Crypto-spatial Coordinates, Proof of Location & Spatial index

Ryan King, FOAM CEO at Ethereum Meetup Philadelphia

We greatly enjoyed the Philadelphia Ethereum Meetup, check out the video of Ryan John King presenting FOAM below.

To give a short overview, below follow the the three parts of FOAM as explained in the video.

1. Crypto-Spatial Coordinates

As described in our previous blog post Crypto-Spatial Coordinates — the open location standard on Ethereum we are developing an open location standard for the Ethereum blockchain.

2. Proof of Location

Our Proof of Location Protocol will provide consensus on whether an event or agent is verifiably at a certain point in time and space, without GPS. The problems of geolocation and time synchronicity have a lot in common. Proof of Location can be done with with Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) Time Synchronization protocols run on specialized devices with radio transmitters.

As the financial incentive of mining in Proof of Work created the worlds biggest supercomputer, we see the possibility to use financial incentives in our soon to be released Proof of Location Protocol to create wide-spanning networks of beacons and IoT devices for unspoofable location validation.

3. Spatial Index

Built in part on our previously released Purescript web3 library, the Spatial Index is a visual explorer for geospatial smart contracts on the blockchain. We like to think of it as a cross between a Bloomberg trading terminal and Google Maps; spatialized financial data. As an open-source web-app it will be used to a) allow users to interact with our protocol visually and b) as cornerstone in the large variety of decentralized applications that can be built on top of our protocols.

Check the video presentation above for a demo of the Spatial Index application!