FOAM: Token Curated Registries for Geographic Points of Interest
The component elements of the FOAM protocol are designed to provide spatial protocols, standards and applications that bring geospatial data to blockchains and empower a consensus-driven map of the world. Token mechanisms and crypto-economics underpin the elements of FOAM and empower the distributed users to coordinate and interact in a decentralized and permissionless fashion.
The FOAM Crypto-Spatial Coordinate (CSC) standard is a registry that enables the blockchain to act as an index of spatial contracts and, by extension, allow spatial contracts to be queried and displayed on the Spatial Index Visualizer. Token Curated Registries (TCR), are an emerging crypto-economic primitive for curating human readable lists with intrinsic economic incentives for token holders to curate the list’s contents. Content of the list is backed by staked tokens and token holders vote on additions to the list with the goal of raising the value of their token by producing a valuable list.
Pioneered by Mike Goldin and the AdChain team, TCR’s are a subset of Curation Markets, which in general serve to reduce information asymmetry in the markets with skin-in-the-game signals generated through the use of tokens. The theory and thinking behind TCR’s is that “if we can correctly align the incentives of token holders, we can produce lists that are as close to the objective truth as possible”. This has massive and unearthed implications for cartography.
CSC’s and TCR’s together make 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.
CSC + TCR = POI
A map is essentially a registry. Fundamentally, a map is a visual and spatial curated list of places or points worth remembering. One of the oldest known surviving maps is the Babylonian Map of the World, a tablet the size of an iPhone. This map was not for navigation but for conceptualizing places of interest as a way to reason about the world.
Claudius Ptolemy (90–168 A.D.) a Greco-Roman astronomer and mathematician put forth the first attempt to make mapping realistic, as he “gathered documents detailing the locations of towns, and he augmented that information with the tales of travelers. By the time he was done, he had devised a system of lines of latitude and longitude, and plotted some 10,000 locations — from Britain to Europe, Asia and North Africa.” Ptolemy is the father of Geography and his work served as the prototype of modern mapping. Maps have served as symbols of power but also can confer great power, for commercial trade routes, military intelligence and accurate land taxation.
Historically, maps were created and maintained by centralized entities, usually a government, and were sometimes slow to update and always prone to human error or deliberate censorship. Not until the recent boom of digital cartography have maps been so democratized. Maps have never been so readily and easily available to the public. However, one of the most valuable aspects of the map are the Points of Interest. In today’s terms that translates to where are the stores, cafe’s, restaurants and malls and where and what locations a fleet of vehicles in a ride sharing program like Uber should be anticipating a surging demand.
POI data is notoriously closed and proprietary. Foursquare is a leader in this field, collecting data from user check-ins. However Google has the ultimate lead and has even made a competitive “moat” around its innovative data-sets by algorithmically generating “Area’s of Interest” out of their own proprietary data sets. For Google POI data is not collected but created out of Street View and Satellite View data which allows an unprecedented quality, coverage, and scale that is magnitudes ahead of competition.
Nevertheless, this kind of Point of Interest information is ephemeral, unlike static entity like a building or a road. Business open and close daily, move their location and or change their hours of opening. Thus, it is a challenge for any entity, even Google, to maintain a database of quality POI data. Further, up until now there has yet to be an incentive to drive crowd participation in the generation and verification of POI data. Token Curated Registries are a powerful solution to this problem while simultaneously decentralizing control over POI data.
The output of a TCR is a list, and the process is binary — you are either in or you are out. Curated by token holders that are incentivized to generate a valuable list of integrity and the value of the registry is determined by how useful it is and if it acts as a good schelling (focal) point of information about the world.
Many TCR’s are Subjective — meaning that they are driven by the consensus of the curators but are on a subjective topic, such as the best movie’s, the world’s most beautiful beaches or finest whiskey. A location based TCR is Objective, the entity applying to be on the list is either physically there or not — there can be no middle ground or subjective debate over egregious candidates. As a result, a well curated POI list can serve as a soft social Proof of Location for smart contracts that represent fixed places. From a location point of view, for a business or any POI there would be great financial benefits for being listed on a prized registry/map. This could mean more customers, foot traffic and ultimately attention.
A TCR has three kinds of actors: Consumers that want to utilize the list, Candidates that want to be on the list and Token Holders that curate the list. The crux of the incentive game is to include reputable information and exclude faulty information and this is done through staking valuable tokens to the information on the list. Lets look at an example TCR about location for FOAM:
- Location curators submit a token deposit in order to add a Point of Interest to the registry with a corresponding CSC.
- In doing so, they have to wait out a challenge period. If honest and reputable none of the FOAM Token holders should dispute this candidate and the POI will become part of the list after the completion of the challenge period. The deposit is then kept, staked to the listing.
- During the challenge period, if a current FOAM token holder feels that this POI will degrade the quality of the registry, they can issue a challenge, by submitting an equal amount to the listing applicant’s deposit. This initiates a voting period.
- Because POI data is objective, voters have the ability to verify the applicant in person.
- FOAM token holders then proceed to vote whether to include or deny this Point of Interest to the list. Any FOAM token holder can then vote.
After the voting period, if the challenger succeeds the applicant’s deposit is distributed to the challenger and the voters as a reward for helping to curate the registry. If the applicant succeeds it is then added to the registry, in this case the map of points. In order to create the right incentives for list curation the TCR pattern calls for a number of parameters that can be used as levers to manipulate the crypto-economic incentives of the registry.
There are seven modular parameters to a TCR which are:
1. The minimum deposit needed to apply to the registry,
2. The application period, which is the duration that has to pass before listings
3. Commit and
4. Reveal periods for the votes if there is a challenge,
5. The dispensation percentage for the winning party in a challenge and
6. The vote quorum, the needed majority of the participating voters for the vote to pass.
The final parameter 7. is the slashing conditions for the losing side of a challenge, to account for vote splitting by token holders. The parameters are specified in the Token Curated Registry Whitepaper as:
MIN_DEPOSIT
The number of tokens a candidate must lock as a deposit for their application, and for the duration of their listing thereafter.APPLY_STAGE_LEN
The duration, in blocks or epoch time, during which an application can be challenged. If this period passes with no challenge being issued, the candidate becomes a listee.COMMIT_PERIOD_LEN
The duration, in blocks or epoch time, during which token holders can commit votes for a particular challenge.REVEAL_PERIOD_LEN
The duration, in blocks or epoch time, during which token holders can reveal committed votes for a particular challenge.DISPENSATION_PCT
The percentage of the forfeited deposit in a challenge which is awarded to the winning party as a special dispensation compensating for their capital risk.VOTE_QUORUM
The percentage of tokens out of the total tokens revealed in favor of admitting/keeping a challenged candidate necessary for that candidate to get/keep listee status. The VOTE_QUORUM does not count non-voting tokens, and unrevealed tokens are considered non-voting.MINORITY_BLOC_SLASH is the percentage of tokens in the losing voting bloc disbursed to the winning bloc, by token weight, as additional rewards.
The FOAM Token Curated Registry will follow these parameters with minor adjustments. We lift the MIN_DEPOSIT requirement, setting it to zero, where a candidate can apply for a listing with a token deposit of any size allowing the market to dynamically deciding what is an appropriate amount. Additionally, after a candidate has successfully been added to the list they are able to withdraw a portion, to their choosing, of the deposit to their claim. The remaining stakes will serve to rank the order of the list and act as collateral for future challenges.
The FOAM Crypto-Spatial Coordinate (CSC) is an open registry and by adding a Token Curate Registry powerful decentralized opportunities are opened for Points of Interest. Because CSC’s are visualized on the Spatial Index Visualizer the FOAM TCR will be visual and serve as the backbone and master list to the consensus driven map of the world.
Token holders will be able to vote and change the modular parameters of the FOAM TCR, such as the window of time in which a token holder can challenge an applicant or window of time in which a token holder can cast a vote. Further, as the POI-TCR infrastructure the registry will serve as the launch point for “Emergent Mitosis” as explored by Simon de la Rouviere.
Curators of the FOAM TCR are encouraged to split in mitosis and create their own child sublists for further categorization and curation. For example, lists may start to form for particular countries, cities and regions. Even more, when there is sufficient demand and willing curators subjective lists can form around POI’s such as best coffees shops in the country to work out of on your laptop, or the best hiking trails out side of Los Angeles. An unlimited number of child lists can spin off of the FOAM TCR, leveraging the parent list as the consensus driven map that can securely support user TCR’s.
All of this is in the early and exciting stages. Before the FOAM TCR launches on the Ethereum main-net our Developer Portal has just launched with our Spatial Index Visualizer API, tutorial’s and example applications. Users can already start building and deploying their own decentralized spatial applications and token curated registries.
We welcome feedback from the community and are open to collaborations, so please get in touch.
