Overview
Proof of location is revolutionizing the blockchain and geospatial industries.
Ethereum plays a special role, as it hosts most Proof of Location tokens and smart contracts. EOS brings new consensus, performance, and account management insights to the space.
Platin is leading Proof of Location on EOS, which has the potential to revolutionize this nascent industry. The EOS Community Initiative is an open forum with weekly meetings that has led to:
- Architecture of GEOS, the geospatial language for EOSIO
- San Francisco EOS GeoSpatial Treasure Hunt, held November 2018
- Much more, detailed below
In this post we share of our recent accomplishments and goals, and tell how you can get involved.
Note: Fake Platin.io Token Alert
The fake PTN and PTNX tokens created by MyEOScoin.e in EOS mainnet are not affiliated with Platin. Please beware, any assets exchanged to those tokens will not be backed by Platin.
Please let us know if any member of the EOS community can reach out to myeoscoin.e to influence a takedown. Contact us at eos-community@platin.io
Guiding Principles
Security: Proof of location claims shall be secure. Security is a moveable goal and must take into consideration relevant operational, practical and human considerations. The most advanced encryption scheme can be undone by social hacking. EOSIO’s use of C++ (as opposed to newer, younger languages such as Solidity) enable EOS-based contracts to inherit decades of resilience, reliability and expertise. Security should also consider account management and recovery procedures. EOSIO human-readible account names, account recovery and transaction recourse modes play a role in the event of loss or theft. Accounts have an owner with active recovery modes that can enable recovery of a lost key.
Performance. Proof of location spans a range of response time and performance needs. Proof of address can take hours to complete, while autonomous vehicle Proof of Location may take seconds. In addition, each may scale to millions of users worldwide. EOS implements rapid block times, as it enables security via other mechanisms and does not need the wait cycles we see on other blockchains. Platin supports some use cases that require processing on the scale of VISA. The leading Proof of Work blockchains don’t come close to this performance: but EOS does with Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS).
Consensus. The consensus mechanisms of EOS offer advantages for Platin’s Proof of Location. Compare for a moment, a group of 100 people mutually witnessing one another’s location certificates, as opposed to 100 people submitting a location certificate for a validation by a centralized system: which is more secure? In addition, the pattern of “block producers” fostering a community aligns with Platin’s vision of “secure beacons” spread across diverse locations. EOS’s dPOS also aligns with Platin’s thinking around opportunistic networks — nodes at a location connecting to each other directly, opportunistically, without the need for an internet connection. These aligned visions, systems and philosophies are just some of the reasons why Platin is engaging so strongly with EOS.
Usability. Proof of Location contracts can involve some surprisingly complex geospatial operations. Location boundaries, proximity, tri-lateration and privacy take some expertise. Platin seeks to wrap the complexity and make it simple and easy to do geospatial operations. We also keep in mind that simple, useable libraries are ideal for making things more secure, as they avoid mistakes due to complexity.
Community Group Initiatives
Initiative #1: PTNE (Platin Token on EOS)
The initiative aims to deploy a Platin PTNE token contract on EOS mainnet called PTNE. The motivation is to simplify EOS community engagement with proof of Location and benefit from the improved performance profile of EOS vs. Ethereum. Project highlights:
EOS-based PTNE to operate separately from the ERC20 PTNX token (the combined amount of PTNX + PTNE tokens will always equal 1 billion — an equivalent number of PTNX tokens will be burned for any amount of PTNE tokens created to ensure that static supply).
Planning phase. Token swap plan in development, strawman stage
Signal harvesting is currently the most popular activity in the Platin network (see platin.io/map). To extend this engagement to the EOS community, we need time to consider impacts of the difference, e.g. EOSIO’s increased performance profile; PTNE payouts for signal harvesting activity to EOS wallets may be more frequent than PTNX payouts to ETH wallets.
Platin Signal Harvesting app to enable support for EOS wallets. Users to decide in what (EOS or Ethereum) mainnet they will wish to be compensated.
WIP: Change wallet to enable onboarding of EOS wallet data
Dev & planning phase
Platin is developing and launching a decentralized network optimized for Proof of Location operations in stages. The current stage has Platin hosting Signal Harvesting blocks. The next step is to provide transparency by anchoring these blocks on a public blockchain. In this initiative, Platin stores merkle roots of Platin hourly blocks on the EOS Mainnet. These are anchors that enable transparency and dcentralized operations.
Community group status: PoC in development.
Initiative #2: GEOS, Geospatial on EOS
GEOS is Platin’s flexible, powerful and extensible library that enables simple binding of location-based behavior to any digital asset. GEOS is used to simplify and define smart contracts handling geo-fencing, token air-drops, location-based three factor authentication, secure location verifications, geolocating assets with smart contract/policy/logic/requirements, and more. Location-based zero knowledge is kept in scope from the ground up, and the library is released under a free and open source (FOSS) license.
GEOS is based on “simple features,” an existing standard with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Co-standardized as ISO standard 19125, it is popularized as PostGIS and integrates concepts from “ESRI Shapefile Technical Description.” GEOS is used to specify a common storage and access model for location data on the blockchain.
GEOS also provides an interface to handle location verifiable claims, the W3C standard for privacy-preserving location claims. See the Verifiable Claims site, https://www.w3.org/TR/verifiable-claims-data-model/
Platin’s zero knowledge range proof is based on our GEOS architecture. The range proof can be extended to any boundary. See Platin’s location ZK Yellow Paper at https://platin.io/yellowpaper.
High-level EOS architecture for GEOS. Map server data is processed via API and handled by the EOSIO network.
Read more simple features and the ideas that GEOS inherits from these standards: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sfa
Planning stage.
Conclusion
Platin is proud to be part of the EOS Community and has multiple initiatives currently in various stages of development. This work has short-term and long-term goals. The Platin Initiative team meets weekly. Platin, EOS and Proof of Location enthusiasts are invited to join to help shape our overall goals, align mutual efforts, and work together for a stronger EOS and Platin going forward. Email eos-community@platin.io for more information or join the Platin/EOS community calls/hangouts at platin.io/EOS.
