Layer System

New dNFTs minted via Next Earth and attached to original land tiles ("Genesis Layer") can be done through the creation of a new Layer on top of the Next Earth Map. Any developer who wishes to create their own application can generate their own Layer, select which tiles, regions or locations are active on their application and build their own solution without the need for deep Web3 knowledge. This new Layer is the developer’s own “realm” where any rule can be set based on what their application does.

However, as developers are using Genesis Layer (the original Next Earth Map) as their baseline, the smart contract allocation system will automatically pay royalties to owners of Next Earth land from the use of their land in another Layer.

This structure is scalable to millions of applications in a trustless and permissionless way. While dynamic NFTs allow for virtually unlimited use cases (as opposed to regular NFTs which are difficult to work with and mainly have been limited to static use cases such as art), multiple layers allow for the creation of the Next Earth App Store. Therefore every dApp built on Next Earth will use its own Layer.

These layers can be displayed on top of the Mapbox map thanks to the Next Earth Map Engine. This engine is responsible for the tile system which is the base of all Next Earth’s features from the beginning.

Technically when you open the map the engine is calculating in real time all the tiles you can see on the selected map area. This can be done by a mathematical algorithm which can convert any geo location (described by latitude and longitude coordinates) into a unique tile id. The reverse calculation is also the task of the engine, so when you have a tile id (or several tile ids like in your Land NFT) it can calculate the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of the tile from its id. The on the fly calculation is essential because of performance and storage. You can’t store approximately 5 trillion tiles and their coordinates in a database and queries it every time the map shows up for each user.

When you take a look at the Next Earth map you can see several layers drived by the engine.

• The grid layer just draw a simple line around every tile in the area you currently see

• The land layer (above the grid) draw a polygon around the lands (purchased and owned by someone) and give them a color

• The land art layer (above the land layer) draw the art onto the lands

• The campaign layer (above the land art layer) draw a polygon around the campaign area (which consists of many tile) and gives it a border

All layers use the tiles calculated by the engine and draw somehow something around / inside them and gives a possibility to the user to interact with them (such as clicking on a land and seeing its details). Besides that the mentioned layers are separated from each other so can be switched on/off depending on the use case ( just like Mapbox layers such as satellite view, street view etc).

There is another layer which is a technical layer called ‘selection layer’. This allows the user to select the tiles that are available for selection. When the user selects them he/she can mint the Land NFT from the selection.

With the Layer System Next Earth developed a generic solution to create new layers. As a developer you cancreate your layer on the surface of the Earthswitch off any non relevant other layermint a standard or dynamic NFT with arbitrary attributes and metadata from the selection on your layer (with or without the geo data coded inside the selected tiles) with Next Earth’s smart contract systemconnect your layer with other layers (just like all layer connected to Layer 0 by default)draw anything on your layeradd the possibility to any kind of user interaction on your layer

As a technical summary with the Layer System on Next Earth means anyone can create an own Web3 layer on the surface of the Earth.