FOAM

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6 Foamspace Corp, “FOAM Whitepaper”, FOAM, Jan 5, 2018. https://bit.ly/37Fz70G

Information condensed by Jay McAllister

- Supply chain, verifiable and accurate product tracking

- Insurance, trusted spatial information that supports contract enforcement and automated conflict resolution

- Transportation, support growth of mobility services and autonomous vehicles

- Location intelligence, traffic movements and actions of people

Users own their personal location information, controlling when and with whom they choose to share their location. FOAM is committed to solving this need by providing spatial protocols, standards, and applications that offer a higher level of security and resiliency than conventional location-based geospatial technologies .

FOAM is a crowdsourced and decentralised world map that uses radio signals rather than GPS and is built on the Ethereum blockchain. FOAM can assign the “space-less” information on blockchain with realworld locations, both in 2D and 3D.

The map system can be used for

Fig. 14: FOAM (2022) Printscreen of central Europe in the FOAM map with “Signal Heatmap” layer on

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7 Foamspace Corp, “FOAM Whitepaper”, FOAM, Jan 5, 2018. https://bit.ly/37Fz70G

Information condensed by Jay McAllister

FOAM accurately confirms the location of POIs [Point of Interest] with CSCs and TCRs:

Crypto-Spatial Coordinate (CSC)

Ethereum smart contract addresses, with corresponding addresses positioned in physical space, that can claim, reference or read the location in the physical environment.

Token Curated Registries (TCR)

The crypto-economic model curating human-readable lists of economics gives independent token holders an incentive to curate the list’s contents.

Points of Interest (POI)

Combining CSCs and TCRs allows information such as topography and density to be mapped along with markets and community forces. Validated by those who contribute to the relevant locality.

Fig. 15: Foamspace Corp (2018) Illustrations of CSC, TCR and POI

GPS is commonly used for location finding in everyday devices.

Simply put, GPS requires four satellites: one, two and three measure the device’s x, y, and z coordinate.

The distance is calculated by the time it takes for the satellite to receive signals from the device. Time is not absolute and the satellites’ clocks can not be identical always, so a fourth satellite is used to synchronise the clocks [of the first three satellites] for the calculation to be accurate.

FOAM uses the same principle only that instead of centrally owned satellites, it is based on four “zone anchors”, which can be a computer or router owned by anyone.

A vast difference between the two systems is that GPS shows receipts of data, but one can interact with the FOAM network.8

8 FOAM Protocol. “The Importance of Time Synchronization - FOAM @ Distributed Global” Youtube video. https:// bit.ly/3O4aETC. Uploaded on Mar 15, 2019

Fig. 16: Drawn by author(s) GPS and FOAM signals explained