In the past few years, there’s been much written about the potential for blockchain to give user’s greater control and protection over their own data. We believe this is a mission worth pursuing, and there are many new blockchain projects doing just that. But we also believe that the massive data moats built by the major tech conglomerates in the past decade pose a number of other challenges — One is how they use these moats to compete unfairly (perhaps illegally?) in areas adjacent to their core business, like geo + mapping for example. Through our investment in Carmera, we were already quite familiar with this emerging battle for mapping data when we met Randy and Diana from StreetCred.
Randy and Diana have spent much of their professional lives thinking about and building mapping products. Randy originally at Google, and then as CTO of Mapquest, and together as CEO and Head of Search Eng at Mapzen, respectively. They painted a compelling, but also worrisome picture for us —Point-of-Interest (POI) data tends to be restrictive and expensive, quickly outdated and inaccurate — big companies hold this data close to the vest, and there’s been little innovation since the Foursquare / Gowalla days. After moving on from Mapzen, they wondered what a permanent solution would look like, and would that even be possible? We wondered together what a truly, forever open-source mapping protocol might look like if maintained and owned by its community of contributors and users? Would this look like OpenStreetMap? Or would it look like something new?
We believe it looks like StreetCred, a fully decentralized and open-source mapping protocol, maintained and owned by the community, with its own dedicated blockchain and cryptoeconomic incentives to reward contributors. At scale, we believe StreetCred will be the largest and most valuable POI data set in the world — it will be owned by the community with no platform risk for developers and users, and it will be the cheapest to access by cutting out the middleman. Could the StreetCred protocol be forked for other types of data assets as well? Of course, it’s all open-source, and we hope other teams with similar aspirations will collaborate with them and with us.
This is an audacious mission, but we think Randy and Diana and the rest of the growing StreetCred team are uniquely suited to build this. If you’d like to join them, they’re hiring, but there will be lots of others ways to become a collaborator on this project as well, so if you’re interested please get in touch!
