Foam’s protocol is open source. But cartographers have to purchase tokens that entitle them to contribute to it. Zone operators both stake and receive tokens as they perform their geolocative labors. The company hopes that this incentive system, which is not found in other volunteer crowdsourced projects, will help extend the network’s geographic coverage.

The protocol promotes other rewards, too. For a fee, anchors can also offer location services that use smart contracts to link a location on the blockchain to an address—a geohash—on the physical map. That’s how services including package tracking, address verification, and contract enforcement might work.

Location is meant to be commercialized: The platforms hope to “foster an ecosystem of applications built on top of a verified location standard,” as Foam puts it. The whole ecosystem, rather than some centralized authority, gets to determine what’s featured on the map. Contributors can stake their Foam tokens to create lists of points of interest (POIs), such as coffee shops with Wi-Fi, the best dog parks, urban landmarks, or government facilities. Other token holders can then vote on those lists; up-votes increase the value of the list and the value of the list creator’s tokens. Down-votes indicate that other token holders presume that a nominated POI will degrade the quality of a list.

Atop this infrastructure, Foam provides an interface, which it bills as “a cross between a Bloomberg trading terminal and Google Maps.” The dashboard allows users to interact with and act on all those smart contracts, facilitating an array of applications—from autonomous-vehicle tracking, to supply-chain management, to location-based games such as Pokémon Go. A Foam competitor, XYO Network, proposes that PoL could also help government agencies and police forces track regulated firearms, to make sure that they’re always in the hands of the agents authorized to handle them. I asked King whether or how they plan to discourage particular uses, such as surveillance and predatory marketing. He told me that “governance is built into the protocol” (unlike with GPS). Foam requires users to make a minimum deposit to participate; putting one’s own tokens up as collateral, King said, serves as an “anti-spam mechanism.” The voting procedure also provides checks and balances.

King explained that Foam’s is the only PoL project “providing full-stack location services,” including location and coding standards and the visualizer. “It’s important to start from scratch,” he said, to start a “whole new infrastructure,” to make location “holistic.”

What makes a “quality” list of places in the world? Foam claims that it focuses on “objective” spatial information, yet it seems to see spatial value in “economic or reputational terms.” That could lead users to stake their tokens to map readily verifiable, predictable features and high-quality neighborhoods and facilities (that is, those with a strong reputation for good schools, low crime, and high property values). Even so, users can also use their tokens to “signal” where location services are needed and to inspire growth in underserved areas. A bet on an up-and-coming area determines users’ “spatial-mining rewards”—the bounty doled out, in this case, for extending the map to underrepresented regions.