This oracle data provider platform has surpassed 4 million nodes since inception

Can a fully-functional oracle network ecosystem that anonymously collects and validates geospatial (location-specific) data exist? One blockchain firm seems to have gotten the gist of the idea. Founded in 2012, XY Labs and its namesake protocol XYO, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, seek to reward participants for the genesis, interpretation, analysis and storage of data to be called upon for specific problems. There are currently over 4 million nodes worldwide on the XYO network. 

In a recent ask-me-anything (AMA) session with Cointelegraph Markets Pro, Arie Trouw, founder of XY Labs, explained that fundamental to the XYO system is a special type of payload called BoundWitnesses. It contains a list of user-input data points that are signed by one or more nodes in the XYO network. They can be modified to include time, date, and location, and be signed by nodes as to reflect the certainty of the embedded data.

"The job of an oracle is to provide an answer with as much certainty as possible. We use blockchain to memorialize these answers and provide transparency into the process of creating the solutions by linking to supporting data using immutable hashes."

To ensure security, BoundWitnesses only shares the hashes of payloads while keeping the payloads themself private. Each node has its own blockchain, and with BoundWitnesses, those blockchains are linked together and, as a whole, provide one reflection of the imperfect data of reality. Since its inception, over 77.4 million BoundWitnesses and 244.7 million payloads have been submitted to the XYO Main Net.

Together with the firm's COIN mobile application, which rewards users for data collection and production and the XYO token as a payment channel, a fully-functional marketplace is born where users can exchange data for incentives. There are approximately 12 billion XYO tokens with no fixed supply. Factors such as token inflation and burn mechanisms will affect its supply-side tokenomics.

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