Learn of New technologies enables cryptocurrency users to build NFTs with ”proof of presence’

According to Larry Pang, the IoTeX project uses “verifiable GPS data to mint NFTs that show you were at a certain location at a certain time.”

The new offering from IoTeX, a privacy-focused Internet of Things platform, allegedly introduces to the crypto space the idea of a smartphone’s trustworthy execution environment for real-world data.

Larry Pang, IoTeX’s head of business development, told Cointelegraph that the company’s Pebble Tracker, a computer capable of capturing and encrypting data from the real environment, provides a new way for consumers to gain data ownership. According to reports, the Pebble Tracker can securely monitor data such as position, temperature, air quality, motion, and even light levels for a range of blockchain-related applications.

The technology is intended to enable computer owners as well as third parties to check the data’s accuracy. This will allegedly facilitate use cases such as healthcare providers checking the temperature of COVID-19 vaccines from manufacturer to injection, but it would also include a new way to integrate real-world data into non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

Comparing IoTeX’s “Pebble Go” project to the popular Pokemon Go smartphone game, Pang said the tech was designed so that users can’t easily spoof locations — as many did to capture rare Pokemon in the game — but instead “use verifiable GPS data to mint NFTs that prove you were at a certain place at a certain time.”

“This technology can be used to absolutely verify the proof of presence of a person,” said Pang.

“A lot of the use cases of NFTs are about clout — ‘I have this, I’m the owner of it’ — even though you can see this JPG on the internet […] The next step for NFTs is not to prove you have reputation that’s transitive from someone else but if you have reputation that says ‘I have a collection of NFTs that were only mintable under verifiable conditions.'”

Though this technique may not be appropriate for certain common NFTs, such as Jack Dorsey’s tokenized genesis tweet, it may easily be used for sports digital collectibles released at games, with the venue’s location checked and minted. If the number and importance of NFTs increase in the market, so will the demand for consistency in terms of additional verification and data.

“If we didn’t have this kind of model, then at every checkpoint there would need to be a group of validators that validate that this data is correct,” said Pang. “It’s a level of verifiability that really connects the physical and digital world in a new way.”

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