FOAM — A Geospatial Proof of Location Protocol for Blockchains and DApps on Epicenter
In the past decade, GPS and other location-tracking solutions have gone from being niche technologies used by the military and outdoor enthusiasts to mass adoption, available to just about every connected device in existence. However, while GPS has become a global standard thanks to its accuracy and availability, decentralized applications cannot rely on its location data security. In this Epicenter episode we were joined by Ryan John King, CEO of FOAM, a blockchain protocol which aims to offer secure location services independent of external centralized sources such as GPS.
FOAM Protocol is one of the first projects working on the intersection of geospatial data and blockchain by introducing a novel crypto-spatial coordinate system and developing technology around Proof of Location. It aims to allow network participants to arrive at consensus on whether an event or agent is verifiably at a particular point in time and space.
The project that served as FOAM’s impetus was Foamspace, an installation at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in 2015. As a temporary work of architecture, Foamspace explored the speculative relationship between decentralized infrastructure and the production of the built environment. Since then the team behind FOAM has been exploring many visionary ideas around location, space and blockchain.
The main challenge that FOAM intends to solve is ensuring one’s ability to localize themselves securely and in a decentralized way, without a need for central authority participation and without GPS — which is an outdated, non-encrypted, centralized system launched and controlled by the US government. According to Ryan, while GPS has been definitely helpful in navigation, we are dealing with an overreliance on a single entity — and Proof of Location protocol appears as a real disruptor, especially once the industry starts to require encrypted solutions. Its easy to compete with GPS, as GPS III has been delayed till 2022, and current GPS is super susceptible to cyberattacks and it is a slow moving system, says Ryan. To that purpose, FOAM is building a BFT time-synchronisation protocol that will be run over radio by a distribution of beacons which synchronise their clocks, and maintain a quorum on space and time. Through that system they can determine the geometry of their own network without an external input such as GPS.
FOAM will issue a token to provide an economic incentive for people to open the zones — which act as a sort of mining triangulations — and coordinate between them. The first device in the area creates a zone and is eligible for mining new tokens. You have economic incentives to operate the zones to offer secure location services with a service level agreement, you would want to add more nodes to the zone to make it more robust and precise, and you have a lot of location customers (cars, drones, people) paying you to sign the location claims — explains Ryan. Therefore, FOAM is a protocol where anyone can become a location service provider and has the incentive to purchase the necessary hardware devices to offer those services.
While it will take some time to build up the FOAM ecosystem of zone creators and for the project to mature, the team has already begun exploring possible use cases on an enterprise level — partnering with e.g. Trusted IoT Alliance working on the question of data provenance, or with the Toyota Research Institute, figuring out how to ensure that autonomous car share immutable location records across different owners of fleets. FOAM has also recently integrated uPort into the private beta of FOAM’s visual blockchain explorer, the Spatial Index.
If you want to play around with the FOAM API, check out their newly launched developer portal where you can find tutorials and sample applications.
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