The 3Box ecosystem keeps growing at a rapid pace and I am routinely impressed by the creativity of developers in our community.

Decentralized, location-based reviews using FOAM and 3Box

Ian Lapham, a Uniswap developer hacking at ETHBoston, integrated 3Box comment threads into the FOAM map to create a decentralized location-based review system.

You can find a demo of the Reviews app here, and the Github repo here.

It’s exciting to see FOAM and 3Box, complimentary web3 technologies, come together to create a product capable of providing an equivalent user experience to successful web2 products like Foursquare or Google Maps.

How does it work?

Let’s look at how these protocols work together to create a decentralized location-based review system.

FOAM Map

The FOAM protocol allows cartographers to add points of interest to the FOAM map by staking tokens, which you can easily purchase on Uniswap. These points of interest can represent anything from restaurants to businesses, public parks, and more. See more at: https://map.foam.space/.

3Box Threads

Using 3Box, each POI on the FOAM map now gets its own persistent decentralized comment thread that organizes a feed of user-submitted reviews. 3Box threads are built using 3ID and Ethereum accounts for decentralized identity, OrbitDB feed stores for data structuring, and IPFS for storage. Read more about 3Box threads here.

3Box Profiles and Reputation

Throughout the entire web3 ecosystem users are visually identified by their 3Box profile, which is associated to their Ethereum account, and they can begin to build up a reputation for providing valuable reviews or other content. You can create a profile here.

Open, Interoperable Reviews

One cool thing about this model of reviews built on 3Box threads is that the review data is not tied to any specific interface or platform. It’s completely open. Any interface can plug into the review threads that already exist and surface them in their own interface for whatever use case they can imagine. Be creative!