Thank you to the community for providing questions to our first ‘Ask me Anything’. This is the first of a series and we will be following up with a developer oriented AMA soon.

1. How will a GPS based system compare to the decentralized system built with FOAM?

FOAM is a solution for blockchains and smart contracts. Because GPS has no proof of authentication or proof of origin, autonomous smart contracts cannot verify and act on this information. FOAM is not necessarily trying to compete with the accuracy of GPS, although it can be possible over time, our primary goal is to serve autonomous smart contracts with secure localization and verified location data so they can autonomously act on this information.

2. Is FOAM going to be built on the Ethereum blockchain?

FOAM is developing exclusively right now on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. How that actually plays out towards launch will determine what components are on the public chain, and which are on designated side-chains. We are exploring things like Cosmos zones and Plasma pegs for individual areas of coverage so that they can have scalable high speed block times. Potentially, those would run with different consensus algorithms such as Tendermint. We are looking at the actual utilization of proof of location and the proofs live on the public Ethereum blockchain.

3. Will FOAM be dependent on third-party scaling solutions or does it have its own scaling solution?

I wouldn’t call Plasma or Cosmos a third party solution as we would be working closely with those teams and building custom solutions for FOAM.

4. Should it be the responsibility of Dapps to find their own scaling solutions?

Yes, we at FOAM are working on a unique problem that needs a unique solution, and that means it also needs a unique scaling solution. It is a responsibility of projects to make sure that they can not only implement this technology, organize a community around it, but also find a way to allow it to scale responsibly.

5. What hardware and staking requirements will there be for hosting proof of location nodes?

As we’ve mentioned in our blog posts and some of the chats, right now FOAM is agnostic to which radio it actually uses. Our innovations are focused on time synchronization protocol (which through that you can derive location), as well as the token economics and incentives to actually have the correct incentives to have the system developed. That said, the most interesting radio that we are looking at is the LoRa radio and we will be launching our first proof of concept on LoRa. In that sense, some of the hardware requirements to be a zone anchor would be operating a LoRa gateway, and it shouldn’t be too much extra hardware beyond what you can get off-the-shelf already. In terms of staking requirements, you will need a token to participate as a zone anchor or a verifier — checking for fraud proofs. You can think of that token as a virtualized piece of hardware that you need to buy and own in addition to the hardware of running the actual node. That will be one of the requirements along with the hardware to be a proof of location node.

6. Can a zone be made of LoRa nodes that are all in range of a gateway? Does each zone anchor need to be a gateway?

So the way that we are addressing this are by using what we call zone authorities which are essentially gateways. Those are entities that have access to the internet and therefore can also have access to the blockchain so they can check the current status of the blockchain and basically be a watcher. LoRa then also allows for all of these sub-nodes to be attached to one gateway. Those can be distributed hardware in IoT on Raspberry Pis out in the field and those are like the core zone anchors. A batch of those would have to rely on a zone authority and that authority would have access to the blockchain and the internet. So you could have a very lightweight device that is very cheap and register it with a local authority (which you could also own yourself). Each individual authority, which is a gateway connected to the internet, would have to stay in sync with each other.

In summary, zones are made up of LoRa gateways as well as the end node devices that don’t necessarily have internet connections (because they are very low-power and light weight) and they have to rely on the gateways for updates.

7. Is there going to be a sign up list for hosting a zone anchor or beacon? How might people get involved?

There is not only be a sign up list but there will be ample opportunities for developer grants, access to hackathons, and other support from our team. The only way for FOAM to succeed is to actually have people setting up zone anchors and beacons, maintaining them, and becoming their own service provider. With FOAM we want to empower people to be their own service provider with this proof of location technology, so we will be cultivating a list. In terms of our utility token distribution event we want to make sure it is going to people that actually utilize this utility token in our software. This list will also play into how we distribute the tokens to the initial holders.

8. Will there be an incentive system for signing others up to host these beacons in your locale?

We are thinking about incentive systems in the actual protocol in the form of block rewards and inflation. If you are setting up a beacon or a zone anchor, you can get this base reward. There isn’t necessarily an incentive for signing others up, but the block reward can be higher on the edge of these zones where there is less coverage. You could be incentivized to add new nodes to the edge because you could get a baseline block reward that is higher. That’s one of the incentives that we see to encourage growth of the network.

9. What are the expected geometries of the gateways? How many to achieve desired accuracy?

A desired geometry of the gateways would be a full graph, meaning everyone in the node can connect with each other. That is desirable and ideal, but it won’t always work out that way. So there isn’t exactly an ideal geometry, but the point is that the deployed network can determine its own geometry without an external source like GPS. No matter in which configuration the gateways are deployed, the network can determine its own geometry autonomously and doesn’t need to rely on any external information or trust that information.

With a LoRa gateway in an urban environment, you could get up to five miles of coverage. There have not been that many field tests in terms of number of gateways for a dense area. That will be one area that we will research once we get our first proof of concept and testnets up. We will try to actually figure out what kind of coverage can be achieved in dense urban environments. These Low-Power Wide-Area Networks are a very new frontier, so there is very little raw field test information to go off of.

10. Is the accuracy inclusive of multi-path considerations?

Yes, that is one of the biggest concerns, but we are able to mitigate that because our nodes are constantly communicating with each other. They’re trying to synchronize their clocks so you can do averaging of the distance and time to account for multi-path. And the fact that these constant communication channels are open and that we are relying on the very extreme measure of the byzantine fault tolerant time synchronization protocol, this should try to mitigate for multipath. Also, if you have more nodes in line of sight, that’s another way to mitigate for multipath.

11. In what geographic areas do you expect to see beacons rolled out first?

I would expect in urban areas because this is where you also see a dense concentration of decentralized interest in blockchain technology. There’s many meetups in urban areas that are quite large and attract a big crowd. There’s also a lot of big hacker communities in the LPWAN space. Because we ourselves are based in a large city, New York and also with people in Berlin, we think that potentially that’s the easiest way to build communities on the ground. That is not to say that we are against anyone starting in rural areas and that would be really exciting if that’s also some of the first places that people set up zones.

12. What are the challenges you might face in implementation?

One might be that a lot of FOAM’s future depends on the growth of the entire ecosystem. As I mentioned at the beginning of this broadcast, FOAM is a solution for smart contracts and blockchains. For FOAM to be useful, there needs to be a need for smart contracts to exist out in the world. We project there will be for everything from IoT, to supply chain, to video games like Pokemon Go, and to anything that requires location in a blockchain parameter. That’s one challenge for us is that for FOAM to work, the entire ecosystem has to scale and the industries have to actually adopt this technology for there to be a need for secure location verification.

Another challenge is just building the actual community and getting people involved, excited, and interested in running nodes at such an early stage.

It may also be a challenge getting people excited to build their own applications. It’s not only being a validator or contributing computational power, but we are also building many spatial tools here at FOAM. Not only with proof of location, but also our Spatial Index web app and Crypto-Spatial Coordinates. We want to encourage people to build all different kinds of decentralized applications built with our tools. Those are our challenges how we can get this to market and build a decentralized ecosystem around the standards that we are proposing.

13. Can FOAM be supplemented by other systems like Wi-Fi and GPS?

Absolutely, and that’s really up to the client side. If it’s a weak proof required, they could use GPS. But the approach that we are taking is that, “If there’s token on the line, if there’s money on the line,” people can easily spoof things like GPS. So yeah, you can use it as a supplement to help these systems orient themselves. However, what we are thinking is that when there are autonomous contracts that could be releasing funds, there will be an incentive to abuse those complimentary systems like GPS.

14. FOAM will not use LoRaWAN and use a custom protocol. Can FOAM devices run with LoRaWAN and FOAM at the same time?

This is addressing that the LoRaWAN MAC layer standard is very limited. It’s built for enterprise use cases and only allows one way communication; just gateways to the nodes, and not vice-versa. Where if you just build on the actual radio chip, you can easily do mesh networking and bi-directional communication.

Yes, essentially what they would be sending over the LoRa radio signals are signed messages about FOAM.

We will be releasing more information soon, including our roadmap, timeline and some exciting partnerships. For now, check out our new website and join our Telegram. Updates will be posted on Reddit, Twitter and Facebook. Leading up to the release of our white paper, we will be sharing posts going into more detail on the FOAM protocol, our API, use cases for different verticals, the Spatial Index, and further technical breakdowns of Proof of Location and our white paper.

We welcome feedback from the community and are open to collaborations, so please get in touch.