How Will Phase I Incentive Payments Work, And How Are You Preventing Cheaters?

Following our first shipments yesterday and Incentive Payments going live on Thursday, we thought it would be helpful to provide a summary of how Incentive Payments will work in Phase I.

Beginning today, 300,000 PollenCoin (PCN) will be paid out to the community every day. The PCN will come from the Incentive Bank, where 500 million of the one billion PCN were deposited after being minted (a number that will never grow).

The number of PCN paid out each day will halve (to 150,000) once one-third of the Incentive Bank is depleted, and will halve again (to 75,000) once it’s two-thirds depleted.

If no other payments are made from the Incentive Bank (such as Geographic Boosts or Loot Boxes — see our white paper for a description of all the different types of incentives that may be paid out), payments will last about 10 years (it would be slightly longer than 10 years, but on the 10 year anniversary of the first Incentive Payment all remaining PCN will be flushed into that day’s payment).

There are three ways to earn PollenCoin (PCN) in Phase I.

Provide Coverage With a Flower

Flower owners are rewarded for every unique daily Bumblebee-Hex connection, so the more Bumblebees connecting to a Flower from more locations, the more the owner earns each day.

An owner’s share of the daily Incentive Payment is determined by the number of PCN Incentive Credits (“PICs”) earned each day. Each unique Bumblebee-Hex connection earns a Flower owner 10 PICs. So if a Flower earned 100 PICs in a day where 10,000 PICs were earned across the network, the owner would receive 3,000 PCN.

Verify Coverage With a Bumblebee

Bumblebees are a critical component of building out a decentralized network with utility to its users. They are key to incentivizing and verifying the placement of Flowers where they are needed with quality coverage and backhaul connectivity.

Similar to Flowers, Bumblebees are rewarded by every unique Flower-Hex connection — the more Flowers verified from more Hexes, the more a Bumblebee owner earns. Instead of 10 PICs per unique connection Bumblebees earn 1 PIC, which encourages Bumblebee owners to get mobile!

Connect To The Network With a Hummingbird

In addition to being able to use the network free of charge with unlimited data during Phase I, community members who have purchased or received a Pollen eSIM will also be rewarded with 1 PIC each day their mobile device connects to a Pollen Flower.

What About All The Ways To Cheat The System?

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to carefully construct Pollen’s incentive system to minimize the opportunities for cheating the system and putting in additional protections to limit cheating where vulnerabilities remain.

For example:

• The number of unique Bumblebee-Flower connections that receive PICs are limited each day depending upon the model / range of the Flower
• We are implementing an Intersection over Union (IoU) algorithm to detect and block rewards for what we call Flocking — a user running multiple Bumblebees in their own vehicle, pretending to be multiple Bumblebees.
• Implementing limitations on moving Flowers, such as making them ineligible for rewards for a certain number of days after moving (and it’s difficult to spoof the location of a Flower given CBRS SAS requires a GPS location before it will let a Flower broadcast, we know the ranges of each model of Flower, and Bumblebees independently report GPS coordinates, combined with the other protections above)

Among others.

If there are questions or opportunities to cheat the system that we haven’t thought of / addressed above, we’d love to hear from you! Join the conversation on Discord and help us make the Pollen network stronger.