#229 Ryan John King: FOAM – A Geospatial Proof of Location Protocol for Blockchains and Dapps

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by shape-shift I uh the easiest fastest and most secure way to swap your digital assets don't run a risk of leaving your funds on centralized exchange visits shapeshifter IO to get started hi welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is sebastian cuiture and i'm a Hanoi today we'll be talking about the intersection

of geospatial data and blockchain technology in many cases you might have come across applications where it is important for some party to prove where they are on on earth basically in order to get something and we have a unique project which is called forum that is developing technology around proof of location allowing devices machines containers to prove that they are at a particular point in space and time so we are talking to Ryan John King who is the co-founder of the foam protocol Ryan welcome to the show thank you so much for having me really excited to be

discussing from cool the forum is I think one of the first projects that is working on this intersection of geospatial data and the blockchain now and we are wondering like how you came to work at this intersection and what is your background that led you to it yes so we started working on the forum about three years ago the beginning of 2015 really beginning this investigation of how can you think the reason about space on the blockchain our first project was actually called foam space which was sponsored by the new Museum here in New York City where we built a physical installation of the blockchain made out of geofoam blocks in the streets and airdrop tokens to everyone who came actually on counterparty at the time

gave out foam space coins to try to capture the value of this temporary event it was an architecture installation and then we sold the blocks on a block sale and had this kind of fund to back this token and did we wanted to move the value of space to another location we made some more investigative installation such as the tropical mining station which was recreated at the last ethereal and we kept going from there and eventually realized for many of these visionary ideas about location space and blockchain and decentralized organizations around programmable space we actually needed a way to prove where you are if it's going to be happening in an autonomous way which led us to proof of location there's been a lot of talk about proof of location and specifically

sort of the intersection of IOT and and the blockchain and in in my experiences so what I've seen and so the circles that I sort of run with it's been mostly about trying to keep IOT devices that are out in the field secure so that one can trust the data that it's coming from those devices in this case we're trying to prove the location of a device what are some of the challenges there that we see that are like unique to this specific use case yes I know a lot of the attention has been on secure kind of Enclave computing

for IOT devices and IOT data markets have been a popular kind of meeting of exchange token but we haven't really seen address ability of proof of origin or you know data provenance and that's a difficult problem because most ways that systems localize themselves securely is either based on some central authority or something like GPS the challenges with relying on that in the blockchain or smart contract context is there's no way to speak back to the GPS to produce some sort of digital certificate or authentication about the message so for people receiving this data from the IOT device there's not a way to kind of challenge or check if the location data actually came from where it's edited so the fundamental problem here it is so

when I'm let's say let's say I'm playing Pokemon go right and if I reach a particular spatial coordinate I'm going to be rewarded these collectible items right you can think of them as crypto kitties so we can have a future version of crypto kitties where if I am at a particular point in space at a certain time I'll get a crypto kitty and it's going to be valuable let's say it's I don't know going to be worth one Easter then I need a way to prove that I was in that space at that point in time to a smart contract so that that smart contract could then give me the crypto kitty so you are developing the

fundamental protocols that would allow an interaction like that yeah exactly and you know with Pokemon there is no real money at stake and people went out of their way to lie about their location and spoof their GPS so you can imagine in any sort of situation where whether it's mobility or supply chain or Internet of Things if there's an actual value at stake people would be quite incentivized to lie about their location yeah it's it's really me proving to a smart contract that I was at a particular point in space and time and getting something in value from that smart contract in exchange for that yeah exactly but this is also in a privacy-preserving way so you as the customer the location customer have the agency over when you want to produce

what we call a presence claim and you can keep this you know as a you know privacy-preserving log in case it wants to challenge you or in the case where you're playing a game like a crypto kitty Pokemon go you need to present it to the app then to unlock whatever the logic of the app you're interacting with is okay so let's first dig into why GPS itself would not suffice for this application right so like before we dig into that question tell us how GPS works how do i how do i magically know where I am on earth using GPS yeah most people don't actually necessarily dig actually deep into that because it works so well it's extremely reliable and so much

infrastructure using this GPS so GPS is launched and controlled by the United States government around maybe 30 satellites oh is orbiting overhead and all these satellites share synchronized atomic clocks they synchronize with base stations and they simply just send out messages about what time it is and who they are and through the kind of physics if you have synchronized clocks and radio signals you as the receiver can calculate time of flight or time difference of arrival and through distance learned something about location so synchronize time and location are really intertwined so you're just an iPhone if it can pick up at least four GPS signals so you need a 1 for X Y Z and 1/4 for time then you can localize yourself and that's kind of

how GPS works today so the assumption is like there are 4 satellites oh so when I basically switch on Google Maps and it shows my locations essentially like my mobile is connecting to 4 satellites mm-hmm and then all of these four satellites running like run a very precise clock and they are all synchronized with each other yep they're synchronized yeah base station and they are running the most precise clock which is an atomic clock and your device doesn't speak back to it but it can simply receive at least four signals it could triangulate itself and localize your receiver so okay so when I connect to one of these satellites what I receive is a message and in that message there is some kind of time stamp

from that satellite so that says that okay I said the satellite says I sent this message this particular time and does it also send the location of that satellite itself no simply the time so that you know they're always moving around overhead but at that exact moment you can get four and kind of localize your receiver and just with those four messages with four times I can look and I can locate where I am on earth yes sometimes it takes you know up to a minute and especially then in the context of IOT it's extremely battery draining to rely on GPS to localize yourself and do two other kind of limitations sometimes you know if you don't have four overhead it takes a long time to figure out where you are and

other times you have more than four overhead it's just a minute on the fourth so would not wouldn't I also need to understand sort of my position in relation to these different GPS satellites as well as the time wouldn't I need to know the time it took for that message to come from the satellite to reach my phone exactly so that's why you have these four and because all four are in sync your receiver can calculate the time of flight it took for each four to get to you and with this minimum before you can then position yourself but if I'm not also synchronized using atomic clocks how can your phone does not synchronize with GPS or speak back to it it's simply

a receiver that can receive GPS radios and calculate the time of flight between four different messages so when you open your iPhone and your iPhones localizing yourself it's just simply receiving the GPS messages but it can't speak back to the GPS okay understand okay so I was under the impression that there was a bilateral like a back-and-forth communication between the device and the GPS when in fact it's just receiving timestamps and maybe I'm just receiving and then that's why there is no proof of origin or authentication so if you open your Apple iTunes Store there's plenty of GPS spoofer apps so you know I can send Sebastian a dropped pin on iMessage telling you that I'm in California with no problem it's trivial to do and you

have no way to verify if that dropped in actually is a real GPS dropped in or I just placed it there of course I understand okay however I mean we we could let's let's imagine like a let's imagine like a an augmented GPS system and more secured GPS system could the GPS satellites themselves sign the message sign the time stamp with a key sort of maybe like a US government key and so if you trust the US government then you would presumably trust these coordinates yeah technically that's possible I mean GPS right now is currently outdated and not even capable to defend itself against a basic cyber

security threats GPS 3 has been delayed year after year I think it's now scheduled for 2022 and it doesn't have this encryption so civil GPS is not encrypted and it won't have this feature the Galileo system in Europe which is their global positioning satellite system are considering this you know message back to it but beyond that you know GPS doesn't work indoors it has a lot of difficulties in cities so you could use proof of location with satellites as an element but I think GPS itself these are a billion dollar billions and billions of dollar systems that are slow-moving and I don't see them being a solution for smart contracts in the near future absolutely I I totally agree with so the the legacy technology aspect that doesn't really

necessarily speak well to newer technologies such as from our contracts now with the with the sort of ubiquitous proliferation of GPS chips costing under $5 and just about any connected device that we have and that we own can can we assume that GPS is here to stay or you think that it can be disrupted by something else so how how do you think one can come to perhaps disrupt GPS well I think GPS is here to stay and

definitely helpful in navigation I think if you look to the news today there's increasing concern that there's an over-reliance on it as a one central entity that's why you see other nations trying to launch their own satellite systems I think being able to offer proof of location is a real disrupter to GPS and because so many industries rely on it and it's not even encrypted once those industries start to adopt blockchain technology they're going to realize they need a secure location verification solution and once those kinds of economies of scale start to kick in with this need that's when we may see a shift of you know where we rely on for secure location in some senses I guess like when the GPS system was built the fundamental

assumption was the system the a system is needed in order that devices and humans can triangulate their location on earth whereas the fundamental thing form is saying is in addition to triangulating where I am on earth I also need to be able to prove that I was at that place on earth and other people need to be able to verify it and this necessarily creates a requirement for interactivity between the device that is at the particular point in space and time and the satellites that are actually sending the synchronized signals so there has to

be some back-and-forth communication between these in order handshake like I'm some sort of cryptographic handshake exchange of signatures and the end and that is what requires a protocol and this kind of protocol interactivity protocol doesn't exist today and this is what foam is attempting to build yeah and to that you know there are many alternative ways to localize yourself than GPS based on IOT kind of beacons and different kind of protocols so you could there are ways and systems that do localization without GPS so the technology exists today and we're really trying to innovate and bringing the incentive model to have people offer

alternative location services and be incentivized to do so okay so what are these technologies for location without GPS give us a give us like a survey of the landscape yeah I think that there are plenty different of wireless sensor networks that use different sort of localization techniques so one way your phone determines your location is also through the position of cell towers and cell signals and you can also in any sort of IOT network that can communicate do localization as well the fundamental thing is it's always the same logic of you know some element of synchronize clocks some systems have only one base station that does synchronize and others aren't but it always boils down to some sort of triangulation and it's

subcategories of trilateration or multilateration one of the most exciting they're new developments is a radio class of low power wide area networks and these are designed to be for IOT devices that can last you know ten years and broadcast of the long range like 15 kilometers or so and there are many different variants and with those systems you can do alternative localization so that's kind of where our interests lie okay so these are low-power wide area network devices and is it correct to say that you're building some kind of protocol that would incentivize the deployment of such devices so that users of your system could prove their

location so an interactive protocol between their device and these are there yeah proof of location protocol is based on a time synchronization protocol specifically a Byzantine fault tolerant time synchronization protocol so if you have a distribution of beacons that are running this protocol over radio they can basically synchronize their clocks with themselves and basically maintain a quorum on space and time and through that system they can determine the geometry of their own network without an external input like GPS so the report designing this radio protocol as well as a consensus with state machine so they can store information about that so that's really the how do you figure out

location or aspect of the protocol but then yes more broadly where we have more crypto economics is to actually incentivize people to actually offer these services and operate these nodes and run what we call the zones of coverage so let's just walk through a tort experiment right like so imagine the three of us are beacons essentially so we are these low-power IOT devices that can communicate over radio with each other and we have we ultimately want to synchronize on our clocks and we are let's say very close to each other so we are at in the same one kilometer square area and imagine three of us as devices and maybe there

are more of more devices in that same kilometer square so it they might be actually six or seven so until now nothing has happened and now what we must do is all of these devices must communicate over radio and synchronize their clocks and they use some kind of is it correct to say they use a blockchain in order to synchronize their clocks so the time synchronization happens purely over radio and this is like a self-stabilizing fault-tolerant protocol but what they do use a blockchain for is our sharing the state machine so each beacon and his own anchor what we call them has to have a shared state machine and that steer'd shape machine is basically a blockchain running tender man consensus

but in the broader kind of foam protocol how do those validators ever end up becoming a zone they actually have to pass through a higher-order blockchain and make different bonds and offer basically service level agreements that they're going to be offer in synchronized time services and they're not going to be faulty so in other words like if it's like one kilo meter square and like the three of us are beacons we have a shared blockchain so we have some sort of protocol that is not related to the blockchain at all that synchronizes our clocks so we communicate over our radio and as long as a majority of us are honest we'll get synchronized there's already a

protocol unrelated to Byzantine fault tolerance that does this right now okay so once our clocks are synchronized then we will also set up our own internal blockchain for this piece for this one kilometer square piece of land is that correct yes in this example yeah and so each time you would need to come to around the people would basically vote on have we actually been in sync and they would basically store that state with all the corresponding times to have data from that round now just thing on this example I have a bit of a question here let's assume me once again there's there's three of us

and we're able to synchronize our clocks and sort of be aware of each of our positions so spatially so that like I know that you guys are positioned at certain distances for me so we have we have sort of relative context of our locations but how can we prove to someone else that were in fact situated say for instance in a one square kilometer or Zone in Paris and not in a one square kilometer zone in Mozambique like where is that where do we bootstrap the sort of initial location and what authority says that you're actually in

these at these coordinates and that's somewhere else yeah great question so the time sync protocol and each zone they determine their location relative to each other so it's not about absolute positions so that they you know the protocol works in geometric space so it could you know essentially run in a different planet it's agnostic to absolute positions to just back up a bit because there are other elements to foam we didn't get touched on we have kind of location encoding standard called the crypto spatial coordinate and the visualizer tool I called the spatial index so if you're using those in this case if I'm a zone I'm putting down a collateral bond that I want to open his own and then I do in fact open my zone and I'm running this time sync protocol

the first thing is that that protocol is going to be checked by a verifier who's gonna check this data and say is the zone actually in sync or not and if it's not I'm gonna be punished and lose my bond so I always have to be in sync to be a valid zone so yeah the question is I could open his own and claim it's in Paris but actually open it in Alaska and maybe at first you know I'm just checked that uh I am in sync so I'm you know not getting punished but if I'm not where I said I am I'm gonna have trouble getting location customers which are all the use cases and applications who want to pay me to sign their requests and then further because I'm not where I actually said I was anyone can figure that out by going where they said thought I was

opening device they don't have to pay me if they can't pick up my signals I'm not where I am so I'm subject to a challenge if another zone joins in powers wants to get in touch with me and they can't talk to me well then again I'm subject to a challenge and I'm at risk of losing my bond we probably see more in a higher level kind of social protocol where people will curate absolute positions and you know test them but the protocol itself is just about the nodes in a zone being able to determine their relative geometry okay and in that case then presumably one one would get finer position data with more nodes and more beacons being challenged on their

absolute locations yeah or just in general more nodes in the zone do lead to more accuracy and precision so you want to kind of have this robust coverage and if you have these overlapping zones and one of them is actually not there well if the other people can't talk to it they'll be found out so in order for this system to be useful what you essentially want is to fill the earth with these low-power devices each for each kilometer square on earth you might need like four or five devices so you know that's going to be like billions of devices and so that's kind of where our kind of economic incentives come in where we

want to use the token to coordinate people opening these zones and so we have a rewards mechanism where if you are actually proving you're in sync as a zone and you're not being punished you're actually eligible for provisions a minting of new tokens so these zones are kind of mining triangulations and in our system you know if you know the supply of bla Bitcoin you could easily reason about what year it is because it's exclusively issued over time or we actually want a foam token to be issued over space and that the mining reward will be higher in an area where there aren't zones yet to try to incentivize people to keep expanding the network well that's a lot of objectives for an incentivization mechanic so a you want to incentivize people to create zones

and have these low-power devices in those zones so if I'm like the first device in a particular area like I go and create these zones so there has to be incentive for me to start this own up and if you're the first one you're eligible for mining new tokens even if you have no customers paying fees okay and then like okay so I am the only device in the in that zone there has to be incentive for other devices to join the zone because the more the number of devices the better the triangulation inside inside that zone right now on top of that you want the ability centi wise so when I'm trying when I'm

creating the new zone you want me to create the new zone farther away from other zones like in a unique in a unique geographical location that is not served by others other other zones right and the fourth thing you want to incentivize is if me and the other devices in this particular zone are basically lying about where we actually are then you need a mechanism to detect that and punish us yeah and so this is the sort of economic incentive problem that you have solved using smart contracts on aetherium is that right well attempting to solve yeah but that's kind of the logic behind it that you have this

economic incentives to operate zones offer secure location services with a service level agreement and basically you would want to add more nodes to a zone to make it more robust and precise and hopefully you have a lot of location customers whether their cars or drones or people paying you to sign their location claims but we see that at a kind of threshold where the more nodes that join is almost like the difficulty is rising so the block reward is shrinking for you as itself there even if there's lucrative themarket so there could be an incentive if you had enough money to purchase many hundreds of beacons you might be more profitable to actually put them in different cities than put them all in the same place and so that kind of incentive is that we actually want more zones to appear even prior to the fee

markets being there just simply by having this mining incentive this episode is brought to you by shape-shift the world's leading trustless digital assets change quickly swap between dozens of fleeting cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin ethers e cash gnosis manera golem or cur and so many more when you go to shape-shift dot IO you simply select your currency pair give me receiving adders sent the coins and boom shape-shift is not your traditional cryptocurrency change you don't need to create an account you don't need to give them your personal information and they don't hold your coins so you are never at risk from a hacker or other malicious actor

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alliance called Laura lor a and then there are some others foam is agnostic to these protocols but you are working I guess with with Laura at least in the beginning because it's an open source protocol could you tell us about Laura sort of what is it and how available is it today in terms of network coverage or even you know the ability for someone to sort of set up a Laura beacon yeah the time synchronization protocol and that token economics are fundamentally agnostic to what radio the zone is running and like I mentioned earlier the zone can be only

as accurate as good as the radios and clocks are in the zone so we're most excited interested in this new category of low-power wide area radio networks that are quite new and designed for IOT devices for long range low-power there are a number of options like you mentioned Laura and cig Fox some others like NB IOT Laura is the only one that you don't have to pay royalty or service fee to deploy so just like a blockchain it's permissionless to launch the Laura Network so that's kind of what brought us to that Laura itself is a chip spread-spectrum chirping chip it's quite small like the size of a fingernail and can be really cheap as well like ten dollars and so there is a consortium called the Laura

alliance with companies like Cisco and Bosch but they're actually centered around mac free we're above the law rhetoric we're actually interested in just the radiofrequency chip itself but the ship is quite popular there is an organization called the things Network where you can see a map where they are deployed by people who are hobbyists wanting to offer free IOT data Zurich has over 100 the Netherlands has private deployments of the Netherlands as a country as a hundred percent coverage so you can actually see it's quite exciting there are a lot of different obvious running these Laura networks and those people are now you know finding out about foam and or kind of want to be the first miner so there's already a potential ecosystem of hardware owners so when you say there's private networks

you mean like telcos are deploying these networks so that devices tap construction company I want to pay some service provider to run a Laura network for me and I want to be able to track my construction assets in real time at a giant construction site and or some other aspect so there are companies that basically run the nodes themselves and offer coverage in companies like the Netherlands other countries including other ones have just hobbyists also offering free network coverage so yeah there is actually and the other thing to mention is Laura operates in the is M band so you don't need a kind of license to deploy it either in terms of like where it lies in the radio spectrum okay and so these are these devices have have reach that goes

up to I guess like 10 or 15 kilometers what do you foresee then for say Judy locating ships out at sea are there other bands or other radio devices that you could utilize so that the network could could have coverage globally yeah meant by the time sink is agnostic where you could we have some sort of low orbit satellites that serve the middle of the ocean and also still used the same kind of protocol the same kind of punishments and incentives but you know is specialized for that kind of use gates each zone itself could be a private deployment or you know a proof of authority zone but still rely on this global rule set if you didn't trust

everyone so we really built the incentives and the radio stuff to be as agnostic as possible to expand to these you know use cases but we don't think when foam starts it will be a high demand for location services in the middle of the ocean but once that kind of comes the incentives will be there to serve that market so here's the imagination I'm having like and now that I understand form a little bit more so if you think about Bitcoin you're familiar with the idea of the decentralized autonomous organization right so the idea is okay here's a here's a piece of code which just has incentives right it just says with Bitcoin what

somebody will get once they solve a particular mathematical problem but by just encoding these incentives correctly it triggers a lot of people to build miners and these miners then coordinate together and they maintain the blockchain and these miners and collectively serve two kinds of users those seeking a store of value and those seeking to transfer monetary value across the world and the miners make money by getting the block rewards of of Bitcoin and collecting some of the transaction fees so bitcoin is like a decentralized autonomous organization

because the code is sort of the center so in some ways what form is is also a decentralized autonomous organization and there is a set of incentives or code in the center and then you can think of these low-power devices as sort of the actuators or the miners of this form network they are the devices that are actually performing the work and what you're trying to do is you're trying to create a set of incentives in a way that as many devices as possible joined to this network just as Bitcoin miners proliferated you want a proliferation of these devices across different parts of

the world and these devices will earn form tokens for creating new new hubs and when a particular part of earth like once once hub is created in a particular part of Earth they can also create this proof of location proofs for any customers inside there and they can earn sort of transaction fees they could whitelist what they would want to accept as fees and so the end user doesn't necessarily have to own from token it's primarily to commit work to the network for these zone operators and the verifiers but yeah that's kind of how we

see foam is this protocol where anyone can become a location service provider and have the incentive to purchase the hardware and offer those services they could then earn new tokens and serve customers as well so I think it's a great analogy yeah yeah this is a massive vision right I'm really curious how your incentivisation scheme works like tell us a bit about it and maybe one way to do it would be like what is the business case for for me if I want to put one of these low-power radio devices on what does the business case look like yes I think that to build up this ecosystem of zone operators and

furniture it's going to take some time and you know the market also needs to come and be made for the smart contracts that need location services so the early kind of miners so to speak may not be getting a lot of transaction fees but you'll be able to you know gain a bigger stake in the phone network by owning foam tokens to start and so we have this kind of other element called signaling we see it as kind of a single-purpose prediction market for basically locking tokens up in a location on our visual app of where you want mining to occur and the mining reward is then spatially weighted based on those signals so even now which is why are we having to open distribution in the near future is

because no matter how much money or time we had foam as the founders could never test this protocol and build it in all these kind of locations and stuff so we see the token mechanism being a coordination tool to allow people to signal where mining should be where chestnut should go and ultimately where the largest rewards will be when the mining begins okay so this this is an ER C 20 token on aetherium yep and ultimately it would be bonded to be granted access as a validator in some sort of child chain which would be the state machine of the local zone okay can you explain this technical architecture so you mentioned earlier tender min so there would be a separate chain which you would be

staking these ER C 20 tokens yeah I mean you can think of it as like or as we are thinking about it now as a simple plasma construction where you can always exit to some route chain but you have to bond to get access to become a validator in this proof of authority chain in our case that chain would be running ten Durman and because the weight under mint works you have the consensus for the state machine on one side on the other side you have this ABC IAP Legation in our case that application is the radio time sync protocol so these devices need to put up collateral to be part of their zone and once they're accepted in the zone they're running this thing over radio and just storing their data logs in the state machine and then we have this third element which is a verifier

which can read the block data of that state machine and actually run the triangulation computations and go back to this parent chain and say that zone is in fact in sync you can distribute the reward okay can you explain how how one can use ERC 20 tokens and stake them in another chain like like a separate tournament proof of authority chain yeah I mean when these contracts are launched for you to be able to run the protocol validly as a zone that zone would need to be checking the fare and chain and say hey how's this person who's trying to form his own or become part of my

zone have they made their identity known have they put up the collateral and locked it saying that they're you know promising to follow the rules of the protocol like can I actually trust them to join my zone as a validator and so if the existing zone or can look to that parent chain for that information then they would basically accept the radio messages from this new beacon who's trying to join them and you would accept them because they've put up this collateral on this parent chain that is subject to be slashed if they became a malicious actor but what what technology are you using in order to do this sort of this this this Parent Child chain I mean right now we're thinking of it as like a plasma construction where it's just simply a tender mint child chain

but I mean ultimately you could imagine phones ohms or actually themselves cosmos stones okay I understand and why did you choose to do an EOC 20 token and not say just like lunch I mean because if you're gonna have this chain anyway why not just launch a new block chain yeah I mean it's not going to be a monolithic chain these kind of asynchronous zones that will you know grow and shrink over time they could have all different lifespans oh so we haven't have this like one you know parent chain that can store the you know block headers and local routes of every sub chain that ever existed or died and be backed by kind of the global security that E theorem can offer and we also see a lot of other aspects to the phone

protocol and spatial tools that we're building could also be utilized by other threa map locations so for now we see this parent chain being a theorem being a great case for them don't mind it it's not a reservation my my competitive question regarding this network is going to be that today we have this GPS system which is like 30 satellites and this is really provided as a public good right I don't pay anything to triangulate my coordinates on on earth right I accept the critique that in this system I am not able to prove my location to other parties but

in theory maybe the GPS system could be retrofitted to do that as well but in comparison like foam is also providing me a way to triangulate my location but in order for the forum network to work really well you need to install potentially like millions of these low-power devices and somebody needs to pay in order like ultimately people are paying in order to install these devices so if it's like millions of devices I don't know $100 each ultimately this will be like billions of dollars of infrastructural cost and you compare that with 30 satellites that are already deployed probably the infrastructural cost is paid and the

service is operated by free by by governmental agencies how do you compete with a competitor that has such deep pockets and maybe even needs much lower infrastructure than your system does yeah I mean a great question I think that the amount of infrastructure and billion dollar costs to GPS is actually astronomical and it is slow moving and so it is easy to compete with because GPS 3 has been delayed about 2022 and the current GPS is super susceptible to cyberattack so it is a slow-moving system and you because it is a horizontal protocol phone and would address so many different verticals it

does need to actually be a large monetization back kind of infrastructure to be able to support all these different verticals you can use it as a public good and triangulate yourself for free just as you can for GPS why you wouldn't want to pay is why you're paying to produce this presence claim or digital authenticate about yourself which most likely could be very cheap but because it happens over radio if you're in a very competitive environment let's say Times Square in New York City and there are over cars and Pokemon players and IOT devices all trying to saw have his own sign their transaction there'll be a hard limit over radio of how many transactions they could sign so therefore you act this fee market would emerge of like how much it costs to

purchase a presence clean and yeah that would then basically that fee market is part of the incentive of why people would want to run zones and offer location services see that GPS moving not quickly to serve this kind of need or being able to penetrate indoors or underground or in highly dense areas in the way that these lope area area networks can do and they exist today so we really want to bring the incentives to actually have people maintain and set up those networks that's that's really interesting that okay there might be areas that GPS cannot penetrate with its satellite architecture that you can with your low-power architecture and maybe those areas indoor areas will form like the

first niche that you can occupy really well yeah potentially like large indoor areas such as malls which you know those are they use kind of a mash-up of different techniques for those situations of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and other signals of opportunity which is great and still but because it's such a mash-up when it comes to a blockchain that's very difficult to verify yeah so I'd like to get a sense of what you feel are the Comparative dynamics of this market like here's what I mean when I say that so you know like Bitcoin an incentive mechanism that creates this digital gold kind of currency right obviously like

once a network like that is a succeeds other people want to create their own network with their own tokens and now fast forward in 2018 we have a thousand of them but even though we have a thousand of them Bitcoin the network still has advantages right like the nature of proof of work is such that if I'm a new miner I want to earn bitcoins rather than some other coin and like money has this network effect that if I am a user of Bitcoin and there are many uses of Bitcoin for the n plus 1/8 user they want to be a user of Bitcoin not a smaller coin with a much smaller network effect right so

ultimately what that leads to is sort of one network has like there's this power law this power law effects in in in currencies like Bitcoin is a massive network his helium is a smaller Network and then maybe the after after do you see like the tenth currency of the fifteenth currency only very tiny compared to that of Bitcoin now I presume like let's say forward to be successful then you will have competitors in the future that would want to launch their own geospatial location network right like so you have the form token okay I want to launch I don't know the cheese token and also offer these geospatial services

and then somebody else wants to want the champagne token to do exactly the same if I'm a new network if I'm a new geospatial network and you are the older one and you have let's say 100,000 devices running what competitive advantage is the older network have over the newer network is this a winner take all market or our thumb is a winner take all market in the sense that this is a fundamental infrastructure for horizontal verticals everywhere from mobility autonomous cars to IOT and if you know we're up there first with this infrastructure running it's an open protocol that anyone can run and there's no fees going to a central service so the people who create the protocol and

generate the value and secure it have the most incentive to maintain it I'm properly upgraded and keep it running and we don't really see that it would make sense for someone to create a competitor when instead there's so much opportunity to build lucrative applications with this infrastructure so if they don't like do networks like this there's the forum network and the dis cheese net well the cheese network is much smaller the forum network is much bigger so if I if I come with my own low power device I have the option of joining either the forum or the cheese network couldn't you do both I mean we'll just stop you from joining both networks using the same laura device to join both networks I think that the device can only send up

one message at a time and if you have to be running this time sync protocol you're either gonna be syncing with one network or the other of course the operator could you know split there or split but by another radio because the they're not that expensive relative to you know it's not equivalent to say like oh I won't split my hash power if I mine two four chains because you know the hash power is really valuable we're here it's actually very low-power and low computational cost so in that case I sure you could be running two different services altogether but ultimately one I will have the most security with the most value backing it and you know the highest block reward so in the same way that sure you could have over layered different signals of opportunity that also worked with blockchain whatever was

there first as this winner-take-all we'll probably have most of the market share hmm so I if I have a low power device I want to be part of that Network which will presumably have the most customers seeking a proof of presence claim so it's a network effect like you have customers seeking proof of presence claims and devices the customers want to accrue to that network which has the most devices the devices want to go to that network which has the most customers so the dominant network basically locks this two-sided network effect between the customers and the devices and ultimately that network effects keep keep on deepening over time which gives a power-law to this market as well

so the father only the first mover has a has an advantage in this market so that is sort of the speculative value proposition of the form token right so when you are presumably when an investor is buying the form token they are essentially speculating on this two-sided Network effect and we don't really speculate but the people purchasing the token will be purchasing it to provide work to the network not to speculate so they'll be buying it for whatever fair market price it has and the utility it'll have on the main that the utility will have initially is the signalling aspect so we want people first to be able to coordinate on how we can set up the test nuts to ultimately

test this as well as other ways to coordinate around geospatial information on the blockchain with some of the other elements for building such as the spatial index visualizer and the crypto spatial coordinate so we see this token as something that is not really for speculative value but it's something that's needed to actually provide work to this network and help build this consensus driven map of the world of secure location good so so what are your sort of plans around the token is is is is it already released or will it be released in the future yeah we're planning a token sale in the near future for purchasers who want to participate in this network and not speculate but actually help build

the network and provide work and with that we've partnered with the Brooklyn Project which is the initiative formed wide consensus about really finding a new way to do token sales that are not about distributing to speculators but those who are going to help build this network so we're hoping to have more information about that in the next few weeks to announce publicly so let's talk about the applications then so obviously as we mentioned earlier there seems to be a lot of applications and use cases that could benefit from having secured proven location you know one thinks of use cases in the supply chain space and sort of provisioning of it could be like

deliveries right proving that you were at a certain place at a certain time proving in insurance that you were also at a certain place a certain time so can you perhaps talk about some of the use cases that you might working with with initial clients yeah so I guess initially we have both of bottom up and a top-down approach and by that I mean specific gaps and teams that are interested in using foams tools and on the kind of enterprise level enterprise level we're part of something called a trusted IOT Alliance which is a consortium of companies both staff based and blockchain like Cisco or Bosch and so they're you know the question is about data provenance and we're working there on how to bring those standards

also a new consortium called mobi which is a mobility kind of started by Toyota Research Institute where they are interested in this you know across different owners of fleets of autonomous cars can they still have this immutable record about where all the cars have been in a shared way on the more bottom-up side we have integrated with you port for self sovereign identity to bring in location right now with it you can sign and launch basically of entities on our spatial index web app and sign it securely with you port and you can imagine you know in the future bringing things like geofencing for voting or other aspects like that on the top side so we just see this as being like a tool that applies to so many things and you can really easily say one to one okay what works today with

location if it's on the blockchain why it might need location but we're kind of most excited about what the users and designers are going to build with these tools and see things that we haven't actually seen before as a developer can I use this like where is the network live or their tools that I can use to start we just launched a developer portal so you can go to developer Tom Dowd space where we have an API for our spatial index the spatial index is a full stack of web app that's a blockchain visualizer for what we call crypto spatial coordinates which is a smart contract that would use our location encoding standard and so we have API documentation tutorials example applications such as like a parking

meter Dao and so you can get started building with this today we currently have a beta running of the spatial index on beta dot foam dot space of 600 people testing it it's on rinkeby at the moment and you can deploy beacons with meta masks or you port and interact with the map we see it as kind of a mash-up between a Bloomberg terminal and a Google Maps but it's a general-purpose visualizer so yeah you can go to our developer portal use the API and build any sort of custom DAP with spatial tools and I guess I want to draw the distinction between like soft perfo location and hard we spent most of the show speaking about this hard proof of location with devices and this fraud proof Ness but the tools we're launching with are more on kind of you know registries around points of interests

and all these different libraries we've built we have a pure script web 3 library your scripts a functional programming language which kind of is the wrapper for this react web app of the spatial index the backend we've the largest contributor to the how scale web 3 libraries that's built in how scale with a kubernetes cluster we have different kind of libraries we've opened for these spatial tools so people can start to do this soft roof location of you know curating information making different spatial applications today and now on the test map and eventually I will have this harder proof of location and launch the specifications for how to join the test net of zone so touching him on this functional programming land which it's called pure script yeah yeah so it's a strongly typed functional programming language

it's a very much based on Haskell but it compiles to JavaScript so it's for front-end applications so we built a pure script web 3 library so the spatial index is a react web app with WebGL so we're using matte box GL and deck GL which is a big data tool by goober but it all actually is compiled in pure script and you can push information into the web app to the blockchain and the backend is how scale indexer and restful api that can pick up that information and feed it to the front-end so if you're in the web app and many people are using that app you're going to be getting all this information populated spatially that's actually people using the blockchain and transactions being visualized so just just to understand pure script it's it's a Haskell based

language so of a strongly typed functional language that compiles to JavaScript yeah so basically it spits out JavaScript yeah but the javascript is like strongly typed and beautiful with no errors really so interesting because my question is why wouldn't just why wouldn't everybody use this this just for any web development any web map quite new and we launched a peer script web 3 libraries so we hope people will use it I should mention my co-founder and CTO Christopher he originally wrote or worked on the Haskell aetherium library and we are a full team of functional programmers building our stack in a scale and peer script I think our team

is one of the largest contributors to pure script and we're hosting a workshop in May with the founder of the language it's quite new and niche but we're hoping to bring it to the etherium community you can look our blog about why we're used it and check out our libraries right I just this is the first time I'm here I hear about this so essentially what you're saying is you can write you can write code in a strongly type functional language and then and compile to say like C++ or Java Script or whatever language you like and it'll it'll has this it will have the same security properties as the native language or are there yeah I believe Pierce group caveats it

compiles to JavaScript but yeah that's the idea is that you you have this basically equivalents where it's as if your JavaScript was a functional programming language interesting I'd like to talk to Greg Meredith about this and see get his impressions about this because I know he works with these types of languages okay great and maybe before we wrap up I mean there seems to be perhaps also some use cases around gaming and augmented reality mara I know that like this is a an area of interest for you could you maybe talk about some of the applications that you see here yeah so I think that the most popular

geo location based augmented reality game has been pokemons go the reason that that haven't been so many is because Google actually has an open source their API but they actually just have so we're probably going to see a big new amount of location-based games and in that game in particular is such a like a unique use case of people going out of their way to spoof location so yeah definitely people who are starting to build with these kind of non fungible tokens and building actual games if they wanted to start to leverage existing developer tools such as augmented reality games and some of our libraries that can start to build these spatial applications with AR and even now today with this soft relation aspect but yeah as we spoke about before because proof

of location is infrastructure so much of the requirements can be defined on the application side so you know these games can be very creative of what they would ask of their users to produce to unlock certain items if it was a gaming kind of example fascinating well thank you so much for coming on the show today it was great to hear all about foam and this is really fascinating that work that you're launching its kind of one-of-a-kind and really solves the problem of proving location with rewrites to blockchains so thanks again and look forward to hearing more about it in the future well thanks so much for having me and thank you to our listeners for once again tuning in we released new episodes of every Center every week you can subscribe to the show on iTunes SoundCloud you can watch the

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