I wrote a white paper in 2021 for a consumer drone, NFT-powered protocol for building a decentralized map of the world (similar to Google Maps). I built an NFT economy simulator to visualize the NFT ownership, staking rewards to pilots, treasury actions, etc. This simulator aided in raising a 8-figure sum from crypto and traditional VCs.
In the protocol, the earth is divided into a grid where each grid cell is an NFT. The simulator worked on a 1/30,000,000 scale model of the world. Drone pilots capture imagery of the cells via the protocol constraints and upload the imagery in order to claim ownership of the NFT for that real world location. Then the fun begins...
An entire ecosystem with gamifications like "King of Hill" and various staking primitives were tightly woven into the protocol to compel drone pilots to participate. The maps generated from ~400 ft altitudes of commodity drone hardware with 4K/8K cameras greatly surpasses the resolution and update rates provided by current satellite imagery.
