# 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
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Notes on local currencies

A strong movement is forming around the idea of local, complementary or community inclusion currencies. The theory is that if we can create a container within which economic value can circulate, local groups can continue to create and exchange value regardless of the global economic climate. Why should a town or village suffer if some systemic vulnerability causes a downturn in global equity markets? Surely those individuals are still able to create the same value they could before a recession? Of course, defining a market and its boundaries is a subjective exercise. Boundaries only exist in our minds. They are still real, though, and defining meaningful boundaries allows us to study and understand the dynamics of systems internally, and within a broader multi-system tapestry. I say this while still acknowledging that ultimately all "systems" collapse into one system — the universe, in this moment. Still, drawing distinctions helps us understand patterns. The collapse of many of our cultural systems into one is more true today than ever before. We can now communicate globally in what is effectively realtime — information can move at the speed of light, and the economy is now truly a global one. This interconnectedness carries opportunities and risks in equal measure, and how we design our systems of value flow has great bearing on the safety, justice and equity of money — whether finance serves to enhance human flourishing or undermine it. Over the past decades, a rich range of experiments in implementing local currencies has naturally and organically emerged. Rarely are these projects initiated by central governments or banks — they typically are driven by local leaders seeking to enhance the flow economic value within a local community. These community initiatives have been classified as "local exchange traded systems (LETS)", and share common design patterns in their numerous implementations all around the world. As our digital systems have matured and information technologies have become ubiquitous, irrevocable tools underpinning human society in the 20th and 21st centuries, perhaps the most significant development has been the digitization of finance. Money is finally revealing its true nature: it is fundamentally an information technology. The value of a coin lies primarily in the stamp it possesses, rather than the actual gold it contains. This stamp is data, which carries information about its origin and legitimacy.

4/2/2022
Astral

For the past few years we’ve been investigating what we see as a new galaxy in the Web3 universe, at the intersection of spatial data and consensus technologies. We've explored the boundaries of the design space researching, prototyping and building community. This is culminating in our work to build what we now see as the key primitives to underpin a new category of Web3 applications using spatial and location data. Our work at Astral is focused on promoting the evolution of an open, human-centered and composable location-based decentralized web. The opportunity space is pretty vast. We believe that the vision for the user-controlled internet is incomplete without peer-to-peer alternatives to services like Uber, Google Maps, Airbnb, Tinder, Craigslist, Amazon and others. Even more exciting is the opportunity to replicate the functionality required for systems of local taxation, voting, and physical security. Perhaps the most exciting of all is the notion that our systems of value exchange can be configured to promote the preservation of life and ecological health — the nascent "regenerative finance", or ReFi, movement, leveraging natural capital currencies and other tokenized natural assets. We've been finding that all of this is possible if we can reliably tie information about physical reality — where someone or something is, or measures of environmental conditions — to smart contracts, especially contracts capable of computational geometry. Rather than working at the application layer, at Astral we are designing open source tools, public goods intended to underpin this category to A: make building location-based dapps easier, B: create spatial data storage systems fit for web3 (i.e. verifiable, uncensorable, permissionless, etc). We believe that if the ecosystem can converge on using these tools and design patterns, the location-based decentralized web will exhibit similar emergent composability that we're witnessing in DeFi. So what does this specifically mean? We're developing verifiable spatial data registries, smart-contract based registries of vector or raster spatial data assets. Initially this was to store polygons representing geographic jurisdictions on chain, though we see use cases for points, lines, polyhedra and raster datasets as well. More here →

10/14/2021
Verifiable Spatial Data Registries

At Astral we’ve been exploring the use of spatial and location data technologies on the decentralized web for a few years now - researching, experimenting, prototyping, writing and community building. A number of early pioneers - FOAM, IBISA Network, Geo Web, Grassroots Economics, among several others - further validate our conclusion that a broad range of useful applications exist at the intersection of these two technology domains. Our work experimenting and prototyping[1], [2], [3], [4] has led us to identify a few tools and standards that we think would dramatically lower barriers to entry for application developers hoping to build with location / spatial data. Our intuition is that if we can identify and build versatile tools, devs will be able to build and innovate more quickly. A powerful second order effect of the adoption of shared tools and standards: the location-based decentralized web could develop the same properties of seamless composability that are emerging in DeFi. Specifically, we’ve discovered that many location-based dapps have a need for what we’re calling verifiable spatial data registries. A verifiable spatial data registry is simply a smart contract that contains a registry of spatial data objects, such as vector features (i.e. points, lines, polygons or polyhedrons), or raster spatiotemporal assets (i.e. satellite images, LIDAR scans, etc.) Different applications will require spatial data registries with various different properties and functionality. We’ve been exploring this design space, and intend to develop and publish verifiable spatial data registries that fulfill commonly-seen requirements. We suspect that there may be a strong case to adopt an ERC standard for these verifiable spatial data registries, so that secure contracts can be developed and so interoperable tooling can mature. So what does this really mean? It probably will help to illustrate with examples and use cases, categorized into vector and raster data.

10/11/2021
The Hyperaware Protocol

A spatial governance protocol for connected devices Abstract Introduction Design Principles Trustless Fully decentralized Self sovereign Private

5/27/2021
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