Verses, a nonprofit foundation creating standards and protocols for what’s known as the “spatial web,” announced Wednesday that the company has partnered with XYO Network, a blockchain-powered location network driven by device data.

As a foundation, Verses is building what it calls the Spatial Web Protocol, a protocol-driven network of location data that makes it possible to link virtual information to physical spaces. With location data, the spatial web would allow developers to link any place or object in order to create “smart spaces.”

By attaching these smart spaces and smart objects with distributed ledger blockchain technology, a tamperproof historical record, developers can also trigger programmable contracts. For example, this could be used to automate payments when a person or item reaches a certain location, such as part of a delivery or shipment.

To build its protocol and service, Verses raised $6 million through a private token sale announced in August.

The Verses universal spatial protocol provides a universal a universal and open standard for the designed for the next generation of the web, including virtual reality and augmented reality. Using the Verses protocol, places and objects could have virtual property rights, meaning that companies could register to virtually “own” physical spaces and exclusively control the virtual objects put in them.

“When you talk about smart factories or smart cities, and when you want to validate a position in space, a drone, an autonomous truck, cargo, or things in motion, XYO is in an amazing position with our network to act as a validator of where something is via proof of location,” said Gabriel Rene, founder and executive director of Verses.

That’s where the partnership with XYO Network comes in for Verses. The Verses protocol provides a framework for creating smart objects and spaces, XYO’s network provides high-accuracy, real-time location data needed to make the magic happen.

“Our companies are perfect partners,” said Markus Levin, co-founder and head of operations at XYO Network. “Working in lockstep, our companies see innovative solutions bridging augmented reality, virtual reality, blockchain and the real world, in an unprecedented way.”

XYO calls its network a people-powered location network that is also built on top of blockchain technology. The company’s network connects the virtual and real-world as well by gathering location data from internet-connected devices such as mobile phones, smart cars, smart appliances and other sensors. As this data is gathered, it’s entered into a constantly updating information network designed to provide accurate, up-to-date and validated location data that can then be used by the Verses protocol as a physical map for its virtual worlds.

By combining XYO’s location data network and Verses’s blockchain-based “ownership” and smart contract automation it is possible to provide proof-of-location functions to distributed applications, which are peer-to-peer apps that can run autonomously on blockchain networks without the need for centralized servers or storage.

“Verses is the access to the single standard of the record of location and XYO is the validation,” said Rene. “XYO is perfectly positioned to do this at scale.”

Image: XYO Network