XYO - Decentralized Crypto-Location Oracle Network.

What is XYO?

Location data is used every day across the world. Societies and economies are becoming increasingly reliant on the certainty and security of location heuristics. Self-driving vehicles, package-delivering drones and smart cities will likely call for an increased reliance upon trustless location data. The adoption of the technologies of tomorrow centers on their ability to trust location heuristics they receive from an off-chain resource.

"The need for a difficult-to-disrupt system to complement GPS has been well known for years. GPS is exceptionally accurate and dependable, yet jamming, spoofing, cyber attacks and other forms of interference appear to be growing in frequency and severity. This has the potential for devastating effects on our lives and economic activity."- RNT Foundation's President,Dana Goward

We believe the current location technologies lack the necessary certainty and security properties necessary to move us into the future. We have developed an ecosystem of crypto-location protocols and components, which leverage the strengths of blockchain technologies, and solve the short-comings of location technologies relied upon today. Our project is called the "XY Oracle Network" (XYO Network). The XYO Network enables trustless transactions through an ecosystem of crypto-location components that can bridge the gap from the world of today, to the world of tomorrow.

Network Overview

Our system provides an entry point into a protocol of connected devices that provides high certainty on location data through a chain of cryptographic proofs. Users are able to issue transactions, called “queries,” in order to retrieve a piece of location data on any blockchain platform possessing smart contract functionality. 1 Aggregators from the XYO Network then listen to these queries issued to the contract and fetch the answers that have the highest accuracy from a decentralized set of devices that relay cryptographic proofs back up to these aggregators. These aggregators then feed these answers back into the smart contract after reaching a consensus on the answer with the best score. This network of components makes it possible to determine if an object is at a specific XY-coordinate at a given time, with the most provable, trustless certainty possible.

The XYO Network has four primary components: Sentinels (The Data Gatherers), Bridges (The Data Relayers), Archivists (The Data Storers), and Diviners (The Answer Aggregators). Sentinels gather location information via sensors, radios, and other means. Bridges take this data from Sentinels and provide them to Archivists. Archivists store this information for Diviners to analyze. Diviners analyze location heuristics from Archivists in order to generate answers to queries and assign accuracy scores to them. Diviners then relay these answers back into a smart contract (thusly, Diviners serve as oracles). The accuracy score, named the Origin Chain Score, is determined through a set of zero-knowledge proofs known as a Proof of Origin Chain. This chain guarantees two or more pieces of data originated from the same source without revealing any underlying information. Each component along the query’s path generates its own Proof of Origin that is then chained to each component it relays data to. Proof of Origin is a novel formulation that builds a chain of cryptographic guarantees along a path of relayers in the network in order to offer high confidence of real world data. This Proof of Origin Chain encapsulates the confidence we can have in a piece of location data all the way down to the very first devices that gathered the data. We will explore how Proof of Origin works in-depth in the following section. To establish a decentralized consensus mechanism among Diviners, the XYO Network will rely on a public, immutable blockchain known as the XYOMainChain that stores query transactions along with data gathered from Diviners and their associated origin score. Before we dive into the details of the functionality of the entire system, we will clearly define the responsibilities of each component in our network.

XYO Network Expansion

We are fortunate to have a consumer business that has successfully built a real-world network with over one million (1,000,000) Bluetooth and GPS devices in the world. Most location networks fail to reach this phase and attain the critical mass necessary to build out an extensive network. The Sentinel network we have created is only the starting point. The XYO Network is an open system that any operator of location devices can plug into and begin earning XYO Tokens. Generally, the greater the Sentinel cardinality in the XYO Network, the more reliable it is. To further grow its network, the XYO Network is engaging with other businesses to expand its network of Sentinels beyond its own network of XY Findables beacons.

Acknowledgements

This white paper is the product of an inspiring team effort that was made possible through the belief in our vision from the following individuals: Raul Jordan (Harvard College, Thiel Fellow and XYO Network Advisor); for his contributions in making our white paper more concise and helping us elegantly communicate its technical details to the world. We thank Christine Sako for her exceptional work ethic and attention to detail in her review of our work. The consistency in structure and best-practices observed in our white paper is the product of Christine’s efforts. We thank Johnny Kolasinski for his research and compilation of applicable use cases. Last, we thank John Arana for his careful review and creative input

XYO Tokens