The Anatomy of a Zone
By: Ryan John King
Tags: Featured, Blockchain, Geospatial, Ethereum, Gps

Verifying New Zones

Thus far we have covered what a Zone and Zone Anchor is, the time synchronization and location services offered, the mining and fee incentives to operate one and the fact that Zones are checked by Verifiers and always have tokens at stake in the event malicious or fraudulent behavior is detected.

This mostly assumes that once a Zone is established, satisfies its staking requirements and begins operations there are mechanisms in place to check on and hold Zones accountable. Yet, how do we know that a Zone really has emerged? Especially if it is in a location that is no where near a pre-established neighboring zone. Thus, someone has to start the first Zone in the network.

This first Zone is known as a “Trust Anchor”. While a Zone Anchor contributes to pinning down and maintaining a Zone a Trust Anchor pins down and establishes trust that the rest of the network operators and participants and build off of.

The first Trust Anchor serves as the genesis Zone and beginning of FOAM token inflation. This Trust Anchor Zone will need to be established in a secure ceremony, which can be done in a decentralized and democratic way. Each Zone Anchors location that is part of the Trust Anchor will be made public. What this Trust Anchor then provides is a pre-verified Zone with an agreed upon geocoded location. The Trust Anchor serves as a reference point for new contiguous zones that can then emerge around it.

Contiguous Zones will hear each others messages due to overlap and as coverage spreads Zones can cross reference and contribute to the verification of new Zones that are not contiguous to the Trust Anchor. As overlapping Zones populate, the Trust Anchor is no longer needed as a reference. While it is possible for there to be multiple Trust Anchors established to aid in network growth i.e. New York, Berlin, Tokyo etc. we will now address the emergence of a new Zone that is not contiguous to a Trust Anchor and has no neighboring Zones.

Proof of Location coverage provided by Zones will not be continuous. There may be a high density of Zones and then large areas of dead zones. Signaling is meant to alleviate this possibility, but even still it is likely that a Zone will emerge in isolation. How can it be trusted to in fact be there and not be simulating its existence?

While coverage of the protocol is not continuous there will still be a “Total FOAM Area” of land covered. To have your Zone be considered as part of the Total FOAM Area and be eligible for mining rewards and fees the Zone needs enough “weight” to pass the protocol threshold that allows the Zone be recognized by the “Total FOAM Area Reward” smart contract, or TFAR. Until this threshold is met, the Zone can be considered a “Dark Zone” and the rewards it is building up remain locked.

Primarily, the weight of the zone is based on length of clock synch messages that can be found the root chain, meaning how long has the Zone been claiming to correctly run the protocol and publish that data publicly. This weight is moreover affected by the total coverage area of that Zone, the bonded weight of its tokens on chain as well as added weight from Signals if it is operating in such an area. Further, servicing location customers and issuing Presence Claims contributes to the weight and demonstrates use.

However, other than becoming contiguous with a TFAR recognized Zone a Dark zone is to issue a Presence Claim to a “Mobile Verifier”. This is a new actor in the protocol. While a Verifier node runs on a computer to check the logs of Zones, Mobile Verifiers are to physically visit Zones, purchase Presence Claims and contribute to their weight. Mobile Verifiers will have their own reputation and will need to bond tokens to participate. Another functionality of the Mobile Verifier is that it can issue challenges against Zones it believes are not there with bonded tokens.

In practice what this means is that if you have established a new Zone in physical isolation from the rest of the network in order to receive the mining rewards being generated they will need to be retrieved by a Mobile Verifier going into the Zone. What is more is that the weight contributed to a Dark Zone by Mobile Verifiers is not by the number of Mobile Verifiers but by the cumulative amount of FOAM Tokens bonded by the Mobile Verifiers. This means that a certain percentage of the FOAM Token Supply needs to be bonded in attestations to the Zone, which prevents Mobile Verifier Sybil actions.

A concluding and key component of the Mobile Verifier is that it must have purchased a Presence Claim in an already existing Zone recognized by the TFAR. As such, when the Mobile Verifier entrees the unverified and isolated Dark Zone it is bringing it into the Total FOAM Area and topographically connecting the Zone to the FOAM network, despite being geographically disjointed.