FOAM Community Call — Signaling/ Initial Use Period Recap
By: Daryl Lau
Tags: Geospatial, Blockchain, Ethereum, Token Curated Registries

Right now there is 8.2% of circulating supply staked on the FOAM Map in both Signaling and Points of Interest right now.

240 Users have fulfilled the Proof of Use requirements, unlocking about 50m of the 300m FOAM sold.

Initial Use Period — Points of Interest (4:20–7:27)

The Tags are pretty distributed, we have many in attraction, art, food, retail.

It’s very nice how the community has been involved in the tag generation and have active and helpful in the community forum to help us decide on new tags.

For POI creation, it is very much in line with what you can see from the Token Sale Distribution, a global distribution and centralized around Europe, Asia and US with New York and San Francisco being the Top.

We have had some nice analytics provided by Blocklytics, Caleb from our community who has provided us with the newsletter, the mail updates and also these data which serve as an overview of the point of interest outcomes.

Of the total Points, only 208 points that have been added to the FOAM Map have been challenged and only 175 of those are removed (ie considered Faulty) which proves that the TCR works as a concept for guaranteeing a healthy database of POI data, or at least at this stage.

Proof of Use stipulates 10 POIs as a needed limit, a big percentage of token purchasers actually add more than the required Points of Interest. Although we’ve had discussions on Incentive models with our community in the past it seems that the current incentive model is healthy enough for at least some of our community members which is a really healthy sign.

Proof of Use Period — Signaling (7:28–8:40)

This section is a technical introduction to Signaling, Ilya explains the fundamental components and how it all comes together to get the signal that you may have already seen on the map.

Signals exist as means to bootstrap the distribution of Zones once Dynamic Proof of Location launches and the way it does it is that it allows token holders to place a signal on where they want the Zones to pop up.

A few considerations were made in the process of creating a Signal. Rewards for zones will be determined after DPoL launches so it is important to keep the mechanic as open-ended as possible.

This means that aspects like the age of the signal might come to play, where the longer the signal has existed on the map. This might lead to situations where the signal itself has more potential rewards and thus theoretically be actually worth more than the actual tokens within it.

Besides that, there is also the actual place that the Signal is placed to consider. Signals also have a size to represent how much coverage should be in it, like how wide the area by the signal should be covered.

Signals as NFTs?

Initially, Signals were meant to be data that was owned by a user, which was similar to the concept of NFTs so a stake token was created, which takes some amount of FOAM Token and just wraps them up in a NFT.

NFTs represent a way to wrap up some amount of FOAM tokens but a way was needed to associate them with their locations, this is done by extending the NFT contract by using Crypto Spacial Coordinates (CSC) which maps an Ethereum address to a location in real world space. Thus, Signals are represented by a Crypto Spacial Token, which is a NFT contract with the actual ID of the token in the NFT contract and with a GeoHash (ie where it is in the world) and a radius associated with it.

We also made a Crypto Spacial Token Registry, which basically allows users to put any NFTs on the Map, which creates new opportunities not just limited to Signaling. For example in the future, we might be able to say “Hey, I have a CryptoKitty and it lives in this shed in my backyard” or we could make a GeoCaching Game and we put this NFT that lives in this Point and Space and you have to walk somewhere to get it.

If you want to know more or an explainer blog post, let us know in the comments and Ilya will write a blog post on it.

There has been a lot of conversations on Extrinsic incentives models over on the community forum and we’ve been thinking and we’re happy to announce a small campaign over Christmas.

This is the first test for extrinsic incentive models for POI Contributions on the FOAM Map

For Christmas , we’re doing the first test with NFTs as Incentives for POI creation, we’ve worked with Blockcities, which is a cool architecture NFT Game and a bunch of POI architecture collectibles were created and these collectibles are right now hidden and each week day of the the coming two weeks, a riddle will be released here the community will have to guess where the POI is that’s associated with the riddle and that POI has not been added to the Map yet.

What the idea is that the community then starts guessing and adding POIs to the map and if they guess correctly, they will be rewarded one of 10 Unique Architecture Collectibles that are also an architectural rendering or illustration of the POI that has been created.

Solve riddles and add locations to discover 10 Hidden Digital Collectables.

The riddles will be released on Twitter on Monday and a discussion Megathread will be live on Discourse. When the riddle comes out, try to solve it, browse the map, register the POI and win the NFT.

Additional Links :

In this session, Ryan answers questions that were submitted by the community members either via the Google Form or on the comments.

On FOAM

How do I access the FOAM Map?

The home page has been updated and there are now multiple ways to enter the map.

The dedicated URL for the FOAM Map is https://map.foam.space

Is there a concern that publishing and charging for authorative Geo-location constitutes the practise of land surveying which is legislatively limited to Professionals?

Nobody is charged to participate, adding a point stakes tokens however those tokens still belong to you. It’s kind of like making a deposit that you believe that a point is truthful

There are many examples of open source mapping projects, most notably OpenStreetMaps and other kinds of crowd source projects like Google guides as well, the data that is then added to the FOAM Map is open and free for any to use, its available publicly on the Ethereum Blockchain.

The FOAM Map is more like a collaborative Open source project for anyone to look at the end of the day

How do you define Success for FOAM , How do you see FOAM being used in 2025?

I would definitely hesitate to make any concrete predictions, primarily because we’re trying to unlock a whole new ecosystem and whole new economy with this Protocol, and we imagine the most exciting things that will be built on it we cant imagine today.

One example, Twitter is most famous for it’s use of the hashtag but it is not something the company told users to do but something users came up with themselves.

With that said, thinking 8 years ahead, FOAM’s defining features would be Dynamic Proof of Location launched, there is mining and there is coverage across many different regions and that we actually have web3 economies happening, that means there is customers purchasing presence claims but more importantly that web3 ecosystem has been built out and FOAM static proof of Location map being used as an important piece of infrastructure.

We see a lot of different economies and games utilizing interoperability, and we think that as Blockchains economies develop especially into 2025, location will be a real key component there. So this is where we will be looking to define the success of the Project.

Signaling

How will we prevent Signals from being the only thing on the Map?

As we just heard from Ilya’s presentation; The way the signaling registry contract works, means that all different types of NFTs can be added to the map in different layers. The First that will probably be added would be these NFTs from the Scavenger hunt project that Arthur just presented

With the new developer portal we will be launching, that also opens it up to other people having their own project or their own aspects of things that appear on the map as this open source project.

We have Points of the map in three different stages, we have signals and soon we will have other kinds of NFTs, and hopefully that will open the gates for other people to build on top of the map and we’ll have a variety of things on the map.

A follow up question, If Signaling is working too well, wouldn’t people remove their POIs?

That’s certainly possible but as we know the minimum deposit is a parameter that can be changed in the POI and it really is just meant to be an anti spam mechanism

If for example, people prefer to put most of their tokens in signals or if they find that the value would be much greater there, the minimum deposit could also be lowered on those points, it really is just this anti spam mechanism as a baseline that you need to deposit tokens into points

Proof of Use

For those that would like to fulfill Proof of Use, Signaling is a no risk means?

Yes that is correct however 10 Points need to be added to the FOAM Map to fulfill Proof of Use.

The minimum deposit is 50 FOAM Tokens so that’s 500 FOAM and there is a chance you could be challenged but it’s quite unlikely as we’ve seen from the statistics, there seems to be a very small % of Points have been challenged to date and they have mostly been challenged for legitimate reasons. So you likely would be fine if you add the information correctly.

For your Percentage Usage threshold, which is either 25% of 50% depending if you’re a large or small purchaser, the easiest way to fulfill that is Signaling.

Signaling have no way of being challenged, stake slashed or lost unless you lose your private key. As long as you have your private key, Signaling is a no-risk way to complete Proof of Use.

After Staking more than half my Tokens, I still couldn’t transfer my Tokens, why?

This is an intricate detail about Proof of Use, it’s the way the token controller contract works, so if you fulfilled Proof of Use and the modal says “POU Complete” you will have to “latch” Proof of Use shut, basically finalize it, by sending 1 transaction of FOAM to any address while “POU Complete” then it will be finalized and latched shut and that means you could withdraw tokens from a Signal if you wanted to and be below the Usage threshold but you’re done with Proof of Use completely and you can transfer freely.

If you’re having problems, please contact us directly either by email to support@foam.space or via Discourse

What does the December 10 Deadline mean?

This is something people get confused but there’s two different aspects of the Sale Terms

Initial Use period : Tokens can’t be transferred outside of the Platform no matter what, it is a period for Token Holders,Cartographers to test the map , interact with it, use it’s functionality, become familiar with it.

This period is now ended, it’s not a deadline, it just means that those who have fulfilled Proof of Use can now transfer outside of the Platform if they wish to.

IF you have NOT completed Proof of Use, There is no deadline for this you can do it today, next week or in 6 months, there is no consequence other than your tokens wont be transferable

Proof of Use, There is for this you can do it today, next week or in 6 months, there is no consequence other than your tokens wont be transferable Proof of Use has a sunset baked into it so one year from the platform launch, if you haven’t concluded or fulfilled Proof of Use , you’ll be past it anyways

December 10th was by no means a Deadline , it just meant that the initial use period was over.

FOAM Tokens

Are FOAM on for Sale?

Now that we’re past the Initial Use period, token sale purchasers do have the ability to transfer them and we have been listed on the exchange Poloniex and on some Decentralized Exchanges like Uniswap.

Community

Moving away from the Telegram Group Chat to Discourse.

Our decision for doing that was by no means; censorship or not wanting to engage in our community, just keeping our main telegram is an enormous resource drain, multiple members of our community had been scammed, we had bots and scammers coming in daily , we just didn’t find it a productive way to manage our community.

Looking at other colleague projects that we spoke to such as 0x, Gnosis, Augur, MakerDAO which we’re all friends with, none of them really use Telegram to manage their community for those reasons.

Now that the Tokens is unlocked on the market , the kind of risk for scammers in that kind of environment is really high, with that said we do have a Gitter for real-time chat, I’m there, I know there’s not a lot of activity but we’re definitely open to real-time chat systems, we just felt Telegram has really served it’s purpose during the token sale but it has run its course.

We definitely know some of you are frustrated about that but we encourage you to either continue working in the FOAM Local Telegram Groups, start a different one, or join the FOAM Discourse or Gitter.

Where can I find the community for Los Angeles?

There is a specific FOAM California Telegram Group which is very active.

You can also make a post on Discourse to find other people from California.

Would we consider creating a FOAM Discord Channel?

We can definitely consider creating a Discord, right now we’re seeing a lot of activity on Discourse and we’re happy with the way the conversations have been developing from there.