telecom companies and easily accessed by the government by way of a court order (and not a search warrant, according to a recent decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals). Countless applications like Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Uber, et cetera access the location data you produce and sell it, earning revenue. Our approach inverts the current market for geospatial data, which relies on bulk collection of information for targeting and resale, by creating new location markets that offer a significantly improved security model. Proof of Location allows users and autonomous agents to privately record authenticated location data at times of their choosing, and then reveal their personal information at their discretion, by presenting a fraud-proof location claim.

Our approach inverts the current market for geospatial data, which relies on bulk collection of information for targeting and resale, by creating a new location markets that offer a significantly improved security model.

Additionally, FOAM will continue to strive toward preserving the privacy of its users. Though privacy is one of the main concerns with the Ethereum blockchain and perfect black-box obfuscation is mathematically impossible, research is being done on improving privacy and making sure that gathering public data on the blockchain is not trivial like it is today. FOAM will continue to implement the most up-to-date solutions for protecting user information on public blockchains.

Decentralization

FOAM will continue to support the growth of a decentralized Proof of Location protocol. In the Proof of Location protocol, Localization is done by a distributed network of radio beacons rather than a central-source GPS and location verification is done cryptographically by parties in the network rather than a dedicated third party. FOAM will not have to govern the platform. A governance model is already integrated into the Token Curated Registry and the parameters for this governance are parametric. We invite the community to help determine the optimal settings for the parameters in the future.

…local communities remain a priority as it’s only through local community-led growth that FOAM can achieve global reach.

The FOAM community operates on several levels of distribution. On the one hand the FOAM protocol is designed to be be a global protocol and intends to cultivate a consistent, verifiable and secure service that is equally global in scope. On the other hand local communities remain a priority as it’s only through local community-led growth that FOAM can achieve global reach. This duality constitutes a decentralized, grassroots model that will continue to compel us forward.

Security and Verifiability

We also firmly believe that it’s a social and economic necessity to produce a viable, fraud-proof alternative to GPS. GPS has added incredible value to the world economy, but its vulnerabilities are startling and its inability to localize with absolutely certainty make it an insufficient source of location information for a variety of contemporary and future verticals. Worst-case scenarios of GPS spoofing and failure are nearly catastrophic. FOAM, using distributed radio beacons utilize bilaterally-signed messages and distributed verifiers, can provide location claims which offer absolute certainty and are highly resistant to attacks.

Openness

FOAM will also continue to prioritize openness of the protocol (not openness of the location data, which is counter to our privacy mission). We hope to contribute to a protocol that is equitable and evenly accessible to all potential Cartographers, hardware Operators, and users. Strategically, this means removing as many barriers to contribution of computational work as possible (except for the baseline requirement of sufficient knowledge of the protocol). In accordance with that, FOAM will conduct testing on Low Power Wide Area Networks and devices that operate on unlicensed Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) radio bands, meaning no licenses or fees are required to broadcast over these bands. Deploying an LPWAN device, like the blockchain, is permissionless.

Our commitment to an open protocol means it is important to us that our code is open-source. We invite our community to review, discuss, and contribute to our protocol. Open-source code will encourage freedom, flexibility and help assure the long-term relevance of the project.

Delivering

Our final tenet is that we are always producing new software updates, testing hardware and helping to build the size and vitality of local communities that are participating in the FOAM network in one way or another.

As part of our developer stack, we have released high quality, fully general purpose open-source libraries for the general Ethereum community to use. These tools aim to increase efficiency and improve compatibility with functional programming languages like Haskell and Purescript.

FOAM is committed to this ongoing mission: no empty promises, and continual progress on the protocol itself.

The Beta version of our Spatial Index Visualizer has been live since April and we’ve continually updated the back-end, optimizing its interaction with the Ethereum blockchain. We’re also carrying out our Token Sale in unison with our Mainnet Launch, proving that we’re selling the right to provide computational work for a functioning product. FOAM is committed to this ongoing mission: no empty promises, and continual progress on the protocol itself.