Foam Turns to Token Grants to Build Out Decentralized Mapping Platform

Foam is accomplishing what few token issuers have: A consistently engaged community that actually uses its token beyond speculation.

Following a $16.5 million token sale in 2018, the geolocation data startup has launched a token-curated registry with about 140 monthly participants in April and a scavenger hunt that garnered 500 user contributions to its open source map.

Foam takes the same type of data used by services like Google Maps and adds features for distributed storage and "Proof of location" to make the data more reliable.

Starting today, CEO Ryan John King tells CoinDesk that Foam will also offer token grants worth up to $15,000, depending on the proposal, for developers to contribute to the mapping and data collection system.

He said roughly 3 million tokens, or 10 percent of the total token supply, was set aside to fund community initiatives such as grants.

Supply chain management expert Coleman Moore recently organized and led the first Foam Community Proposal call.

So he believes an open source tool with economic incentives to keep the data clean, via the TCR, offers an attractive alternative.

"On top of [incentives], Foam uses a blockchain, which really adds value because if you can imagine a world where everything is connected to the internet you don't want that to be controlled by a centralized network server," Moore said.

Highlighting Moore's point about incentives, Microsoft engineer Cody Born collected Microsoft Azure tools to support the Foam scavenger hunt, which rewarded people for verifying location data with a custom non-fungible token of the buildings they added to the map.

The Foam token price has remained unusually stable throughout 2019, close to $0.03 each, because holders who love maps and puzzles are using the token to vote on the quality of data or contribute to the map, rarely trading it.