SAN FRANCISCO, March 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In a move
that strengthens San Diego-based
XYO Network as a leader in the development of crypto-location
technology, the company has recently acquired GEO. The company GEO
and the team behind it first attracted the attention of XYO Network
during EthDenver, one of the largest hackathons for Ethereum in
the United States.
"We're excited about the addition of GEO to our crypto-location
portfolio," said XYO Network co-founder Markus Levin. "GEO adds an additional feature
set to XYO by trustlessly notifying a device that an object was
there with absolute certainty, and without having to communicate
private data with the network."
GEO was conceived and built by three highly talented students,
one of whom is world renowned hacker Jack
Cable. Cable, a high school student, is best known for
competing against 600 hackers from around the world in 2017 as part
of Hack the Air Force, a partnership between the Department of
Defense and HackerOne, a bug bounty platform. Cable found 40
vulnerabilities on the Air Force site, which placed him first on
the event leaderboard.
Owen Shen and Zefram Lou, both
freshmen enrolled at UC San Diego, rounded out the EthDenver GEO
team. Both had already garnered their own fair share of attention
in the blockchain space before joining XYO Network with Cable as an
XYO Network adviser.
A closer look at how GEO works
GEO provides a protocol that allows anyone to easily distribute
and verify Proofs of Location in a decentralized network, all
without a massive overhead.
Companies often require a verifiable Proof of Location, but
traditional metrics, like GPS, are easy to spoof. GEO approaches
this challenge differently. It is centered around Nodes, which are
devices set at a fixed physical location. Users can connect to the
Nodes via Bluetooth and receive a Proof of Location signature. The
signature is unique because it relies on the user's unique device
ID as well as the time-stamp, cryptographically proving that the
device was indeed near the Node at the time specified.
Designed for many possible uses
To accommodate a global market, GEO is multi-platform and
utilizes Bluetooth so that it can be accessed on any enabled
device. The GEO mobile app is written universally in Ionic,
meaning it can be deployed on any mobile operating system. Nodes
are written in Javascript. The mobile app and the node communicate
via Bluetooth, with the node returning the Proof of Location
signature. To protect user privacy, the GEO team created a smart
contract model for probabilistic Proofs of Location for a variety
of possible uses including:
- eCommerce: Companies like Amazon and UPS an offer, as a
premium service, an independently confirmed ledger to track every
step of a shipment's progress, starting at the fulfillment center
and ending with the package's secure delivery within the customer's
home.
- Automated Drones: Automated drones operating
independently of each other will be able to communicate their
relative and absolute locations using a universal protocol.
- Hospitals: By tying the XYO Network into the operational
frameworks that are already in place in Hospitals, care providers
can significantly reduce failures in communication and record
keeping that result in patient injury and death.
Adding to a growing XYO Network portfolio
The addition of GEO to XYO Network's portfolio continues a
larger commitment to facilitating an open ecosystem of GEOspatial
blockchain applications.
As a demonstration of this commitment, XYO Network recently
funded Prysmatic Labs, which also just received a $100,000 grant from Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin as part of the inaugural
Ethereum Foundation grant awards.
Continuing with its mission of collaboration, XYO Network and
GEO have provided access to several libraries where developers can
host and review code, manage projects and build software to bring
added value to GEO going forward.
A leader in crypto-location technology
As all forms of commerce become more reliant on location data,
smart cities and companies of the future will increase their
dependence on that data exponentially. However, one of the biggest
challenges is finding a more efficient and foolproof way to deliver
trustworthy location data. XYO Network has focused efforts on
making trustless location data possible through an ecosystem of
crypto-location technologies and protocols.
The introduction of Ethereum brought about "smart contracts"
which are transaction protocols that collapse payment and execution
of an agreement into the same thing. However, Ethereum's major
drawback was that smart contracts need a centralized third-party
for verification, making those contracts vulnerable to hackers.
To eliminate this vulnerability, XYO Network built the world's
first decentralized location verification system with more than one
million Bluetooth and GPS devices already around the world. After
years of investment and breakthroughs in crypto-location
technology, XYO is poised to help bring the promise and the
benefits of blockchain technology to the real world on a massive
and global scale in location-reliant trade markets that generate a
staggering $11 trillion in activity.
Press Contact:
Keri Kukral
Phone: (760) 487-8421
Email: keri@xyo.network
Related Links
XYO Network
XYO Network on Medium
Related Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3cH7mRwkU8
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