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Can blockchain improve weather forecasting? WeatherXM thinks so
Accurate weather forecasts are crucial for sectors such as agriculture and are also important in helping to prevent and mitigate damage resulting from adverse weather events or natural disasters. But getting correct predictions is extremely difficult. That’s why for the past 12 years the founders of WeatherXM have been trying to make weather forecasts more accurate.
In 2012, Manolis Nikiforakis, Stratos Theodorou, and Nikos Tsiligaridis launched an app that allowed community members to provide weather updates to the base. They then worked as consultants for corporate clients, such as Athens Airport, in weather-sensitive industries. Now they are building WeatherXM, a network of community-monitored weather stations that collect and share local weather data through systems built on blockchain.
Nikiforakis, CEO of WeatherXM, told TechCrunch that the startup has already deployed 5,000 of its own weather stations in more than 80 countries. These stations collect local weather information and are monitored by volunteers who are compensated with WeatherXM’s crypto token, $WXM. All data collected is accessible for anyone to use personally for free with paid offerings for businesses wishing to use it commercially.
“We are strong supporters of open source,” Nikiforakis said. “We believe [WeatherXM’s mission] it has no purpose without the collaboration of many different aspects of people and skills. We are making all this data openly available to anyone. You can see in real time what each weather station reports.
The startup just raised a $7.7 million Series A round led by Faction, a blockchain-focused early-stage fund affiliated with Lightspeed, with participation from VCs including Borderless Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Red Beard Ventures, as well as more VCs and other types of investors. The startup will use the capital to expand its team and prepare to start monetizing its commercial users.
Tim Khoury, a partner at Faction, said he was attracted to investing in the company because it offered an interesting use case for a community-driven blockchain project that had both the supply of people willing to join the community and the question of what the company was producing. The TAM potential for more accurate weather data didn’t hurt either.
“The collapse of many deep networks is on the demand side,” Khoury said. “If there is no demand for what is actually generated, or produced, in this case it is not possible to sustain the grid over time.”
As someone with a basement that has flooded multiple times during storms that were not precisely predicted, this deal immediately piqued my interest. But the blockchain and crypto token aspect of WeatherXM’s strategy initially confused me.
Nikiforakis told me that the crypto incentive structure is the only way this local weather network could work. Paying every person to supervise a weather station would make the idea too expensive and complicated to scale to the size the network needs to reach to be effective. He said that through their first app they found that people were willing to provide weather data for free, so WeatherXM’s structure is intended to incentivize users a little more.
“[Using crypto] it also helps coordinate it [weather stations] they are deployed in the areas we care most about, developing and rural nations,” Nikiforakis said. “Crypto rewards work as a coordination tool. In many ways it is a community project, so cryptocurrency serves as a governance tool. People can vote using this token on decisions that affect how the project works.”
While I admit I’m not an optimist when it comes to blockchain or cryptocurrencies, using that framework here makes a lot of sense. It’s also complementary to the startup’s goal of making data open source, which requires blockchain technology to actually be effective.
Earlier this week I was moderating a panel focused on how communities can prepare for climate emergencies and disasters, and one thing that came up on multiple occasions was that data like this needed to be open source so that public bodies and private individuals could more easily work together to plan for climate disasters and better respond to them.
WeatherXM by making all data open source, especially from its stations in underserved or rural areas, could be beneficial to communities that are combating the growing threat and damage of climate events without needing large budgets or resources.
The mission here is easy to carry out, but we’ll see if bringing weather to the blockchain gets enough demand to really make a difference.
“We need to create an ecosystem around our technology and our ideas for the industry to move forward and for meteorology to improve in general,” Nikiforakis said. “We don’t like the old way where things happen in silos and don’t give access to anyone who has credentials or payment. We are going against the grain. We are opening data to everyone.”