What is Chainfrog Location?
- Patent pending technology
- Blockchain-based location tracking
- Applications in logistics and asset tracking, security, rental services
Chainfrog Location is a geolocation tracking and recording system based on blockchain technology. By leveraging the distributed peer-to-peer and proof-of-work systems underlying blockchains, Chainfrog provides a low-cost and robust distributed system for client devices to check in with their locations.
An associated crypto-currency allows the optional levying of micropayment charges for the reporting of locations. As such, a cellphone or low-power IoT device can run a thin client to connect to a Chainfrog network on a regular basis (or as needed) to report its location, and can contribute to the running of the service.
Chainfrog can provide an ideal solution for secure and reliable location logging and tracking for a wide variety of purposes, by clients as diverse as haulage companies, prison services, mail-order companies, car rental services, and even simply concerned parents.
Locations can be reported in plaintext, or in encrypted form, and the Chainfrog system provides for the secure exchange of the encryption keys between location reporting devices and the intended recipients.
Chainfrog Location is patent pending (USPTO patent application 14/981,803).
For more information, consultancy services, investment opportunities and licensing queries, please contact info@chainfrog.com
Why use blockchain technology for location services?
Maintaining your own infrastructure to reliably log, track, and query device locations can impose a large overhead on your company in terms of hardware and networking equipment, developers and IT support staff, and is in any case beyond the means of most private individuals. With a homegrown solution key staff leaving means vital know-how is lost.
The other option to date, namely contracting a third party or cloud computing supplier to manage your location tracking services, opens you up to other risks. For example, your location data may be revealed to other parties or government organizations, hacked, corrupted, or otherwise altered, without your knowledge. If the supplier’s systems go down, you will need to deal with their support staff and in the meantime your devices and assets are untracked. If your data is permanently lost the best you can hope for is for compensation in the form of an insurance payment.
A blockchain solution, on the other hand, provides a mechanism for multiple interested parties to share the costs and overheads of running a location tracking and storing system, without requiring implicit trust between the parties providing and/or using the system. The distributed nature of the system ensures that multiple copies of the data are stored in different locations, and yet your individual data packets can be encrypted with a key only you and your trusted partners hold.
The identities of the contributors to the system are confirmed by their use of asymmetric keys to sign data for inclusion in the blockchain.
A blockchain solution can be run by a single corporate entity, or many interested parties including private individuals, spreading the cost of producing a reliable system between the groups, without compromising the security of the individual data stored by each party. The crypto-currency associated with the system allows for micro-payments to be levied on using the system, and remuneration for running the backbone of the system. It is effectively self-auditing and self-accounting.
How does it work?
At the core of a blockchain system are:
- an agreed format for submitting data to be included in a shared ledger, or blockchain
- a proof-of-work algorithm that is applied repeatedly to blocks of data until a difficulty target is met, resulting in a validated block.
- a difficulty target that is dynamically adjusted depending on how much computing power is being spent on validating blocks of data
- a peer-to-peer network of block validators (often known as miners), proxies for forwarding blocks and submitted data, and clients that submit the data for inclusion
- optionally, a crypto-currency attached to the system, whereby producing valid blocks results in a reward for the validator, and the inclusion of data may incur a small crypto-currency fee. Successful validators can sell crypto-currency to potential clients in order to profit from their validation effort.
For our demonstration of the Chainfrog Location system, the clients submit location data, the validators include it in blocks of data, and the validation algorithm is a SHA256 hash followed by a BLAKE hash, the result of which must fall below a given difficulty threshold dynamically determined by the average time of production of the preceding blocks.
The parameters of any specific Chainfrog Location implementation can be tweaked to optimize it for any given location tracking requirement: how often blocks can be produced, the proof-of-work algorithm to use, whether to use an associated crypto-currency for micro-payments, and so on.