A weather recording app… on BSV? Why yes, and there’s a lot of untapped value in it. Blockchain companies SmartLedger and SmartGrow AgriTech have co-developed WeatherChain to record millions of data point transactions via Internet of Things (IoT) devices at nearly 10,000 stations across the eastern seaboard of the U.S.A.
The project’s website says precise weather monitoring and detailed climate data would be essential in such agritech fields as vineyards and hemp, among others. It would also provide more efficient energy tracking and environmental impact analysis, risk management, smart city planning, and even carbon credit trading (if that concept proves longevity).
SmartGrow AgriTech founder and CEO Alexander Mann states that the project is “creating an immutable record of environmental conditions that enhances data integrity, quality control, and transparency at every step.”
This information is crucial for industries not only agriculture, but also related fields like insurance, logistics, and environmental research.
“SmartLedger provided the blockchain infrastructure and microservice expertise, while SmartGrow guided the architecture from an agriculture and IoT deployment perspective,” Mann told CoinGeek. “The project is very much a collaborative build, born out of practical needs in agri-insurance and real-time climate risk verification.”
WeatherChain is currently in private beta, and testing partners include: the 10,000 station operators; a select group of insurers, academics, and regulators; and several Virginia-based vineyards and other SmartGrow agricultural pilots.
The project is developing an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant layer to help farmers and other partners interact with WeatherChain outputs. This would allow them to make natural language queries like “show me the risk scores for my fields this week,” with verifiable data in the responses.
Developers are also exploring a tokenized incentives model that would make automated payments to station owners for the use of their real-time data. Though that feature “is still in early R&D,” it’s technically possible to build with a combination of BSV smart contracts, asset tokenization and microtransactions. Mann said it could include proof-of-data-integrity scoring and dynamic payouts based on location, weather volatility, and data value. At the moment, however, the focus is on making the benchmarking and protocol layer rock-solid before adding economic incentives.
All these pieces together form something called “The Tempest Project,” which Mann described as integrating data from the IoT weather stations with blockchain-based verification and automation tools. The stations, he said, generated high-frequency atmospheric data, including temperature, wind pressure, rainfall, lightning, and more.
“WeatherChain ingests the Tempest station data, applies validation and enrichment logic, and anchors it immutably to the BSV blockchain. This enables a verifiable, tamper-proof record of environmental data, which can be used for risk modeling, smart contract triggers (e.g., crop insurance payouts), dynamic forecasting, and regulatory compliance,” Mann said.
Other BSV-related technologies utilized in this combination include direct-to-chain indexing (using custom-built
SmartLedger services), efficient data compressing and batching for low-fee writes, built-in compatibility with smart contract logic for automation, and exploratory use of token protocols (STAS and sCrypt) for those future incentive models.
SmartLedger’s Certihash may also play a part in keeping everything secure, with Sentinel Node providing enhanced network observability and alerting.
“We are also working on a dynamic risk scoring algorithm, which will use machine learning to modulate station posting frequency based on inclement weather — reducing on-chain bloat while improving actionable insights,” Mann said.
Ironically, a weather app generated much ballyhoo around BSV from blockchain’s “thinking inside the box” commentariat in 2019. WeatherSV, described by its creator Paul Chiari as a “proof of concept,” was broadcasting over 95% of the network’s transactions. “98% of Bitcoin Satoshi Vision’s activity comes from a dumb weather app,” chortled The Next Web as the news echoed around crypto media and became one of BSV’s first memes.
Six years later, it’s becoming clear that such articles demonstrated a poor understanding of (a) why it’d be useful to have an app that showed off BSV’s massive transaction throughput capacity in those early days and (b) the usefulness of permanently verifiable data, even for something as mundane-seeming as weather.
It turns out that reliable environmental data is, in fact, extremely important for producing essentials like food and clothing and determining the overall health of the planet. Weather and climate data is also up there with medical research for causing controversy and disputes where billions of dollars (and potentially lives) are at stake. Considering this, it’s perfectly logical to want this information to be stored long-term in an auditable state… and on a blockchain network reliable enough to record it.
For the record, WeatherSV will still be running in 2025, with over 11,000 active channels. Sure, if blockchain data is a commodity, it’s not as exciting as NFT pumps and so-called “national crypto reserves,” but commodities are big business, and there’s a lot of opportunity there.
“We view WeatherChain as part of a broader post-utility narrative for BSV,” Mann added. “It’s not about speculative coins or hype cycles. It’s about blockchain as infrastructure — a backbone for reliable, real-world data and automation.”
Watch: IoT & blockchain integration critical to solving climate change: Alison Gilliland
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