Greece

ATHDAOx: Building the future of Web3 in physical-digital with DAOs

The DAO-centric event took place in Athens, Greece over two days and focused on everything from governance and legal issues to community building and security.

ATHDAOx, an event in the tradition of the Solana Hacker House, took place on Dec. 9 and 10 in Athens, Greece to discuss all things decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

From governance and legalities to community building and security, the event brought together the local DAO-focused community in Greece and abroad.

Cointelegraph was on the ground for the event and spoke with one of the event’s founders, Dimitris — aka Takisoul — about his experience building a physical space to discuss digital communities.

How generative AI allows one architect to reimagine ancient cities

Cointelegraph spoke with architect and designer Tina Marinaki about her work using generative AI and text-to-image prompts to reimagine the ancient Athenian cityscape.

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has presented modern society with new means for understanding and visualizing the world.

Meta, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, recently introduced new AI video and image-generating tools for creators, while OpenAI updated the premium version of its popular AI model ChatGPT to include powerful text-to-image generating capabilities.

As the pace of AI development continues to accelerate rapidly, many artists are faced with the challenge of embracing the new tools as a part of their workflow while still managing to keep their unique vision.

One such artist is the New York-based Greek architect Tina Marinaki, who has incorporated AI tools into her creative work and, in the process, created an online community of nearly 20,000 users on Instagram through “Athens Surreal,” which follows her reimagination of the ancient Athenian cityscape.

Cointelegraph spoke with Marinaki about incorporating AI into her work and how she reenvisions her home city using emerging technology.

She explained that the concept of Athens Surreal stemmed from the desire to understand “the way the different AI tools work” while testing ideas for a “different, sometimes romantic, sometimes utopian, futuristic Athens.”

Technical difficulties

According to Marinaki, one of the primary difficulties working with text-to-image AI systems is “translating” an image description to communicate a vision with the AI systems.

“Other challenges are found in algorithmic ethnicity, gender or other biases when algorithms are trained using biased data.”

For example, she reported that a greater number of men can appear in AI-generated images even when a user’s parameters have no mention of gender, and in some cases, AI can create “racist or stereotypical images.”

Despite its biases in text-to-image generation, these weaknesses can lead to strengths if trained correctly.

How Bitcoin ATMs in Greece fare during a record-breaking tourist season

Despite record-breaking numbers this past summer tourist season, the local crypto scene in Greece sees no impact, says co-founder of local BCash Bitcoin ATMs Dimitrios Tsangalidis.

Greece is globally recognized for its touristic lures of idyllic beaches and a laid-back lifestyle. Prior to the outbreak of the global pandemic, the World Travel and Tourism Council said that tourism generated over one-fifth of Greece’s total GDP.

This year, the country faced a record number of travelers during its summer tourism season. In the month of August alone, the country received nearly 1 million travel arrivals per week, according to the Greek Minister of Tourism Vassilis Kikilias.

A report from ForwardKeys on this year’s summer tourism revealed that, of the top ten “sun and beach” locations in Europe, Greece held six spaces. These included the island destinations of Mykonos, Thira (Santorini) and Heraklion (Crete), as well as Thessaloniki. Athens, the country’s capital, took third place for “urban” destinations in Europe.

In the 27 European Union member states, Greece takes the sixth spot in terms of cryptocurrency ATMs, with 64 active for usage. Over half of Greece’s crypto ATMs are shared between Athens and Thessaloniki.

However, the Bitcoin ATM operator BCash strategically placed some of its ATMs in the country’s trendy island destinations of Mykonos, Santorini and Crete. Cointelegraph spoke with the managing director and co-founder of BCash, Dimitrios Tsangalidis, on how crypto is impacted by or itself impacts the tourism season in Greece.

Although Mykonos and Santorini are the most visited tourist destinations, the mainland ATMs have the majority of traffic, according to Tsangalidis — especially central Athens, where the first ATM was installed, and Thessaloniki.

However, the co-founder noted that in Crete, the country’s most populated island and a popular tourist destination, there is a “very loyal cryptocurrency crowd.”

“There is a strong crypto community in Heraklion of Crete [which is] the location of one of our ATMs.”

In Heraklion, the capital of Crete, the local start-up accelerator H2B Hub made a collaboration with the Greek-speaking University of Nicosia to create and support a local blockchain community.

Both Athens and Thessaloniki have active, regular meetups for the crypto and blockchain community.

While tourism bolsters parts of the Greek economy, according to Tsangalidis, it doesn’t translate to the crypto scene. “Unfortunately, the absolute opposite happens,” says Tsangalidis.

“In summer months and high tourist seasons, the demand drops. But we are in the middle of crypto winter that came earlier this year, so it is really hard to tell.”

Especially in terms of regular traffic, the decrease can also be equated to locals leaving for vacation.

In general, Greece needs more awareness of cryptocurrencies and their utility in everyday life, Tsangalidis sums up.

“Influence on local tourism can be noticeable only if there is a general adoption of cryptocurrency within society.”

He adds that for now, there is little to no infrastructure or adoption from the level of Greek businesses and local governments. “If our government will become crypto friendly and if a green light will be given to businesses, then adoption will follow.”

In May of this year, the president of the Greek National Tourism Organization, Angela Gerekou, said the country is currently exploring how blockchain technology can bring about safety and transparency in tourism.

Blockchain and crypto find use case in community powered weather forecasting

WeatherXM has deployed over 700 decentralized weather stations around the world to harvest local data, which provides station owners with utility tokens in return.

Blockchain and crypto are coming to a local weather station near you — or at least that’s what one group of Athens-based engineers is trying to accomplish. WeatherXM is using a combination of blockchain-based data verification with crypto incentives to get people worldwide to capture their local weather data for more accurate forecasting.

Cointelegraph sat down with WeatherXM co-founders, CEO Manolis Nikiforakis and chief technology officer Nikos Tsiligaridis for an interview in Athens, Greece. They talked about how Web3 tools provide the best solution to the lack of quality and the quantity of available weather data.

*WeatherXM co-founders from left to right: CEO* *Manolis Nikiforakis, CTO Nikos Tsiligaridis, head of engineering Stratos Theodorou*

The company is deploying a new infrastructure of community-powered weather stations built with blockchain-based oracle hardware. It creates smart contracts of information gathered from localized weather stations, from which decentralized weather data is produced. The smart contracts verify both the location of the station and the nonfungibility of data collected from the location.

“Then we monetize those services and put the value back into the original people who created the data in the first place, which are the weather station owners, who we call weather miners,” says Nikiforakis.

The native utility tokens of the network are WXM and Data Credits (DC).

“Using the crypto incentives, we have transparent and fair mechanisms that will make sure that once value is produced and obtained by a third party, it will circulate back to the community.”

According to the co-founders, the project includes both weather enthusiasts and those with a more tech-savvy background.

Currently over 700 weather stations are set up around the world from the United States and Europe to as far east as Vietnam. Nikiforakis says within the next few months at least another 2,000 will be shipped out for users to start collecting data.

*Weather stations with Web3 hardware developed by WeatherXM in Athens, Greece.*

The creators of WeatherXM say decentralization is inherent to the project. By allowing individuals to deploy their own stations in a given location it creates a “by the people for the people” – type approach to weather data collection, rather than a major centralized enterprise.

“The more dispersed the decentralized weather community is, the better it is for the general accuracy of weather data collection and for providing data on locations with little to no known data.”

The developers incentivize weather miners through rewards based on location and data quality. Those in rare locations a proper installations of weather stations (i.e., away from asphalt, not under an awning) reap higher token rewards.

Though, due to the stations needing an active connection to the internet, rural stations are even more rare.

Roughly one-third of the global economic activity is highly weather-sensitive, such as international trade and shipping and the agriculture industry. For ordinary people, knowing the weather might affect clothing choices. For businesses, it has a major impact on the ability to waste or save resources.

“There’s a whole industry that deals with weather data from an insurance point of view,” says Nikiforakis, adding:

“This means our infrastructure can enable weather insurance smart contracts in the future in ways that traditional weather forecasts or weather networks today cannot.”

These types of blockchain-based solutions will be important in developing regions that rely heavily on weather-sensitive economic activity. For example, in Africa, 44% of the working population in 2020 had agriculture-related employment.

WeatherXM has used its collected weather data to service extensive operations like the Athens International Airport and a major regional telecom provider, the team said.