Astral is a spatial extension for decentralized systems like Ethereum (i.e., distributed ledgers) and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) (i.e., peer-to-peer networks). Built on FOSS principles and designed for composability, Astral introduces a standard way to structure, sign, and work with geospatial data in trust-minimized environments — enabling location to become a first-class primitive in decentralized applications and protocols that often lack standardized support or completely overlook the geospatial dimension.

This talk will introduce the decentralized geospatial web, along with Astral’s architecture, including:

• The Location Protocol — a general-purpose, open standard for digitally signed spatial records or claims. These “location attestations” are versatile, and can represent the location of events, objects, features, and interactions. The Location Protocol supports an extensible range of geospatial feature types, data formats, and location proofs, including formal cryptographic evidence and informal supporting media, as well as arbitrary metadata.

• The Location Proof Extensions Library — a modular collection of “recipes” for generating location-linked evidence using hardware, peer confirmation, sensors, cryptographic techniques and other proof-of-location strategies to support claims about location.

• Spatial.sol — a suite of utilities for reasoning about location natively in smart contracts, including basic spatial operators (e.g., contains, distance).

• Supporting tools like the Astral SDK and API, which simplify the creation, verification, and querying of location attestations.

We’ll walk through how Astral enables new workflows for verifying geospatial data and computation, and how it integrates with existing standards and practices from the FOSS4G world.

Why Now

The Web3 paradigm, which includes consensus networks, blockchains, smart contracts, content-addressed data, decentralized identifiers and more, introduces new architectural constraints and opportunities for spatial data. Well-designed Web3 systems are more open and durable, and enhance user rights, by incorporating features such as immutability, attribution, tamper-evidence, and selective disclosure. But current geospatial systems were never designed to interoperate with distributed ledgers or peer-to-peer networks, and these decentralized systems do not typically offer structured and standardized ways to work with geospatial data.

Astral fills this gap. It provides a minimal, standards-aligned foundation for building spatially-aware applications on decentralized systems, without requiring a significant break from existing geospatial tools. It’s built for compatibility with formats like GeoJSON and concepts from spatial data infrastructure (SDI), and designed to be extended by communities who already know how spatial data should work. This is slated to become increasingly important as the nascent AI agent economy develops and becomes one of the largest creators and consumers of geospatial data.

What We’ll Cover

• The structure and rationale of the Location Protocol
• How different location proof strategies are modularized in the Location Proof Extensions Library
• Spatial.sol and on-chain verifiable geocomputation
• Current deployments on Celo, Arbitrum, Base, and Sepolia
• Example applications: AI agent localization and geospatial data interchange, verifiable check-ins, field data collection, decentralized mapping
• Opportunities for collaboration on tooling, verification schemes, and data interoperability

Track

Data Management and Interoperability — Astral is explicitly designed to bridge decentralized and traditional spatial systems through shared schemas, open formats, and cross-platform tooling.

Who This Is For

• Developers exploring decentralized approaches to geospatial data
• GIS professionals interested in cryptographic verification, decentralized IDs, or tamper-proof provenance
• Contributors to open geospatial standards who want to shape how those standards evolve in new computing environments

Open Source Commitment

Astral is fully open source. All schemas, contracts, recipes, and code are maintained in public repositories as part of the Decentralized Geospatial Collaborative through the University of Maryland, and contributions from the FOSS4G community are welcome — especially around proof strategies, media types, and integration with open geospatial tools.