Blockchain and crypto are coming to a local weather station near you – or at least that’s what a group of Athens-based engineers are trying to accomplish. WeatherXM is using a combination of blockchain-based data validation with crypto incentives to enable people around the world to capture their local weather data for more accurate forecasts.
Cointelegraph sat down with WeatherXM co-founder, CEO Manolis Nikiforakis and chief technology officer Nikos Tsiligarridis for an interview in Athens, Greece. He talked about how Web3 tools provide the best solution to the lack of quality and quantity of weather data available.
The company is deploying a new infrastructure of community-powered weather stations built with blockchain-based oracle hardware. It creates smart contracts of information gathered from local weather stations, creating decentralized weather data. Smart contracts verify both the location of the station and the irreplaceability of the data collected from the location.
“Then we monetize those services and put the value back into the core people who created the data in the first place, who own the weather station, which we call weather miners,” Nikiforakis says.
The core utility tokens of the network are WXM and Data Credit (DC).
“Using cryptocurrency incentives, we have a transparent and fair mechanism that will ensure that once value is produced and received by third parties, it will be transmitted back to the community.”
According to the co-founders, the project involves both weather enthusiasts and those with more tech-savvy backgrounds.
There are currently more than 700 weather stations around the world, from the United States and Europe east to Vietnam. Nikiforakis says at least 2,000 more will be sent over the next few months so users can start collecting data.
The creators of WeatherXM say that decentralization is inherent in the project. By allowing individuals to deploy their own stations at a given location, it creates a “people-by-people”-type approach to weather data collection rather than a major centralized enterprise.
“The more spread out the decentralized weather community is, the better for general accuracy of weather data collection and providing data at locations with little or no known data.”
Developers incentivize weather miners with rewards based on location and data quality. Rare locations and proper installation of weather stations (ie, away from asphalt, not under an awning) yield higher token rewards.
However, rural stations are even more rare, due to the stations requiring an active connection to the Internet.
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Roughly a third of global economic activity is sensitive to extreme weather, as is international trade and the shipping and agricultural industries. Weather information for the general public can influence the choice of clothing. However for businesses, this has a major impact on their ability to waste or save resources.
“There’s a whole industry that deals with weather data from an insurance point of view,” says Nikiforakis.
“This means that our infrastructure could enable weather insurance smart contracts in the future in ways that traditional weather forecasting or weather networks cannot today.”
These types of blockchain-based solutions will be important in developing regions that rely heavily on weather-sensitive economic activity. For example, in Africa, 44% of the working population had employment related to agriculture in 2020.
The team said WeatherXM has used its collected weather data to serve a wide range of operations such as Athens International Airport and a major regional telecommunications provider.
