FOAM in 2018, a Year in Review
It has been an exciting year and our busiest yet for the Foamspace team. One year ago the FOAM protocol was largely still in stealth mode. We had a minimal website, no white paper or demos available. This post will serve as a year in review highlighting the progress made on FOAM in 2018, none of which could be possible without our amazing and dedicated team and support from our community of Cartographers and Radio enthusiasts. Thank you and Happy New Year! 2019 will be another exciting year for FOAM.
To catch up on relevant information surrounding the FOAM protocol, check out this reading list.
Proof of Location
By the end of last January we launched a new website were ready to announce and introduce the work being done on the FOAM Proof of Location protocol, one with features that could be fault tolerant, independent, open and permission less, accountable and incentivized. This post explains the need for Proof of Location, the vulnerabilities of GPS and how Low Power Wide Area Network radios can play a role. Since publishing we have seen a number of blockchain projects in the location space emerge, all focused on the glaring Web 2.0 issues in location services.
Spatial Index Visualizer & Beta
In February we revealed the technology stack of the Spatial Index Visualizer, a general purpose visual blockchain explorer. The Spatial Index can serve as the front-end for any decentralized application that needs to visualize smart contracts on a map.
By late February a private beta of the Spatial Index was opened to the FOAM community, which was made public later in the Spring. The beta is currently live on the Rinkeby test net and can be accessed at beta.foam.space We learned a lot from this beta and were able to optimize the back end to ultimately power the FOAM Map main net application. The beta also has a very slick integration with the uPort application for self sovereign identity, points can be added and biometrically signed on the iOS application. Thank you to everyone who participated!
Around this time we also announced that FOAM had joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, was expanding to have desk space at Full Node in Berlin, joined MOBI, the mobility alliance, as well as released the FOAM promotional video, which visually articulates Proof of Location and the resulting accurate location verification data along with a video interview series with our team and an overview of future use cases.
Time Synchronization
One of the most popular posts published on the FOAM blog in 2018 was on The Importance of Time Synchronization. This post provides a history of clock synchronization and location services and explains how FOAM utilizes synchronous, partially synchronous and asynchronous consensus to achieve a proof. We further published more information on how Tendermint consensus is relied on for sharing state machines between Zone Anchor radios.
With the excitement and interest growing around Proof of Location we conducted a survey with our community on where there was interest to run nodes. The results were encouraging and this served as “proto” Signaling prior to the network launch.
FOAM Ethereum Stack
In 2018 the Foamspace team made amazing progress on our own functional programming stack for Ethereum, which powers the FOAM Map. With these tools we strive to release high quality, fully general purpose open-source libraries for the general Ethereum community to use. Much of our stack is written in the functional programming languages Haskell and PureScript. As a result we have had to develop viable alternatives and rework common Etheruem solutions like web3.js and truffle. There are some obvious benefits to using functional programming for Ethereum; composability, strong type-level programming, and compile-time guarantees (which are especially important when dealing with potentially large assets).
Out of this came:
- Chanterelle, a purely functional smart contract manager and build tool;
- purescript-web3 library, to write front-end dApps in purescript
- hs-web3 library, we’ve made significant additions and are now maintaining our own fork of this library
- cliquebait, a fast standalone blockchain docker-image with pre-allocated ether
Whitepaper
In May of 2018, after much anticipation and legal review the FOAM Whitepaper was released to the public, along with a draft technical paper.
This publication marked the first time that the FOAM vision was laid out in full. Static Proof of Location is for Points of Interest and rely on curation market mechanisms. Dynamic Proof of Location is a fault tolerant protocol that relies on participants staking and running nodes. Signaling bridges the gap between the two.
Community
In 2018 there was an overwhelming excitement around Curation Markets, Token Curated Registries and Bonding Curves. FOAM is proud to be one of the first main net applications to test these mechanisms. We are grateful to the support and engagement from the Curation Markets Community. One of the most inspiring and memorable events of the year was the FOAM hosted Curation Markets Meetup during Blockchain Week in NYC.
Throughout the year we have been active in the Curation Markets Community, see below a recent presentation from the Foamspace CEO Ryan John King.
Around this time, we also published a series on the FOAM community members to publicize their motivations for participating. Spotlight #2 and #3 can be found here and here.
Did you want to start a local community/get involved for any particular reason?
The project itself is a fascinating combination of several components, which, when linked together, create a powerful self-sustaining, self-propagating and trustless network for geolocation. The fact that it pushes the boundaries on geolocation is a great start *but* it’s also a rabbit hole to start thinking about the many second and third order effects that might result from relative network maturity. Getting involved with the community early on seems like a great way to begin exploring these ideas with people of similar interests.
FOAM Map
During the Spring our team was laser focused on building the FOAM Map, a TCR for geographic points of interest.
The idea of the FOAM Map is a powerful combination for a new form of mapping and maintaining what are known as Points of Interest (POI). In this light, FOAM can be the contextualized successor to the work of cartographers throughout history that maintained geographic data about everything from topography to dense urban streets. However, FOAM takes this history a step further by granting control over the registries of POI to market and community forces.
Token Sale
At the end of June we announced the FOAM token sale as well as revealed our innovative sale model. This model was designed to ward off pure token speculators and only attract a community of Cartographers and Radio Enthusiasts that wanted to use the tokens. Along side questionnaires and registration exams, we also implemented “Proof of Use” which requires those that purchased tokens in the ale to use their tokens before they could be transferred. With this model we were set to launch the main net application soon after the completion of the sale.
The FOAM Token sale was a success, thank you to all that participated around the globe!
Mainnet Launch
In early September the FOAM Map was launched on the Ethereum main net! Signaling was launched in December at the end of the Initial Use Period. The application can be accessed at map.foam.space
Post-Launch
Since launch, the Foamspace team has been hard at work optimizing the FOAM Map based on our learnings from the Initial Use Period as well as pushing new updates and features. By the end of the year we launched a new Developer Update Series, so far with issues #1, #2, #3 and #4.
Additionally, our community has moved to discourse.foam.space where there has been great conversation and debate from stakeholders.
Now that the Initial User Period for the FOAM Token has ended it is possible to obtain FOAM Tokens if you did not participate in the token sale. We are proud to be working with Circle and Poloniex with a listing of the FOAM Token.
We judge a listing’s merit not just by the volume in which it trades, but by its potential to move the blockchain space forward. This includes nascent assets with strong fundamentals, technology, people, business models and market dynamics supporting them.
Blockcities Collaboration
We ended the year at Foamspace with the first ever game on the FOAM Map in collaboration with Blockcities, which was a Holiday themed treasure hunt for locations on the Map related to historical sites associated with the development of time and space.
Those that added the correct point for each days riddle received a unique NFT of that building. The results of the game were exciting and we are looking forward to the next one. Thank you to everyone that participated!
Dynamic Proof of Location
Lastly, but certainly not least, this year Foamspace has been quietly at work on Dynamic Proof of Location. The protocol is designed to be radio agnostic, however through our research the Low Power Wide Area Network Radio called LoRa was a standout choice to use due to size, cost and operating on an unlicensed spectrum. See more in the FOAM Technical Draft Whitepaper.
However, the requirements for Proof of Location require nanosecond clock precision and it was unclear if off the shelf LoRa radios could accomplish this. There are many issues and complaints lodged at LoRa, however these are mainly towards LoRaWAN a MAC layer for the radio, see for example “The Problem with LoRa”.
Within our work, we recognize these problems with LoRaWAN and are instead utilizing a custom firmware designed for clock synchronization. We were able to demonstrate nearly 2ns synchronization precision in the lab, amazing results! This proves our hypothesis that off of the shelf LoRa devices can be used for Proof of Location. We will be publishing this research in full over the course of this quarter. The work being done now is on the Tendermint application running on the radio. Our goal is to open development and provide a means for the first generation FOAM developer boards to be readily available for testing. For 2019 Dynamic Proof of Location will be the primary focus for the Foamspace team.
Thank you for reading and being a part of the FOAM Community! It has been a great year and look out for upcoming news, announcements and events from the Foamspace Team. Happy New Year!
