GroundTruth
A Waze-like map app that pays contributors for verified real-world map changes.
01 / Problem
Crowdsourced map platforms like Waze rely on unpaid volunteer labor. GroundTruth's premise: actually pay contributors for verified real-world map changes, motivated by giving people a legitimate way to earn money from that effort.
02 / Approach
The project moved through a full brainstorm, architecture pass, and MVP-scoping process before any build — documented as specs in the source repo — landing on a friends-only, points-based pilot with no real money and no KYC, to validate the core report-then-verify loop before adding payouts.
03 / What Was Built
GroundTruth is a Next.js 16 + Supabase + MapLibre GL map application. A user submits a report, n8n auto-assigns a verification task to a random eligible friend, that friend verifies it true or false, and both users earn points. Points logic and verification were moved server-side after a security review caught two separate client-side forgery vulnerabilities. Performance work included eliminating unnecessary full map re-renders on every data refresh and adding missing database indexes.
04 / Outcome
The pilot is live at groundtruth.ludex-gg.com. It has been security-hardened — including a storage-bucket upload vulnerability that was found and fixed via a scoped migration — and is currently tracking report volume and verification rate as evidence for a future funded phase.