The following article is a guest post and opinion of Ting Peng, Head of Ecosystem at SkyX Network
What do you do when the weather app says light rain, but a flash flood tears through your town instead? You blame the app. Your rightful ire is a bit misplaced, though: It could very much be the data, or rather the lack thereof. In May 2023, deadly floods tore through parts of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing hundreds of people. Most had no idea the water was coming. Not because no one cared, but because the systems meant to warn the local communities simply didn’t have enough data to sound the alarm in time.
So how do we tackle this? What if instead of relying on a handful of government-run weather stations, we tapped into thousands of small, distributed weather sensors? That’s what DePIN enables: Community-powered networks where individuals contribute to physical infrastructure, and are incentivized to do so.
It’s the combination of scale and intelligence that makes this model so powerful. Centralized systems will always be limited. But decentralized networks can grow organically wherever people are willing to plug in.
Skeptics might argue that decentralized data and the use of AI is messy or unreliable. That it needs strict oversight. But AI can actually excel at filtering out bad data, spotting inconsistencies, and learning from patterns across thousands of sources. This isn’t about replacing national meteorological agencies — it’s about helping them.
When people die not because of a storm, but because they didn’t know it was coming, we’ve failed as a global community. That failure isn’t inevitable. Climate extremes are hitting the world’s most vulnerable people the hardest. And the cruel irony is that in many of these places, sufficient weather warnings could have been issued… We just haven’t bothered to rethink the current model.
We already have the tools to change the outcome. But tools don’t work unless we use them. We just need to decide: Do we want weather systems that serve everyone, or only the few within range of the radar?
