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# System prepended metadata

title: 'DRAFT: ESP Astral Application'

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# DRAFT: ESP Astral Application

# Project Name
The Astral Protocol 

# Project Description
_What are you working on? What does success look like for your project? (2-3 short paragraphs)_

At Astral we are building tools to underpin the location-based decentralized web. 

We’ve been exploring the opportunity space for some time - we’ve prototyped a number of diverse dapps and protocols that use spatial and location data. For example, we designed the Hyperaware Protocol, a spatial governance protocol for connected devices, and built a prototype implementation to create a trust minimized, decentralized system of congestion zones. We also prototyped a spatial finance application that ties a smart contract to measurements of air quality in a particular geographic area. We have experimented building a location-aware wallet that could support local currencies.

Based on these explorations, we are building the tools that would have made our lives easier in building these location-based decentralized applications. Specifically, we are developing Spatial.sol, a Solidity library of topological and geometric functions, which will mean we can perform on-chain computational geometry. We also intend to propose a verifiable spatial data registry standard to the Ethereum ecosystem, which will use Spatial.sol as a dependency. These spatial data registry contracts will fulfill a common requirement across location-based and spatial decentralized applications, both in the physical world and in the metaverse. 

# Team Profile
_Who are the members of your team? Please write or link to bios._

johnx25bd has been exploring the intersection of Web3 and spatial data technologies for several years. His interest was inspired by a combination of years exploring the world as a cycling tour guide and travel journalist, and a period working at an international NGO studying the ways in which we can mitigate human conflict. 

Nitin Shukla is co-founder and CTO at Real Analytics, and a geospatial data scientist specializing in the analysis of remote sensing imagery. 

João Martins is a developer at Spectral Finance and a core community member involved with Astral since inception. 

A number of other community members are involved and will be supporting engineering, writing and community management.


# Impact
_What key problem or need do you hope to address? How will your work impact the larger Ethereum ecosystem? Who will benefit from your work?_

We believe it's just a matter of time before people start looking for user-controlled alternatives to location-based apps like Uber, Tinder, Google Maps - and we believe smart contracts open a wide new design space of location-based and spatial applications. This class of decentralized applications is largely unaddressed, largely due to technical complexities of working with geospatial data in resource-contrained computing environments like the EVM. 

However, as the smart contract ecosystem matures and evolves, various scaling techniques are making the developing and deployment of location-based dApps increasingly viable. 

Rather than operating at the application layer and building a peer-to-peer Uber or Pokemon Go for NFTs, at Astral we are working at the infrastructure and dev tooling layer. By developing versatile standards and building compatible tools, we hope to dramatically lower the barrier to entry for a developer looking to develop a location-based dApp, or otherwise use spatial or location data in a smart contract. A second order effect of this: if developers converge on a set of standards, the ecosystem of location-based dapps will develop many of the properties of composability that are creating much emergent value in DeFi. 

Long term, we hope to help create the ability to tie smart contract logic to physical locations, enabling developers to write what we call “local contracts”. This will imbue trustless computing platforms like Ethereum with the ability to replace our legacy systems of jurisdictional governance with much more transparent, reliable and fair systems.


# Needs and Challenges
_What are the most significant obstacles facing your project or your team right now? What are some of your most pressing needs?_

We have a strong plan and have proven feasibility for our roadmap - we now need to dig into the difficult work of making decisions about standard interfaces and writing code. Our development would progress much faster if we could bring on an additional Solidity engineer. We’re also keen to build developer tooling such as a Typescript client library, which would require developer time and talent. 

Computational geometry is relatively data and compute intensive, so this use case is quite dependent on scalability. Many applications also deal with highly sensitive information - where someone is on Earth. Also, positioning technologies like GPS are highly centralized. Decentralized alternatives are being developed (notably FOAM's dynamic proof of location), but are still a ways off. So we need to carefully consider how scaling solutions, zero knowledge protocols, and localization technologies can support the kinds of applications we hope to build. Our outlook at this point is to start building and experimenting, knowing that many dapps will depend on technologies that are still in development - we want to be ready with mature tools when they do come online.

We’d also like advice and guidance on how to go about bringing an ERC standard to life. 


# Previous Work
_Please provide links to published code, research, or other documentation of what you’re working on._

- https://docs.astral.global
- [Spatial.sol on Github](https://github.com/AstralProtocol/spatial-sol)
	- [Prototype, including location-aware wallet:](https://devpost.com/software/location-aware-wallet-contract)
- Details on [Verifiable Spatial Data Registries](https://docs.astral.global/workplan/verifiable-spatial-data-registries)
	- A prototype implementation from ETHLondon 2020: [geolocker](https://devpost.com/software/geolocker)
- [Hyperaware: a spatial governance protocol for connected devices](https://hyperaware.io/)



# Contact Person
johnx25bd

# Contact Email


# Where is your contact person based?
UK