Q&A with FOAM Advisor: Matt Liston

Sitting down to discuss the implicit potentials of FOAM’s standards and protocols.

Matt Liston is a Blockchain entrepreneur based out of San Francisco, California. He is known for his involvement in the blockchain platforms Gnosis and ethereum. Matt is also an advisor of FOAM, consulting both on on navigating within the blockchain ecosystem and protocol design.

As we get closer to big announcements regarding FOAM we invited Matt for a Q&A on his view on FOAM and what we are building.

Hi Matt, How did you first become involved with FOAM?

I don’t even fully remember. It’s been a while. I was in touch with Ryan, I think through an arts and theory friend network, 2+ years ago. I was drawn to FOAM as a team approaching blockchain applications with a speculative and creative lens. My core goal for FOAM was to see it morph into a spatial protocol and complimentary token design. I kept nudging Ryan toward thinking about protocol tokens. Eventually something snapped, I think frustrations with the state of DApp development, and Ryan went all in. Almost daily he was talking about blog posts he was reading about protocol and token design. It was really inspiring watching his vigor as he tore through the material and ideated the current iteration of FOAM. I’m so proud of the FOAM team’s journey and persistence.

What excites you about the FOAM protocol?

A couple components and potentials of FOAM excite me. FOAM is a physical consensus layer. That is fundamentally exciting. We’ve been obsessing over consensus for blockchain transaction ordering and state, in a digital context. Proof of location brings this to a physical dimension. The ability to visualize and explain consensus protocols outside of a digital context is fascinating for me, and helpful in explaining consensus to non-technical audiences.

Throughout my path in blockchain I’ve had a fixation on oracle layers, bringing non-blockchain data securely into the blockchain. Most pieces in this layer focus on discrete events. FOAM integrates 3 full dimensions into the blockchain with a continuous consensus layer. This is both critical practically for a new category of blockchain economic interactions, and also theoretically as it merges location and time proof.

Of course, I am also excited for what can potentially be built on top of a physical consensus layer linked with blockchain economies. I don’t think we’ve scratched the tip of the iceberg of what types of interactions this can enable.

I don’t think we’ve scratched the tip of the iceberg of what types of interactions this can enable.

What are some short term use-cases where FOAM can create value for the blockchain community?

I see a potential for FOAM to be used within the consensus layer of other protocols. For example, with FOAM stakers/miners could provide proofs of location and the protocol could increase the reward to incentivize some desirable geographic distribution. Similarly, it can be used for storage protocols to prove that redundancy is not colocated.

By connecting physical location to smart contracts, game designers can imbue digital properties onto physical objects.

I also see a potential for medium-term AR games with FOAM. By connecting physical location to smart contracts, game designers can imbue digital properties onto physical objects. A user could drop a message or token at a physical location that could only be received by the next user who physically visits that location. NFTs can spawn and be collected in the physical dimension.

Can you expand on how you envision FOAM as an infrastructure layer.

Smart contracts will need to interact with physical location in order for blockchain economies to reach their potential. These contracts need a way to provably link to location. FOAM provides both a standard for contracts to interact with location and a consensus network that provides economic proofs for location information.

How do you see FOAM enabled Token curated registries for Points of Interest developing over the long term?

I could see POI TCRs become increasingly personal and specialized. Parties can fork TCRs or create nested TCRs to specialize the list. Services like recommendation engines and other bots could be built around these, resulting in a decentralized Yelp/Foursquare. In this model TCR curators can capture the value they’re adding to the network, rather than having user data farmed for ad revenue and fed to centralized corporations.

Can you expand on what you mean with ‘Merging synthetic blockchain time with spatial relativistic time’ in relation to Time synchronization in FOAM’s proof of location protocol?

Blockchains provide a singular ordering of transactions (events) and records them onto a shared, verifiable, and immutable (to varying degree) ledger (and PoW commoditizes and enables fungibility of time itself). FOAM adds location dimensions to this ordering. It moves from discretizing purely digital orderings and transforms space into this format. It moves us a large step closer to collapsing continuous space-time into discrete blockchain time.

What are some long term implications of FOAM you are excited about?

FOAM will allow for secure and sovereign relationships which are linked to blockchain economies. Dynamic local currencies, data marketplaces, location based micro-insurances, decision markets for land development, mixed realities, autonomous vehicle routing, drone airspace purchasing, location proof based sybil resistance, location weighted PoW/PoS space access and governance tokens and contracts, automated interactions with local governing rulesets, a secure and resilient global positioning system, incentivized collection of spatial data, point of interest curation, token or product airdrops,…

The most exciting implication of FOAM is that I anticipate that we won’t be able to predict the large majority of new applications enabled by FOAM.

FOAM opens a new dimension to blockchain. The most exciting implication of FOAM is that I anticipate that we won’t be able to predict the large majority of new applications enabled by FOAM.

Personally, I’m most excited about mixed reality and blockchain layer 1 application. I see a critical use case for location proofs in securing Proof of Stake blockchains and other decentralized systems. Creative applications catch my mind even more. Permanent alternate realities with real economies could be the future of human interaction.