Inspiration
Weather quietly decides who gets paid. A farmer loses a crop to a dry month, an outdoor event loses ticket sales to a storm, a street vendor loses a day's income to rain. Big companies hedge this with weather derivatives; everyday people and small businesses can't. We wanted weather protection that anyone can buy from their phone in one tap.
What it does
SkyHedge lets you pick a city and a risk (rain, snow, wind, heat, cold), choose a trigger level, and see exactly what you pay and what you get back before you commit. You approve it in your Solana wallet, and if official NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) data shows the trigger was hit, you collect. No claims, no paperwork.
How we built it
- On-chain program (Anchor, Solana Devnet): holds each cover, the liquidity vault that backs payouts, and the settlement rules. The protocol fee is hard-coded in the program.
- Pricing: chances come from 10 years of NOAA history per city. The premium is the fair price plus a 15% margin, and the protocol takes 1% of the payout amount:
$$\text{premium} = P(\text{trigger}) \times \text{payout} \times 1.15$$
- Mobile app (React Native / Expo): runs on the Solana Seeker and signs with Mobile Wallet Adapter (Phantom). The same app ships as a web app at skyhedge.app/app.
- Backend (Vercel): serves markets and quotes, and refuses to price any window where NOAA history is missing rather than guess.
- x402: a paid weather-quote API that answers HTTP 402 and unlocks for 0.01 Devnet USDC.
Challenges
- Trust in settlement: settlement currently relies on our server reading NOAA data. We documented exactly how it works and what's on-chain, and we're moving toward verifiable, automatic settlement.
- Missing data: some NOAA weeks aren't published yet, so we chose to fail closed instead of quoting a bad price.
- Mobile wallet flow: making the app-to-Phantom-and-back handoff feel smooth on a real Seeker took many iterations.
What we learned
Plain language matters more than math for a consumer product: people instantly understand "pay 47, get 100 if it rains 118 mm." We also learned that Solana's speed and near-zero fees are what make small, everyday hedges economical at all.
Who it helps
- Catastrophe response (State Farm track): when a storm, heat wave, or freeze hits, every SkyHedge holder in that city is paid from the same official NOAA reading, with no claims to file, so thousands of people get cash at once and no one is left waiting in a queue.
- Property managers (CBRE track): SkyHedge lets a building owner forecast and hedge rain, snow, or freeze disruption before it hits, paid from official NOAA data with no claims to file.
What's next
Automatic on-chain settlement, more cities in the U.S. and then worldwide, and embedded wallets so first-time users can sign in with Google or Apple.
Built With
- anchor
- android
- codex
- cursor
- expo.io
- grok-bot
- noaa
- node.js
- phantom
- react-native
- rust
- solana
- solana-mobile-wallet-adapter
- solana-seeker
- spl-token
- typescript
- usdc
- vercel
- x402
