XYO: The XY Oracle Network

Imagine this, you just landed after a long and tiring flight and make your way towards baggage collection. You wait tirelessly while the other passengers find their bags and make their way to the exit. As time passes, the thought that the airline might have misplaced your baggage kicks in, not a good feeling to have right? I am sure many of you have been in this situation.

What if there was a way for you and the airline to track your baggage in real time? Would save everyone the hassle of lost baggage right? XYO does just that!!!

XYO's website describes XYO as a "Network of devices that anonymously collects and validates geospatial data or data with a geographic component" 

XYO's application could be leveraged by multiple industries .e.g. airline industry, car rental, hospital, e-commerce etc (you can read about the use case of these industries on XYO's website: https://xyo.network/case-studies/)

This all sounds great, but how does the XYO network collect and validate geospatial data? It does that using what is called a Sentinel, a sentinel is a physical device (like a smartphone or SentinelX device) that broadcast a signal with its location and other data. What does this actually mean?

Say that you are roaming around in the Swiss alps and having the time of your life (something that I can only wish for sadly), turned your phone into a sentinel by downloading the XYO app. Your phone transmits your geospatial data to the XYO platform but how would your location be validated? 

Let's suppose another group of lucky people are roaming around in the Swiss alps and one of them uses their phone as a sentinel as well. When that individual's phone sends its geospatial data to the XYO platform, the platform can then validate the geospatial data by comparing the information sent by your and the other individual's phone. The proximity of the two phones would act as a validator. Makes sense?

This brings us to a very crucial point and the something that XYO's future success is dependent on, PRIVACY. For the XYO platform to be able to validate the location, at least two devices need to be at the same location, I am not sure how much would it cost to install the SentinelX device worldwide but I am sure it would be a lot. The most cheapest option would be for people to use their phones as sentinels but that means relaying your geospatial data constantly. I am sure a lot of people would be vary of being tracked constantly, XYO hopes that by incentivizing the users to share their location data through their COIN app they might be able to solve the privacy issue.

Overall XYO seems to be a promising innovation in the crypto space even though its in its initial phase but it is all dependent on how they tackle the privacy issue and get more users to use their phones as sentinels. 

Note: Trading decisions should not be based on the opinion in this article, investors should conduct their own due diligence before buying the cryptocurrency. This article is purely based on my own research and understanding of the cryptocurrency in the article.