# Welcome

**Welcome to Astral!**

Our vision is to build a protocol and community dedicated to creating an ecosystem of location-based Web3 applications and spatial contracts. We believe that the Web3 vision is incomplete without location services, and are working to develop technologies that will make it easy for devs to build user-controlled dApps leveraging location data.

We're taking a modular approach, architecting our tools so each component useful on its own, but all designed to work together.

{% hint style="info" %}
We've been exploring the intersection of spatial data and consensus technologies for the past few years. We're dedicated to building in the open and sharing our findings — so we are leaving everything we've worked on available to read.

**We are embarking on the next phase of development of Astral, which is independent from past work. The docs here are NOT accurate to what we're building now. Instead, they show the meandering path we've taken to this point.**
{% endhint %}

**For an up-to-date summary of what we are working on now, read our litepaper:**

{% content-ref url="/pages/7lHSm6N67AesgpNVyFBZ" %}
[Astral Litepaper](/astral/astral-litepaper.md)
{% endcontent-ref %}


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# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://astral-protocol.gitbook.io/astral/readme.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.