MeteorolOG: Weather TrackR- Using the world’s strongest force for good.
Summary Description
Weather is one of the strongest forces in the world and impacts many aspects of everyday life from travel, many industries in business, science, and even big personal events such as weddings or vacations.
The goal of Meteorol-OG is to create synthetic tokens that track key weather metrics such as temperature and rain that can be used in practical everyday applications around the globe. Here are some potential use cases for these synthetic tokens.
- Business and Supply Chain: The recent situation with the blockage of the Suez canal highlighted how dependent global businesses are to the massive global supply chain and freight industry. Weather is a huge disruptor of this industry.
- Outdoor Industries Any businesses that are weather dependent such as construction and farming are severely impacted by extreme weather and could utilize these tokens to hedge risk, provide insurance, or even supplement profits based on long/short positions for these tokens.
- Personal Events Anyone that is planning an outdoor event such as a wedding, vacation, or expo oftentimes has to spend significant money for things like hotels, venues, travel, etc. Inclement weather can mean important events, both indoor and outdoor, are postponed or even cancelled. This has an impact on any event: from small-scale family skiing vacations, to huge events such as the Olympics or the Superbowl. Using these tokens, you could insure that expense and provide a “refund” if the event gets rained out or weather causes it to have to be rescheduled.
- Science (climate change) As this continues to be a hot (pun intended) topic globally, one could bet on or against global warming. Large climate change funds could bet on increasing global temperatures and use those profits to counter climate change.
Which metric will your synth track?
Initially I think the most valuable metrics to track would be rainfall and temperature. We could explore additional metrics in the future
These initial tokens could be:
sTEMP
sRAIN
How will you get data for your metric
*What sources will you use?
There seems to be an abundance of weather data sources and APIs that are available that vary greatly in price and comprehensiveness. The data looks reliable and depending on the source gets granular by location or type of data. Here are a few examples:
- https://datarade.ai/data-providers/customweather/profile
- Weather API ☀ Get the Tomorrow.io Free Weather API Now
- weatherstack - Real-Time World Weather REST API
- https://datarade.ai/data-providers/meteomatics/profile
- https://weatherstack.com/
- https://www.weatherbit.io/
What collateral would you use for this synthetic
I would suggest using USDC due to it being a stablecoin with deep liquidity, but there may be suitable alternatives as well.
Describe how you would create this synthetic
I don’t have the technical aptitude to describe the intricacies of what it would take to create these tokens, but should be possible based on the data and APIs available.
- What issues might you encounter in the development of the synthetic?
I think given the scope of weather metrics and how large it can be covering the globe and multiple metrics, it may need to start smaller with a specific country or region as a pilot or test launch from a cost and feasibility perspective.
- How you would make sure that people who would find the synthetic useful could access it?
In the UMA spirit, I think a big part of this idea would be to have an app or platform that helps people easily access these tokens, outlines uses cases, and makes ease of use for beneficial actions such as options or leveraged approaches very intuitive to use.
Additional Use Cases
In the future, I think there could be other use cases for metrics such as wind, snowfall, air quality data, wildfire data, etc.
Best winds!