Blockchain and crypto find a use case in community-powered weather forecasts

WeatherXM has deployed over 700 decentralized weather stations around the world to harvest local data, providing station owners with utility tokens back.

Interview

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 uses a combination of blockchain-based data verification with cryptographic incentives to entice people around the world to capture their local weather data for more accurate forecasts.

Cointelegraph caught up with WeatherXM Co-Founders, CEO Manolis Nikiforakis and Chief Technology Officer Nikos Tsiligaridis for an interview in Athens, Greece. They explained how Web3 tools offer the best solution to the lack of quality and quantity of weather data available.

WeatherXM co-founders from left to right: CEOManolis Nikiforakis, CTO Nikos Tsiligaridis, Head of Engineering Stratos Theodorou

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

"Then we monetize those services and return the value to the original people who created the data in the first place, namely the owners of weather stations, who we call weather miners," says Nikiforakis.

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Network native utility tokens are WXM and Data Credits (DC).

"By using cryptographic incentives, we have transparent and fair mechanisms that will ensure that once value is produced and obtained by a third party, it will recirculate back into the community."

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

Currently, more than 700 weather stations are installed...