Blockchain and crypto find applications in community-driven weather forecasting

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 achieve. WeatherXM uses a combination of blockchain-based data verification with crypto-incentives to get people around the world to capture local weather data for more accurate forecasts.

Cointelegraph sat down with WeatherXM co-founders CEO Manolis Nikiforakis and Chief Technology Officer Nikos Tsiligaridis for an interview in Athens, Greece. They talked about how Web3 tools provide the best solution to the lack of quality and quantity of available weather data.

The company is deploying a new infrastructure of community-driven weather stations built with blockchain-based oracle hardware. It creates smart contracts with information gathered from localized weather stations, from which decentralized weather data is produced. The smart contracts confirm both the location of the station and the non-fungibility of data collected from the location.

“Then we monetize those services and put the value back into the original people who created the data in the first place, which are the weather station owners, who we call weather miners,” says Nikiforakis.

The native utility tokens for the network are WXM and Data Credits (DC).

“Using the crypto-incentives, we have transparent and fair mechanisms that will ensure that when value is produced and obtained by a third party, it will circulate back to society.”

According to the co-founders, the project includes both weather enthusiasts and those with a more tech-savvy background.

Currently, over 700 weather stations are set up around the world from the US and Europe to as far east as Vietnam. Nikiforakis says over the next few months at least another 2,000 will be sent out so users can start collecting data.

The creators of WeatherXM say that decentralization is inherent to the project. By allowing individuals to deploy their own stations in a given location, it creates a “by the people for the people” type of approach to weather data collection, rather than a larger centralized operation.

“The more dispersed the decentralized weather community is, the better it is for the overall accuracy of weather data collection and for providing data on places with little or no known data.”

The developers motivate weather miners through rewards based on location and data quality. Rarer locations and proper installations of weather stations (ie away from tarmac, not under an awning) reap higher token rewards.

Although, due to the stations needing an active connection to the internet, rural stations are even more rare.

Related: How blockchain can open up energy markets: EU DLT expert explains

About a third of global economic activity is highly weather sensitive, such as international trade and shipping and the agricultural industry. For ordinary people, knowing the weather can influence their choice of clothing. Although for companies it has a big impact on the ability to waste or save resources.

“There’s a whole industry dealing with weather data from an insurance point of view,” says Nikiforakis, adding:

“This means our infrastructure can enable smart contracts for weather insurance in the future in ways that traditional weather forecasts or weather networks today cannot.”

These types of blockchain-based solutions will be important in the development of regions that are heavily dependent on weather-sensitive economic activity. For example, in Africa, 44% of the working population in 2020 had agriculture-related work.

WeatherXM has used its collected weather data to serve large-scale operations such as Athens International Airport and a major regional telecom provider, the team said.