Location, location

It’s easy to take the world for granted. It almost comes naturally to see business and commerce as how things are done, when things are done. And there’s a lot of business potential in where things are done.

Location intelligence — the business of gathering information on location — is fast becoming an area that societies and economies are reliant upon. Location data is used every day all over a data- and mobile-rich world. As an increasing number of workers and users are carrying location-aware devices, this presents more opportunities to generate business value.

Vehicles that are self-driving, drones that deliver packages and smart cities, however, need this data to be certain and secure. While currently, this data — mainly sourced through mature GPS technology — has grown to be extremely accurate and dependable, it is becoming more and more vulnerable to malicious attacks. Hackers can jam signals, disrupt data delivery, spoof the data or interfere with it. And they are getting more and more active, growing in frequency and severity, posing a threat to economic activity and even lives.

Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation (RNT Foundation) president Dana Goward notes that “The need for a difficult-to-disrupt system to complement GPS has been well known for years”.

Blockchaining the real world through trustless location heuristics

Our partners, the XY Oracle Network (XYO Network), have developed an “ecosystem of crypto-location protocols and components”, leveraging blockchain technology to create this very system of decentralized and trustless location heuristics.

Instead of a centralized system for location data, they propose a vast distributed network of interconnected devices delivering data required by location-based smart contracts.

Through XY Findables, the company behind XYO Network, they have built over 1 million beacons all over the world over the past five years, with hundreds of thousands more ready for activation. Each works on verifying locations through cryptographic security to form an oracle network, using smart contracts to interact with the real world — essentially interacting with the physical world as if it were an API.

It also introduces novel concepts of Proof of Origin, which is a key to verifying the data that enters the XYO network, and Bound Witness, which establishes the existence of bidrectional proof of location, where both parties validate the occurence and range of interaction by cosigning.

It eschews traditional methods of trustless systems such as unique ID for data source (impractical as they can be spoofed) and private key signing (nodes must be assumed to be difficult to physically secure, putting private keys at risk of theft). Instead, it uses Transient Key Chaining, which makes it virtually impossible to falsify the chain of origin of the data.

Meet the XYO Network blockchain guardians

The XYO Network consists of four main components: sentinels, bridges, archivists and diviners.

Sentinels are heuristic witnesses that produce temporal ledgers to vouch for accuracy and certainty of heuristics. They add a Proof of Origin to ensure the data is from the same source.

Bridges than securely relay Sentinel ledgers to Diviners, ensuring they are not altered in any way. They also add an additional Proof of Origin for added security.

Archivists store all historical ledgers in a decentralized manner for free, indexing ledgers so any data string can be retrieved. They are compensated each time data is retrieved.

Diviners analyzes stored data to answer a given question. It judges measures witnesses, as well as how valid and accurate heuristics are, based on their levels of Proof of Origin. They are incentivized to provide honest analyses, and add answers to the blockchain using Proof-of-Work.

The XYO token sale

What you get with XYO Network: a trustless verification for location data, which is geo-focused and consensus-building.

Each time you write a smart contract specifying for an object to appear at a specific XY-coordinate, you know for sure the object appears there and it was at that location. The location signaling device is spoof-free, verified by thousands of Sentinels with the longest Proof of Origin chain, resulting in greater confidence in the heuristics.

The XYO utility token will be the used by smart contract developers to access the network. The XYO token generation event is live, with over 418 million XYO already sold.

Join the XYO token sale now or find out more details in their white paper. Check out their latest updates on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

Curious about what AmaZix can do for you?

We’re always on the lookout for another exciting project to work on. If you’re working in the crypto space and planning an ICO, or just want help managing your communities, we’d love to hear from you.

Reach out to us on the following channels:

1. Telegram: https://t.me/amazix

2. Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmaZixOfficial

3. Website: http://www.amazix.com/

4. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmaZixOfficial

5. Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmaZixOfficial/