WeatherXM: Revolutionizing weather data with Web3 and IoT

In the latest episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph, join host Savannah Fortis and WeatherXM CEO Manolis Nikiforakis for a dive into the future of weather forecasting. Imagine a world where anyone from farmers to scientists can access and contribute to the most accurate and hyperlocal weather data. Nikiforakis shares how WeatherXM is transforming weather data collection using cutting-edge Web3 decentralized technology and the Internet of Things.

Discover how WeatherXM’s innovative approach is changing the landscape of weather data through community-driven, decentralized networks.

Learn about the unique blend of hardware and software that powers WeatherXM and how its network of weather stations provides critical data globally.

Host’s Twitter: @savannah_fortis
Guest’s Twitter: @WeatherXM, @nikil511

Cointelegraph’s Twitter: @Cointelegraph
Cointelegraph’s website: cointelegraph.com

Timestamps:
(00:08) - Introduction to the episode

(01:10) - Unusual weather conditions in Greece

(04:15) -  Weather stations deployed in the greater Attica region and their impact on forecast accuracy

(05:50) - WeatherXM’s evolution from an IoT company to a decentralized weather station network

(13:24) - Technological infrastructure of WeatherXM

(16:41) - The advantages of a decentralized weather station network compared to traditional methods

(23:27) - Real-world use cases of weather stations

(35:48) - Novel approaches to provide hardware access to users

(37:58) - The role of crypto in filling gaps in traditional finance

(42:15) - Challenges with onboarding users to the Web3

(48:34) - Execution of weather mining pool project

(50:01) - Community sharing photos of weather station deployments

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast are its participants’ alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph. This podcast (and any related content) is for entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, nor should it be taken as such. Everyone must do their own research and make their own decisions. The podcast’s participants may or may not own any of the assets mentioned.

Transcript

[00:00:08] Savannah Fortis: Imagine a world where anyone from a farmer in a remote village to a scientist in a bustling city can contribute to and benefit from the most accurate and hyperlocal weather data available. Today, we’re diving into how a groundbreaking company is making this a reality. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Decentralize with Cointelegraph podcast. I’m your host, Savannah Fortis, and today we’re going to be speaking with Manolis Nikiforakis, CEO of WeatherXM, to explore how they’re revolutionizing weather forecasting by using cutting-edge Web3, decentralized technology and the power of community. By the end of the episode, you’ll understand how a simple weather station in your own backyard can potentially change the world or at least add to it, so stay tuned to find out. Manolis, thank you so much for joining us today on this episode of Decentralized. I’m excited to pick your brain and share with our listeners a really exciting and innovative blockchain use case.

[00:01:08] Manolis Nikiforakis: No, thank you for having me here.

[00:01:10] Savannah Fortis: We are here together in beautiful Athens, Greece, which has actually not been so beautiful these days. Very strange weather, lots of gray skies, but not actually cloudy. What’s up with that?

[00:01:23] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah, actually, the last couple of days, we have some African dust clouds, and that is messing up with the weather and with the visibility and the looks of Greece and Athens in particular. And it’s funny, there’s a lot of discussions in our Slack channel with meteorologists, you know, asking each other like, can we forecast this? Can we find more data on the dust and add this data to our data and, model it and so on? But it’s something that happens frequently, I would say, during the summer in the last couple of years, but I’m not aware of any major negative effects. I guess people who have sensitivity breathing might be affected by this. I don’t know any other problems with that.

[00:02:12] Savannah Fortis: The cars, the balconies. You know, all my plants have a fine layer of dust now, or some people say it affects their mood. I’ve heard a lot of people these days when the dust has been around saying it affects their mood. But yeah, and actually, like, two weeks ago, we had a lot of dust where the whole sky was tainted orange and red.

[00:02:34] Manolis Nikiforakis: That was new, that I’ve never seen that before.

[00:02:36] Savannah Fortis: That was wild, that made headlines all around the world. I had people back in the U.S. asking me to send them pictures and asking me if this was true or if this was, you know.

[00:02:46] Manolis Nikiforakis: There was a lot of photos circulating the internet, and people were writing no filters. And this is exactly how it looked. And that’s true. I mean, I was looking at the sky, and it was like completely red. And the typical joke at the time was like, Dune. So yeah, that was that was the first. I’ve never seen that to that extent. Yeah.

[00:03:06] Savannah Fortis: Some people were saying that we put the Mexico filter on it. Was it just Athens, or was it all over Greece?

[00:03:13] Manolis Nikiforakis: I think it was a big chunk of Greece.

[00:03:15] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, I thought so too.

[00:03:17] Manolis Nikiforakis: But it was, maybe it was made more clear in Athens because of the way that the landscape is here, and Athens is in a good spot in terms of material. Logically speaking, it’s a basin. So it’s relatively easy to forecast the weather here.

[00:03:33] Savannah Fortis: I heard this is specifically the case even in some northern suburbs of Athens, like Iraklio. Yeah. Is that true also in these neighborhoods?

[00:03:42] Manolis Nikiforakis: So if you’re talking about hyperlocal forecasting like a very local phenomenon, then that’s a weakness of the meteorological industry in general. But then if you have the way that Athens is structured because you have mountains all around it and it’s a flat, relatively area, then the weather conditions, in general, are relatively similar. If you go to the islands outside of Athens or you go at the mountains, then the whole thing changes.

[00:04:11] Savannah Fortis: Different story. Yeah, yeah, So, speaking of WeatherXM, though, how many weather stations do you guys actually have deployed in the greater Attica region at the moment?

[00:04:20] Manolis Nikiforakis: So that’s a good question. I don’t know, to be honest. We’re not paying that much attention to where we live actually because we are like obsessed with making this work on a global scale. And we’re actually actively pursuing some challenging areas and nations outside of Greece and outside of Europe. So we’re looking into Latin America and Africa and those sort of places. So I think like just by looking at the map, our explorer, which has all the stations in real-time and all the weather data in real-time, I think roughly it looks like we have something like 20 or more active cells and, usually in Athens, obviously, I mean, the project is known here in Greece, so we have more than a couple of weather stations in every cell. So I would say roughly we have, like, I don’t know, 50 weather station here.

[00:05:14] Savannah Fortis: So relatively concentrated. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does that mean you can get pretty accurate weather data on Athens?

[00:05:21] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah. So, I don’t have any statistics at the top of my head right now. But yeah, the way this works, and you didn’t ask, but so yeah. So, we’re producing our own forecast by taking advantage of the historical data that we have from our stations. And obviously the more data we have, the better forecasts we can do, so in our ecosystem and in the services that we have, people can enjoy a better forecast basically because of the fact that we have more stations here.

[00:05:49] Savannah Fortis: Yeah. And I met you guys two years ago here because you’re based in Athens because I’m based in Athens. And I was looking up local Web3 projects here, and I wanted to see if there was anything interesting to report on locally. And I found you guys, and I really liked the idea that you were focusing on a community-driven project. And I thought the use case was pretty novel, decentralized weather data, but also very helpful and useful, you know if it works, and if it’s something you guys are able to run with. And two years ago at the time, you know, I’ve been following you guys for a little while now, and I’ve watched you grow substantially from the time that we met two years ago, you know, even upgraded offices, which were in right now, which is really exciting. And, you know, I think we’re also at a really exciting moment, perhaps, maybe a turning point for WeatherXM, which we’ll get into a little bit later on in the episode, and I’m excited to hear it. So it’s great to catch you in this moment, but I know you guys pretty well at this point. You know you guys fairly well at this point, but our listeners might not be so familiar with what you guys do. So, can you just start by giving us an explanation of what WeatherXM actually is and how it works at a pretty base level?

[00:06:59] Manolis Nikiforakis: So it’s a community-powered weather station network, with the goal to create new weather data in areas that don’t have much weather data and reward the community for doing so with our own crypto token in exchange for the weather data that they produce, and then take advantage of this weather data to produce more accurate weather forecasts, weather services in general, and deliver those services to companies — enterprises that depend on the weather so need weather services, but at the same time, serve individuals, the community itself, and the public domain because as a true Web3 project, we have a lot of our technology open source, and all of our data are open as well.

[00:07:46] Savannah Fortis: And what came first in the scenario, like the chicken or the egg? What inspired this cross-pollination of Web3 and weather from your experience? I mean, are you guys weather guys first? Are you guys technologists first? How did that come about?

[00:08:02] Manolis Nikiforakis: The first answer that came to my mind is the project was born out of pain and tears and blood because we’ve been in this space for more than 10 years. And to explain a little bit to unpack here. So when you met us two years ago, the team was less than 10 people, and it was basically when the project had just pivoted toward crypto. So until that point, we were just an ordinary, I might say, IoT company, Internet of Things company, a system integrator that was trying to do something novel, that was trying to create new services, new hardware, new technology for a long period of time. So, our company goes back to 2015, and actually, the ideas and the projects they started even before that. Yeah, so crypto came last. So we think, we feel that we are engineers first and then crypto enthusiasts second. And yeah, so we started with some naive ideas to try to do something in the weather analytics space by creating some weather services, basically, that we felt at the time that were the kind of weather services that we ourselves would use. And by we, I mean the core team, the founders that go back more than 10 years in time. So we started with a mobile app that was aggregating third-party forecasts and was using weather data coming from already deployed weather stations, typically from the governments. So that’s the ground truth that we all use in the industry. So, we were aggregating multiple forecasts from multiple models that usually contradict each other. So they give you a completely different opinion of what’s going to happen in the future.

And we use the real-time data or the historical data from the ground stations to evaluate which forecasts are accurate in the locations that we were interested. So that’s how it all started. So, in a way, it started with software in an amateur style that transformed eventually into hardware, industrial IoT hardware for large enterprises, so we had a lot of companies like we had as a customer the Athens Airport, motorways, the largest motorway here in Greece, wind farms, energy utilities, the national transmission operator for electricity, those sort of companies we were serving with weather analytics and with some industrial hardware because it was very often that we needed weather data that didn’t exist at that location. And after a couple of years in that space and that’s before 2020. So, the company started in 2015, so we were in that space for a few years, and we thought that we can do a better job when it comes to hardware — than the hardware that was available in the market. So we went to China, Shenzhen, we started working on our own weather station. That’s when we added hardware in the mix, and when we reached the maturity that we were almost ready to take it to mass production, we were trying to find differentiation points for our hardware, like, because as you can imagine, being romantic and naive and with not a lot of experience, we started designing a weather station that could do amazing things and could innovate in a number of different directions, but eventually reality hit us and the limited resources as well.

So, we ended up doing a similar weather station to what was out there already. That was the product that we had in 2018, 2019. So we had our own weather station, which is great and super cool, and we have the ability to steer that product to any direction that we wanted. But it wasn’t like the most innovative weather station ever built in the history of humankind. It had a few novelties; it could speak a couple of different protocols. It was doing multiple wireless communication protocols at the same time. So LoRaWAN, WiFi, 4G, GPS and all this stuff. So yeah, long story short, we added crypto as an experiment because as we were trying to find product market fit and we were exploring new markets, we realized that maybe there’s an opportunity if we combine weather data with smart contracts and utilize weather data on-chain to serve use cases that require a very trustworthy source of weather data, which didn’t exist at the time and still, in many ways, still doesn’t exist today. And also, we had this, you know, vision or romantic idea that wouldn’t it be awesome if we could have thousands or hundreds of thousands of weather stations deployed all around the world. So, ourselves, but everyone in the industry, can benefit from additional weather data and do a better job at predicting the weather. And in many ways, what we do today is addressing all of this at the same time. So, to summarize, in 2019, we were inspired by Helium and Filecoin, and we basically did a similar concept on the weather industry with our own hardware.

[00:13:23] Savannah Fortis: Okay. So that’s kind of like my next question, though, under the hood of WeatherXM, once you got into the Web3 space and you started utilizing these technologies, what did you base yourselves off of? Web3 speaking. Protocol speaking.

[00:13:38] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah. So, as I mentioned, because we were inspired by those projects and, of course, Ethereum, Bitcoin preceding those, we had this vision of creating a superstructure like some kind of network that is unstoppable, and it can grow on its own, and it’s sustainable. And I think that’s the key here like if you can create something that adds value to the world and it’s sustainable at the same time, that’s a very good characteristic for a project. Yeah. So, the first experiment we did was to connect our weather station to IPFS, which is a decentralized data storage infrastructure that is at the core of Filecoin. So yeah, we did the world’s first IPFS-aware weather station. And in many ways, we had to create some new stuff there because there were no micro-controller IPFS clients at the time. So that’s a new type of library, let’s say, or SDK for IPFS. So we had our weather station connecting directly to IPFS, and then we were using some Oracle protocols, like, in specific, Chainlink, to connect to an Ethereum smart contract. And we were experimenting with the idea of a parametric weather insurance contract on-chain that is triggered by hardware. But a lot of things have. Changed since. So, today we use, we’re still in the Ethereum ecosystem, but most of our work takes place in Arbitrum, and that’s where the community rewards exist.

And we’re also using helium as a wireless protocol to deploy weather stations in areas that don’t have cellular coverage or WiFi, but we have also WiFi and 4G stations. We still use IPFS indirectly because we actually use Filecoin today. Through a collaboration with another project called Tableland Basin, we archive our data to Filecoin, so I think that’s super important to use all these technologies that I mentioned because that’s how we build a decentralized network that is as close as possible to this superstructure vision that we started with. It’s not easy for a deep-end project to have this characteristic because there are always some centralized elements there when it comes to hardware manufacturing, who controls the hardware certification, who onboards hardware on the network? Also, the reward mechanism in our case is super complex to turn into a protocol because we do a lot of weather algorithms on the data in order to identify which weather stations are doing a good job and which ones have problematic sensors or problematic deployments. So, essentially, the reward mechanism that we have today is quite centralized. We control who gets what, but we do it in full transparency with open-source software, even though the infrastructure is quite centralized. And our goal is to progressively decentralize all this and make it as much of a protocol as possible.

[00:16:40] Savannah Fortis: And you mentioned more toward the beginning that the pivot into the Web3 space was something that kind of came out of, not necessarily a dead end, but maybe a rebirth of the initial idea that you had. And I’m curious now that you’ve been in this space, and it’s starting to take off, especially since the seed of the idea was so many years ago. You guys are at a way different point, and you’re seeing your community grow. So I’m curious now that you’ve been in this space now that you’re working toward, as you said, becoming more decentralized, what are the key advantages of having a network of decentralized weather stations compared to, you know, traditional methods?

[00:17:20] Manolis Nikiforakis: So, the traditional, I think the first traditional approach that we need to compare ourselves with is what the governments are doing. So traditionally, the industry has evolved, I think, through public spending, governments paying for the infrastructure. And governments being governments, they overspend and produced little effect in many ways. I mean, it’s, I guess it has to start that way, but eventually, as industries mature, the private sector comes in, and new approaches are created, and sometimes these approaches might be even more efficient and more effective than how the thing started. So I think we are at that cross point in time today. We obviously have private companies for quite some time now, doing weather forecasting and producing better forecasts, more accurate forecasts than what the government is doing. However, the governmental infrastructure remains a huge part of the industry. So, to give you some examples, NOAA, the U.S. meteorological organization, is operating on a budget of roughly $7 billion per year. And just for the weather stations to maintain and expand the network of weather stations and to produce the weather forecasts that they do, their budget is $1.3 billion. And what they do is actually is really hard or impossible for other companies to do. So, it makes sense that their budget is huge. But still, if you look at the numbers, like if you look at how many weather stations they operate, it is roughly 14,000 stations, and it doesn’t sound like a huge number if you compare it to the budget.

At the same time, you know, the forecasts that they produce on a daily basis every few hours, they run a huge simulation of Earth’s atmosphere that basically is more or less what most of the world is using. Most of the forecasts are based on the output of that work, and we have similar agencies. So we have another same agency in Europe that is doing more or less the same, probably with a smaller budget. And then every country has its own organization, and depending on how wealthy the country is, you know, the budget is comparable. But if you compare our project to that environment, let’s say that status, we have a dramatic reduction in cost of deploying weather infrastructure. By dramatic, I mean like by two or three factors. So, the average weather station costs for NOAA, according to their document, is $60,000, and if its in a rural area, it’s $120,000, and in our case, we’re using low-cost hardware, which obviously has some weaknesses if you compare it to the super industrial-grade hardware that NOAA is using, but it is more or less measuring the same stuff. So our hardware costs in the range of $400, and then you have an individual member of the community that is deploying the hardware for free.

So, basically, that’s the investment there, like for having a weather station in a new location. So, huge cost difference. And that’s just by comparing the cost. There’s a lot of other aspects there, like the maintenance cost is huge because the government has to send individuals to maintain the hardware and perform a number of tests. And maybe, in some cases, they need to rent the space that they’re deploying the equipment. Obviously they would have a tendency to find land that they own already. But in theory, where you deploy the station remains another obstacle when you’re building a network. So, in our case, that is also magically solved by the community because they usually deploy the stations in their land, in their houses or fields or wherever they want the weather forecasts to appear. And then, I mean, there’s more, our systems are more flexible, are designed in such a way that they can take advantage of these new weather data being produced immediately for that location is hard for us to create a global forecast and do what NOAA is doing, so we would never dare to compete with them. But we can build on top of their work, and we can further improve the forecast of the locations that we have weather stations. We can deploy weather stations in areas that would be even more expensive for Noah to deploy the stations because we’re using alternative wireless technologies like Helium, which is a LoRaWAN long-range wireless technology that can fill some gaps where other wireless networks don’t exist.

And I think the most important aspect of a deep-end project or a crypto project around hardware is the coordination power that the crypto incentive provides to the project. So we have an amazing community of 10,000 people in our Discord, and I would assume roughly 5,000 or a little bit less owning a weather station. And we have a direct channel of communication with them, which is the mobile app that they use to see the weather and to see the historical data that their hardware produces, to see the real-time data that the hardware produces. And through that mobile app, we can inform them when there’s problems with their deployment, whether it’s problems with the quality of data they produce, and they see that immediately because their rewards are dropped. And therefore, we can coordinate this huge number of people to do as good as possible of a job in maintaining and expanding this network, which is inconceivable, I would assume, for a government to do with its citizens, or with scientists or with employees, it would be extremely difficult and very, very expensive.

[00:23:26] Savannah Fortis: So I think some of the best ways of understanding these types of applications are also to have some examples of real-world use cases. And you did go into some differentiation between, you know, government models, but those are centralized methods. So, you know, I would love to hear some use cases and applications of these weather stations, and I’m also interested in two perspectives here: On the one hand, maybe you can touch on the perspective of the deployer and how this can be active in their daily life, you know, whether it’s through them enjoying the accurate weather data themselves for wherever they are, or perhaps it’s through the rewards that they earned through your ecosystem. And the second perspective is also on the other end. So, those who are tapping into this weather data outside of the deployers themselves, for example, if you can expand on that?

[00:24:19] Manolis Nikiforakis: So from an individual perspective, and we call that. So essentially, what we’re building is a marketplace. So we have a supply and demand side, so we think the community is mainly the supply. They are acting as consumers in many cases. So, from that end, the idea is that somebody purchases a weather station or, in some cases, they receive it for free. And we can unpack that more later on. So, somehow, a weather station lands in their hands. And it’s a small compact device. It’s very easy to deploy without any particular knowledge. You just need to set up. Somewhere and mount the weather station there, and its energy and communication autonomous. So no cables and nothing too.

[00:25:05] Savannah Fortis: Roughly how big is it?

[00:25:06] Manolis Nikiforakis: Well, like a laptop or two laptops.

[00:25:10] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, even a shoebox, maybe.

[00:25:15] Manolis Nikiforakis: Likely. Yeah, yeah, very big-size foot. Yeah. Yeah, it would fit there. I mean, when we’re traveling, we actually have a couple of weather stations in our suitcases when we’re going to events and stuff like that.

[00:25:30] Savannah Fortis: Airport security is like...um?

[00:25:34] Manolis Nikiforakis: Very curious, but yeah, they eventually figure out that there is nothing. It doesn’t look like a bomb. Yeah. There’s nothing.

[00:25:39] Savannah Fortis: Nothing menacing. Yeah.

[00:25:41] Manolis Nikiforakis: So the individual deploys our weather station. It has to do a good job in the deployment, and we have a lot of instructions. And we’re very picky about this. And it has an effect on the rewards because we have created a number of mechanisms to detect to guess if the deployment was done properly or not. But once the station is deployed, what happens is it sends data in real time, like every couple of seconds or every couple of minutes, depending on the technology and the specific model of hardware. So, we use this data to create a better forecast by following this approach of ranking third-party forecasts and then building on top of the best ones. And we do a collection of the best bits and pieces. We call that mosaic. And then we use machine learning to improve it even further. But this doesn’t have to worry the end-user. The end-user just gets a better forecast. Okay, that is tuned for the exact location that they deploy the weather station.

[00:26:40] Savannah Fortis: And they check this in the app?

[00:26:42] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah, and they can see that in the app. Anyone can see this forecast in our explorer, in our website. You don’t have to be an owner of a weather station to benefit from the improved forecast. But eventually, this will kind of change. So, the app will evolve into a freemium. It will have some premium features that will have to be paid. In the WXM token, the native token of our economic model. And so, it will differentiate slightly the owners of weather stations from the tourists that they happen to have a weather station nearby, but both of them can benefit from the improved forecast. And the data we create are made available for free in the raw form. And we’re trying to monetize on added value services built on top of this data, or by charging companies who are commercializing on this data so the individuals can do whatever they want with the data, basically, as long as they are not selling services without paying for a license for that. But anyway, so going back to your question, so what happens is somebody deploys a weather station, has a mobile app, which looks similar to Apple and Google weather apps that already exist in the app stores, but it’s specifically tuned for their location. It shows their own data. It doesn’t show a weather station that is 50, 100km away. The nearest airport, which is usually the case with most weather apps because there’s just not enough weather stations out there. Okay, so they have that advantage, and they have the advantage of the improved forecast. And, of course, at the same time, they get the crypto rewards for their service into the project, into the network because they went through this trouble of setting up the station, and they’re making sure that the station continues to operate.

[00:28:34] Savannah Fortis: Exactly. And I was going to say, and also the fulfillment of knowing that they’re adding to a larger weather network.

[00:28:41] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah, and that was so weather enthusiast network’s always existed, I would guess. And so we didn’t invent them. So, there was always people who cared about the weather, and they were willing to put effort and money into buying equipment and deploying it and sharing that information with the rest of the world. What we are doing is we’re trying to organize that community slightly better to achieve in a better way the goals of creating more accurate forecast, more accurate services and so on.

[00:29:15] Savannah Fortis: And I saw that, you know, one particular use case that you guys have been trying to gain momentum with is in developing nations. Yeah. And you know, this is something that’s been even Cointelegraph has worked with you guys on kind of hashing that out in some articles that we’ve worked together on. I’ve also reported on this from a deep-end perspective in general, reaching developing nations. So, what’s the significance of working in these areas in particular? How is it making a difference in these regions for users on the ground, but also maybe even the quality of data that’s collected on those particular areas? Because, you know, we’re not just talking about countries as a whole, but even specific regions within those places that are usually overlooked, for example.

[00:29:58] Manolis Nikiforakis: So, I think there’s two reasons why we want to focus there. And the first reason is actually what you asked me before, and I forgot to answer, which has to do with from a demand perspective, like, who cares about this weather data other than the individual who might be a weather enthusiast or a weather geek? So, most of the worldwide economy is weather-sensitive, so a lot of industries depend on weather conditions in those industries. They need the most accurate forecast and the most accurate data they can get their hands on. And they might have settled with what is already out there. But in some spaces, there’s a huge appetite for more. And for example, in the energy industry, having more accurate forecast gives a huge advantage to the energy-related company because they can optimize their strategy if they’re trading, for example, electricity, if they are producing electricity or buying or selling or whatever, they have an advantage into knowing how much electricity is going to be used in the future, and they can optimize their strategy for that. Or in the agriculture industry, if you know how the weather is going to evolve in the next couple of days, you can optimize your daily operations and not waste resources like fertilizer or spray at the crop before the rain comes, which is kind of pointless or the other way around, like collect the crops when they’re wet. Or, I think almost every task in an open-air field is somehow related with weather conditions, and could change if the weather conditions change in agriculture. So these are the typical consumers, let’s say, or the largest industries that consume weather data. I mean, there’s logistics, airports, there’s a lot of, as I said, most of the economy is weather sensitive. But let’s stick to those examples for a minute.

So, what we observed from past experience is that companies in those space, it’s not easy for an energy utility to roll out their own private network of weather stations. It happens in some cases, the ones that have infrastructure already, for example, the ones who are in charge of laying out cables or energy towers, they often deploy weather stations there, too. And actually, we have a customer that is piloting a project with, I think, roughly 10 of our weather stations, putting one in every energy transmission tower. So those companies, most of those companies, they cannot afford to deploy their own network of weather data, weather infrastructure, yet they do need a lot of weather data. Yeah. And those are the kind of customers that we want to sell our data that we think that are the ideal customers to find product market fit on the demand side in our project. But, in developing nations in Latin America, Africa, or even Greece, there are a lot of obstacles to overcome in order to bridge the gap between supply and demand. And the number one obstacle is that there is no supply, basically. And there is. I’m not talking about our project; I’m talking in general. There’s a lot of missing weather infrastructure. Obviously, if the government of a nation is not in a strong economic position, they are not going to invest a lot in weather infrastructure. So if you look at what’s happening in Africa, there’s like a huge gap basically in weather data coming from ground stations because there are not enough there. So, at the same time, we most of the team comes from Greece, were Greeks, and we have been involved, our families have been involved with agriculture in some kind of shape or form.

[00:33:49] Savannah Fortis: So, you know this on a small scale.

[00:33:51] Manolis Nikiforakis: Exactly. So, we can relate to a small farmer. We understand the struggles they are in, and we can tell the things that they would want to have basically in their work. So we tried in the recent years, and in the past, we tried to sell weather stations and weather services to Greek farmers, actually. And that didn’t go very well. So the buying power of a farmer is not very big, especially if it’s a small farm or a smallholder farmer. And for a product like a weather station, everybody needs the weather data and the weather forecast. But it’s not easy for them to do the investment to deploy the hardware and to pay for weather services. So the result is that most of the farmers worldwide, the smallholder farmers, they couldn’t afford the weather station, not our weather station or someone else’s weather station, no matter how cheap it is. Because at the end of the day, that company that would sell that product will have to monetize somehow. It cannot give the hardware for free unless we create new business models, new approaches, new economic systems, that somehow the hardware cost is subsidized and therefore, the farmer receives the hardware for free. And this is what we’re trying to do, basically. And this is the solution that we came up with that after speaking with individuals; we realized that the only way for this to happen is if we have someone else paying for the hardware, basically, and they deploy it for free, and they benefit from the weather forecast themselves. But at the same time, we get to monetize the weather data they produce with other customers, with the energy companies that I mentioned, or other agritech companies that could utilize this data or even try to use this data in the weather parametric insurance industry, that has a lot of trouble accessing those markets.

[00:35:48] Savannah Fortis: And this is a newer initiative within WeatherXM, which is to kind of pool together as a community in order to get this hardware into the hands of people who may not have access to it otherwise.

[00:36:00] Manolis Nikiforakis: So it’s new in execution, but it’s old as an idea.

[00:36:05] Savannah Fortis: Which means that there’s growth within you guys.

[00:36:09] Manolis Nikiforakis: We were trying to find a way to make this work for quite some time now. So it has been in our plans for many years now. Well, at least it has been since we pivoted to crypto idea back in 2020 when we started exploring the space. So we thought, yeah, we wouldn’t be nice if we decoupled the ownership of the weather station from the operations. So somebody is paying for the hardware, and that person will be credited in the project for their involvement in their investment and essentially in the equipment. So, they do get crypto rewards from the project, and they can use those tokens to participate in the governance of the project or to buy weather services. But the important thing is that they don’t receive the hardware themselves. They don’t have to deploy the hardware because they are coming from a place that already has a possibly, already has a lot of weather data, or they just don’t want to bother, or they don’t have a suitable environment to deploy the hardware. So what happens is they pay for the cost of the hardware. And then we as a project, well, actually, the association, the not-for-profit part of our project, has organized a network of partners in countries that we think there is a point deploying more weather stations. So, we started the network in Mexico. Actually, one of our first partners was a project called um Ethic Hub, which is another crypto project, by the way, and they’re doing micro-loans for farmers. Okay. And the loans are powered by the crypto community again. And I think they’re doing an amazing job. They’re way better than the banking system, the traditional finance.

[00:37:57] Savannah Fortis: You’ve seen that a lot in developing countries. I mean, whether it be with Bitcoin or crypto as a whole, this has been proven to be a great workaround for a lot of people there who are either unbanked or just don’t have great access to the banks.

[00:38:12] Manolis Nikiforakis: I think that’s the first use case that we see most of the time of crypto in the real world is replacing or filling the gap of the traditional financial system in places that basically doesn’t exist, or it works really bad. I mean, in the Mexico use cases, banks exist there, but they due to inflation, the interest rates that they give to the loans are ridiculous. They’re like more than 100%. And so, ethical or other projects similar to that they’re using a global financial infrastructure, which is crypto. They have the ability to provide the reasonable interest rates, I think, in the range of 10% to those people there, and they’re doing an amazing job. I think they have more than 600 farms that they have participated in this loan, and they.

[00:39:01] Savannah Fortis: And they are working just in Mexico?

[00:39:03] Manolis Nikiforakis: They’re focused in Latin America as a whole and around Mexico area. Yeah, the border of Mexico. So this is one of our partners. So we send them a few weather stations there for free. We did a small pilot there to figure out the challenges because, obviously, there are many. And since then, we have created a network of partners in other areas as well. We’re quite active in Africa, too. And um, and at the same time we have set up, you could see this as a crowdfunding campaign in a centralized exchange, or a more crypto way to see this is as a weather mining tool. So it’s like instead of staking a token and getting yields back, what we have created is a mechanism that you pay for hardware, and you get the yield that you get is the crypto rewards are generated by the hardware, and you paid for that was deployed somewhere and has generated data. So the result is so it has a lot of moving parts, and we don’t know if it’s going to scale, but we hope that this model will prove itself. So you have a lot of stakeholders. You have a centralized exchange. You have the users of the centralized exchange that are paying for the hardware, the partners with boots on the field, and the end-users who are deploying the weather stations, and all of them share the crypto rewards from the data that are generated from the hardware.

[00:40:36] Savannah Fortis: From the time that we met till now, as far as I’ve seen, and what I’ve read is that you guys have around 5,000 claimed weather stations, with majority of those actually being active for the most part, around 4,500.

[00:40:50] Manolis Nikiforakis: So yeah, so in our explorer base, the statistics of that might be a little bit confusing, we need to improve there. But so, we have manufactured roughly 8,000, almost 8,000 weather stations. And so those are the stations that are available out there to be connected to the network. We have sold almost all of them. So, we still have a few hundred left in stock, but we’re going to run out of stock soon because of the announcements that are coming in the next couple of days.

[00:41:24] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, that’s next on the agenda to talk about actually.

[00:41:27] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah. But we’re producing more. We are collaborating with more factories in China. And we’re right now, we have two different products, three actually three products in production. So we’re going to fill the stock in a month or so. Okay. Um, so yeah, so we have sold more than 7,000 stations and more than 5,000, I think 5,500 have been connected to the network. So, people receive the hardware, and they activate it. Yeah, they deployed it, which is obviously that’s the obstacle there that you have to put some time to deploy the hardware properly. And so, more than 5,000 have been deployed and connected to the network, and they send real-time data. Then you can see in the explorer, and they get the benefit of the forecast and so on.

[00:42:15] Savannah Fortis: And I mean, this obviously is a signal of growth to you guys as a project and as the WeatherXM idea, actually. But are there any challenges in general with onboarding people to this idea that you’ve, and how have you guys been working with that?

[00:42:30] Manolis Nikiforakis: So yeah, obviously, there’s a lot of ugly parts to this. I mean, the user experience in crypto is still lacking behind the Web2 world. So, for example, in our case, we decided to steer. We’re not helping the user to create a wallet, a crypto wallet within the weather app. So, we are assuming that the user already has one. Or if they don’t, you know, we’re helping them with instructions, but essentially it’s their problem. And that’s not very nice for me.

[00:43:01] Savannah Fortis: That’s difficult. Yeah. For new users.

[00:43:03] Manolis Nikiforakis: For somebody that has zero experience in crypto, that’s not a very smooth onboarding. And I hope we will improve that in the future. There’s a number of reasons why we did it that way. But yeah, I hope it will improve. And that’s the first, let’s say, challenge from a user perspective there. There’s still, you know, scams happening in the crypto world and phishing attacks. And so if people don’t have a lot of experience, they might find themselves in a situation where they’re lost words because of the mistake that they did. Yeah, we have a lot of impersonators in the project already. I mean, we have in our Discord, there’s been every now and then there are people pretending to be somebody from the team asking for crypto or asking people to do something in order to get crypto. Obviously, the team would never do that, and some people fall for this.

[00:43:59] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, that is the hard part about that. I think a lot of Web3 projects that are this bridge that have one foot in kind of the physical world, as you guys do, you know, dealing with weather data, dealing with something that, in a sense, is kind of outside of Web3 as like purest essence, you know, collecting weather data that on its own. And that also draws in, as you mentioned before, weather enthusiasts, people who like this premise of the idea, people who want to contribute to that type of larger network. And then when you add the Web3 element to it, you do get all of these new things that we face as an industry as a whole that some projects face who are just completely digital, completely Web3, don’t have this physical component, and new users who are not used to this, who are totally working in the Web2 world, don’t even maybe even know what Web3 is as an idea. This is overwhelming, and we do hear that a lot, but it does seem that you guys are slowly gaining momentum. And as we kind of round out this, you guys have been taking that momentum, and you have a lot of new things coming up. A couple launches. I know we’ve been talking about the WeatherXM token, which is another Web3 component that’s coming into WeatherXM. That’s exciting, but also probably really new to some users. And also the launch of your mainnet, which is exciting. So, I want to give you some time to expand on those things as well, and how this is shaping your community, how you’re dealing with this, what this looks like for you guys.

[00:45:31] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah, sure. So when we met a few years ago, it was, I think just before or after our first funding round. So, when we pivoted the company back in 2019, essentially, we started again from scratch. And so we raised a $5 million round seed round in 2022. Chris Prynoski was leading that round together with Protocol Labs. Consensus. Borderless capital, minor planet, lots of great names in our cap table from that round. And we just closed another funding round now, and we have Lightspeed faction leading this round, most of the previous investors following as well, adding a few new investors. So, it’s from a funding perspective, we are in a good place to be. So, we have kind of created the safety that the team requires here to scale the project and to, you know, build in all these parallel directions that the deep-end project has to move, like hardware, software, analytics, crypto, support — there’s a lot of things that we have to do in order for the project to evolve. And we joke internally many times that we’re multiple companies trapped in one. So yeah, we just closed a second funding round, and this enables us to go to mainnet. So we have been delaying making it for a long period of time now.

So when we started the project, we made it clear that all the rewards will take place in testnet and being old school engineers and not very crypto vision, we decided that we will remain in this testnet beta phase until we have created something to write home about, like a substantial size network, like the 5,000 stations that we have today. So, at the same time, we want to make sure that our infrastructure is ready to receive the growth that typically comes when a project goes to mainnet. So, we reached this milestone a couple of months ago. We had some delays closing the funding round. We’re there now, so we are launching our token at the end of this month, on May 30, in centralized exchanges and decentralized at the same time. So we’re going to be at Gate.io and MEXC, Bitmart, Uniswap, SwissBorg. And we are trying some novel stuff there. We are interacting with the Solana ecosystem as well by bridging some tokens there. And we have a lot of great things that we have in the pipeline to do with SwissBorg two and, with Arbitrum ecosystem and with Ethereum. I mean, there’s lots of things happening that I cannot describe right now, but…

[00:48:27] Savannah Fortis: Gives us reason to keep an eye on you guys.

[00:48:28] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah, sure. But yeah, what’s certain is that our token is going to be live at the end of the month.

[00:48:34] Savannah Fortis: Exciting. And that means that there’s a lot coming up in your guys’ future. But if you could maybe give us one or two things that, in the near term future, what you guys are like, some WeatherXM goals, for example.

[00:48:49] Manolis Nikiforakis: So, yeah, I think one of the important goals that we have right now is to put into execution this weather mining pool that I described before, which is a project that we have been working for quite some time now, and that will happen in the environment of a centralized exchange. We try to do it in a decentralized, completely decentralized manner, but we realize that it’s not possible yet. So, the first pilot attempt will happen in a centralized environment in an exchange. And, um, yes, that’s going to happen. That’s going to go live in June, probably, and it will execute in the coming months. And that involves expanding the network in countries that don’t have a lot of weather infrastructure and taking advantage of data that appear there for the first time.

[00:49:43] Savannah Fortis: Exciting.

[00:49:44] Manolis Nikiforakis: And yeah, and at the same time, engage with completely new communities, completely new personas and onboard more people into the crypto world and explore. Flooring on new partnerships and new opportunities in uncharted territory.

[00:50:00] Savannah Fortis: So all of that says this is going to be a big year. It’s going to be a really big year. I like the idea of many companies in one because it looks like you guys are really ramping up here, and there’s a lot of work ahead, but also a lot of exciting things ahead as well. Great. Well, I always like to conclude by opening up the floor for any last things you want to add about anything you’re doing, anything we missed, anything you want to make sure.

[00:50:26] Manolis Nikiforakis: I think we haven’t mentioned that our website is weatherxm.com, and you know you can, in our website, you can find links to our Discord community, to our Twitter, which is quite active. There’s lots of videos in our YouTube channel, and there’s lots of videos about us that are made by the community itself. So I think those are the main places that you can find more information about our project.

[00:50:55] Savannah Fortis: Do people post photos of their weather stations?

[00:50:57] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah, we have hundreds of photos, actually, we’re planning to integrate that functionality in the mobile app eventually. So that was always part of the plan. It’s just that we have too many things to do and a lot of things waiting in the backlog.

[00:51:12] Savannah Fortis: That’s a really cool feature for the community.

[00:51:14] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yeah, it’s actually a necessary feature, not just cool, but at the moment, we are at the cool phase. So, if you join our Discord, there’s a dedicated channel for photographs of weather station deployments, and there are hundreds or probably thousands of photos there already from volunteers that just sent their deployments. And people can get ideas like how to overcome technical problems as well, or see comments about what not to do in some cases. But yeah, super cool to see all these photos from around the world.

[00:51:48] Savannah Fortis: Very cool. Well, Manolis, thank you so much for joining us today. It was an absolute pleasure to pick your brain and hear more about what you guys are doing and how you are decentralizing weather data and using our awesome Web3 technologies to make a difference.

[00:52:03] Manolis Nikiforakis: Yep. Thank you.

[00:52:04] Savannah Fortis: This has been another episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph. Thank you so much for joining us on another insightful journey uncovering the decentralized and Web3 space. Also, check out one of the many articles we’ve published here on Cointelegraph on the topic of decentralized weather, including a couple that feature WeatherXM and their work in this space. Once again, thank you for tuning in and make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode, and we’ll see you in the next one.

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