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Overview

Location is one of the most common — and most contested — facts in digital systems.
From VPN checks and border control to carbon monitoring and sanctions enforcement,
many questions online boil down to where and when did an event occur?

Today, location evidence is handled inconsistently:

  • Web2 relies on IP addresses, GPS coordinates, billing info, or ad-hoc service logs.
  • Web3 systems rarely integrate location at all, despite consensus networks depending on where nodes are run and where users interact.

These mechanisms are fragile, fragmented, and easy to manipulate. A ship turning off its AIS transponder, a user masking their IP with a VPN, or a falsified invoice — each shows how weak single-source location evidence can be.

Why Location Proofs?​

Our motivation comes from three converging forces:

  • Web3 design principles. The decentralized web is meant to be open, durable, and opt-in. If location is to matter in Web3, it needs to follow these same principles — portable, user-controlled, and verifiable without reliance on a single gatekeeper.
  • Verifiability in an age of AI. Generative AI and cheap spoofing reduce the cost of lying. Stronger proofs of where and when something happened raise the cost back up, restoring trust.
  • An open framework. Location affects everyone, everywhere. A proprietary patchwork of APIs won’t do. By building open standards and open-source implementations, we create a foundation that others can inspect, build on, and improve. This makes the system harder to capture, more likely to interoperate, and more durable over time.

Design Goals​

  • Pragmatism. Build on what works today; aim for “good enough” in real systems rather than chasing theoretical perfection.
  • Privacy & consent. Default to user-controlled data, introduce privacy-preserving mechanisms wherever possible, and set developer patterns that encourage restraint.
  • Composability. Proofs should be stackable — independent stamps combined into stronger artifacts.
  • Simplicity. Make it easy for developers to create, verify, and consume proofs. Minimize friction in common flows.
  • Interoperability. Standardize the schema and verification flow so proofs from different systems can coexist and be reused across contexts.
  • Accountable persistence. Proofs should remain verifiable for their intended lifetime, but also support expiry or revocation when privacy, consent, or regulation requires it.

Claims, Stamps, and Proofs​

A location claim is any assertion about the position — and optionally the time — of a person, device, asset, or event.

A location stamp is a single piece of evidence that corroborates a claim. Examples include:

  • a GPS reading,
  • a Wi-Fi SSID lookup,
  • a notarized document,
  • or an NFC check-in.

Each stamp makes lying a bit harder — but alone, each can be forged.

A location proof combines multiple independent stamps into a verifiable artifact. The principle: independent evidence increases confidence in the claim. Forging two or three unrelated signals together is much harder than spoofing one.

Proofs lie on a spectrum of certainty, from weak, single-signal evidence up to high-rigor, multi-signal attestations hardened against even nation-state adversaries. Our framework is designed to harmonize the broad range of evidence types, and package it up into a new internet primitive.

If we do this well, location proofs will serve use cases ranging from lower stakes — like gaming and social networking — up to ones with higher security requirements, like those in supply chain management, conflict + humanitarian, and compliance.

How Astral Relates to Other Proof-of-Location Systems

Astral does not compete with systems like WitnessChain, FOAM, or GEODNET.

Instead, Astral location proofs sit a layer above: these systems provide strong stamps that can stand alone or be combined with other, uncorrelated signals to strengthen a claim.

The Astral framework harmonizes how such evidence is structured, signed, and verified, so evidence from different systems can interoperate and developers can compose these signals more easily.

Core Concepts​

  • Strategies — categories of how location signals can be derived (e.g. machine identifiers, network measurements, delegated records, legal documents).
  • Location Signals — raw observables (e.g. cell IDs, RTT latencies, acoustic or imaging data, EXIF tags).
  • Location Stamp Plugins — software modules that process signals into verifiable location stamps.
  • Location Proof Recipes — multi-plugin compositions that stack location stamps into full proofs.
  • Integrity assurances — cross-cutting mechanisms (e.g. TEEs, OS attestation, hardware signing) that raise confidence in stamps.
  • Location Protocol — a standardized schema for structuring, signing, and transporting spatial data, so stamps and proofs remain portable, verifiable, and interoperable across systems — the envelope for location proofs.

Location Proof Lifecycle​

At a high level, the lifecycle of a proof follows this pipeline:

  1. Signals observed — raw data from devices, networks, or documents.
  2. On-device processing — signals fused, normalized, or pre-validated.
  3. Integrity checks — assurance that the data comes from trusted hardware, OS, or environment.
  4. Signing — a plugin packages the evidence into a structured, signed location stamp.
  5. Verification — multiple stamps are combined into a recipe, checked for independence and consistency, yielding a location proof.

Note that some plugins may deviate from this exact process — but it's a useful high-level mental model.

Why Now?​

Several converging trends make location proofs urgent:

  1. Web3 design principles — open, durable, opt-in. Decentralized apps need portable, verifiable evidence of location, just like they need portable, verifiable identity.
  2. Web2 messiness — today’s geolocation methods are fragmented and rarely auditable.
  3. Regulation & compliance — data residency, sanctions, KYC/AML: all are location-dependent.
  4. AI & disinformation — deepfakes, spoofing, and generative content lower the cost of lying; stronger proofs raise it.
  5. Splinternet pressures — as jurisdictions diverge, verifiable location metadata can enable technical enforcement of locally-scoped rules.

Astral’s Work​

At Astral, in collaboration with the University of Maryland and OGC, we are:

  • Cataloging strategies and signals — mapping the landscape of how location evidence can be produced.
  • Building plugins and recipes — creating open-source modules that turn signals into stamps and proofs.
  • Developing the Location Protocol — an interoperable schema for location attestations, the common data format that makes proofs portable and verifiable.
  • Exploring use cases — from wallet security and fraud detection to carbon monitoring, AI localization, and supply chain compliance.

Next Steps in this Section​

  • Strategies: categories of how location evidence is produced.
  • Signals: raw observables we can build from.
  • Integrity: cross-cutting assurances.
  • Plugins: modules that generate verifiable stamps.
  • Recipes: compositions of multiple plugins into full proofs.

Get Involved​

Location proofs are an evolving research area. We welcome collaboration, feedback, and contributions from researchers, developers, and organizations working on location verification challenges.

Connect with us: