TEA Talks: TEA Project’s Use of GPS
Is the TEA Project use of GPS in line with Web3 decentralization? Kevin dissects the different layers that encompass the global GPS system and conjectures what would happen if parts of the GPS grid went down.
Olesia asks Kevin about geolcation, but the TEA Project doesn’t use GPS to geolocate miners. For geolocation purposes, GPS is getting signals from many different satellites in the sky that are always broadcasting the time. GPS keeps accurate time as each satellite must have an atomic clock. To geolocate a target, it then calculates the distance between the target and the satellites by seeing how long it takes for a recipient to get the time signal.
Just to recap, the TEA Project builds upon blockchain as a root of trust and adds 2 others: time and trusted hardware. You can read more about our three roots of trust in the following post:
The TEA Project uses time as a root of trust similar to Google’s Spanner database. But instead of atomic clocks, we use GPS satellites as the source of trusted time. You can read more about some important Google Spanner concepts and how the TEA Project adapted them for use in the blockchain world in the following article:
Using time as a root of trust gives the TEA Project’s layer2 scalability as well as some unique features. One of the unique features of our layer2 that’s certainly to be appreciated by developers is a database tier.
