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Introduction

→ Resource: Location Protocol: Motivation, Design, and Technical Details (EASIER Data Initiative)

Astral's Location Protocol provides a standardized structure for representing spatial information on the decentralized web. It includes:

  • Location attestations: Users create structured, signed records containing location data, metadata, and attachments - basic building blocks of the decentralized geospatial web
  • Flexible data control: Users choose how to manage their location records - keeping them private, using centralized storage, publishing to IPFS or registering on blockchain networks
  • Extensible spatial format support: Handles points, lines, polygons, and complex geometries needed for mapping applications — any spatial data format can be supported
  • Universal spatial representation: Works across Earth-centered coordinates, other planetary systems, and virtual worlds using established formats like GeoJSON, decimal coordinates and other location data formats
  • Rich media attachments: Connects photos, videos, sensor readings, and documents to spatial data
  • Extensible verification framework: Accommodates location proofs (verification evidence) that can be attached to location attestations using various verification systems and techniques

The Location Protocol is built on the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) — it defines core schemas to create location attestations that carry clear attribution, timestamp information, attached data, and optional location proofs.

This section of the docs includes:

  • A quickstart guide to creating location proofs — note this will be updated soon to use the Astral SDK!
  • Specifications of the core Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) schema for the protocol, and UIDs of deployments on Base, Celo and Arbitrum mainnets, and Ethereum Sepolia testnet.
  • Information on our Location Format Extensions Library, which provides an interoperability framework for different location data formats: Location Format Extensions
  • Details on our Location Proof Extensions framework for supporting different proof-of-location systems and verification strategies
  • Details on our Media Extensions framework for attaching different types of media to location attestations

Contributing​

We welcome contributions to improve the protocol and tools. Please read our contributing guidelines for more details.