FOAM at ETHNewYork
By: Arthur Röing Baer
Tags: Developer, Blockchain, Hackathons, Geospatial, Ethereum

FOAM at ETHNewYork

FOAM is a proud sponsor of the ETHNewYork Hackathon. Coincidentally, and much to our excitement, this year the event is a home game for the FOAM team! To celebrate we have lined up some events and prizes for developers participating in the Hackathon in our offices at New Lab, Brooklyn.

If you have questions how to use the FOAM API please contact us via our Gitter.

To find the FOAM API and other developer resources, please visit our developer portal.

To meet our developers during the Hackathon, sign up here.

ETHNewYork Workshop on getting started with the FOAM API will be during the event. Our talk “Learnings from FOAM Location Developer Stack” will be on Saturday afternoon at 15:30–15:55 in the Hive (3rd floor)

In this post we go through some of our developer-focused activity during the event and provide details on our sponsorship and our support for teams using the FOAM API.

ETHNewYork Hackathon Prizes

The best project using the FOAM API during the ETHNewYork Hackathon will be awarded 30,000 FOAM Tokens. The FOAM team will be on location to decide a winner, reviewing the projects that come out of the hackathon.

15,000 FOAM Tokens will be awarded to the project that best Visualizes data from the FOAM Map

Need some inspiration on what to build? Below follow three projects by external developers, built using the FOAM API:

1. BlockCities used Microsoft Azure and the FOAM API to build an interactive scavenger hunt on the FOAM Map.

2. Pollution.network is a pollution monitoring project, using Streamr’s real-time data network and the FOAM CSC standard.

3. Blocklytics has released a leaderboard listing cartographer efforts on the FOAM Map and is building a soon to be released analytics tool. Both efforts are built using the FOAM API and 3box social profiles.

Other things we would love to see:

Spatial prediction markets

Social Map Layer for Reviews and Suggestions

Location games

Bridges to other protocols

Visualizing the FOAM Map

We’re interested in what you kinds of map visualizations you can come up with powered by the FOAM MAP API. We encourage you to use deck.gl(youcan find tutorials and examples on their github) but you’re of course welcome to use whatever tools you want. Your task would be to explore that data and draw some conclusions from the visualizations. The visualizations should also be compelling, which is why we recommend something like deck.gl. Some sample questions might be:

How is FOAM Token staked in POIs distributed geographically? Do cartographers typically place POIs in a neighborhood, or are they posting globall? Does voting and challenging occur within user groups or is it global? I.e. do people tend to participate in challenges in a neighborhood or globally?

deck.gl Layer

We look forward to your projects!

FOAM API 101 Workshop

To give hackathon participants deeper knowledge regarding the FOAM Map API, FOAM CTO Kristoffer Josefsson & senior blockchain engineer Martin Allen will lead a developer workshop on “Getting Started with the FOAM API” as part of the ETHNewYork program.

FOAM Open office

FOAM has an Open Office for the duration of the Hackathon, 17–19th of May. During this time we aim to personally meet as many developer teams interested in FOAM as possible.

Sign up using this form, specifying your background/interest in FOAM, and we will follow up with a personal invitation.

FOAM Ethereum Developer Stack

At FOAM we strive to release high quality, fully general purpose open-source libraries for the general Ethereum community to use. They grow out of our efforts of building the functional stack to support the smart contracts and functionality of the Spatial Index. So FOAM has spent the last year and a half developing a unique suite of developer tools that will ultimately lead to a fraud-proof and privacy-preserving Proof of Location protocol for Ethereum. 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;

, a purely functional smart contract manager and build tool; purescript-web3 library, to write front-end dApps in purescript

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

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

Standalone examples of usage our libraries can be found in: