Updates to Pollen Rewards: (Part II of II): Weekly Rewards, Flower Location, and Uptime

In a recent post, we shared the latest updates to the Pollen rewards system as part of our effort to ensure that the network is growing in a way to support long-term sustainability across all regions.

The proposed changes include:

• Weekly Validations: Rewards will be distributed on a weekly, instead of daily basis, for work completed in the week prior. The week starts and stops at 5pm PST on Sunday, with rewards processing at 2am PST on Monday.
• Uptime Requirements: Flowers are required to be connected to internet and power for at least 95% for the week in order to receive rewards. These measurements are reported by the radio itself to the Pollen network.
• Flower Location Requirements: Flowers can not move more than 3 adjacent hexes within a day.
• Bee Attach Rewards: Adjust the rewards Flowers receive from Bees attaching (as discussed here).

In the previous post, we discussed at length the rationale of Bee Attach Rewards, and are inviting community input and feedback at our upcoming AMA on Monday, December 12th to address questions around that proposal.

In this post, we’ll dig into the other proposed changes and ground them in a discussion of another big change for the network — Weekly Rewards.

Why Weekly Rewards

The reason for this is simple: effort. We want to move from daily to weekly because we don’t need to validate the network every day given the introduction of the uptime requirement and the location requirement. By switching our rewards cycle from daily to weekly, Bees are able to validate and drop Pollen across more hexes — spreading their flight path and growing the network — and do so on a time schedule that works best for them.

In practice, this will result in the following changes —

Timescale

The current reward timescale is daily, where rewards are processed at the end of the day. The new timescale is weekly, where rewards are processed once per week with the week on Monday at 2am PST, and the week starting and stopping at 5pm PST on Sunday.

Bumblebee Rewards

• Pollen Drops — Currently, Bumblebees can drop Pollen in up to 100 hexes per day. This will now change to 700 unique hexes per week, with rewards being distributed at the end of the week.
• Attach — N/A
• Validation — Currently 2 PICS for every unique hex <> Flower <> bee validation (per Flower limits). This will change to 14 PICs, once per week.

Additionally, Bumblebees no longer need to upload their logs on a daily basis, but it’s recommended they upload logs at least every 2 days to prevent storage from filling up.

Honeybee Rewards

• Pollen Drops — Currently, Honeybees can drop Pollen in up to 100 hexes per day. This will now change to 700 unique hexes per week, with rewards being distributed at the end of the week.
• Attach — Currently 1 PIC for every unique attachment to a Flower per day. This will change now to be 7 PICs per attachment, once per week.
• Validation — N/A

Hummingbird Rewards

• Pollen Drop — N/A
• Attach — Hummingbirds earn 1 PIC for every attachment to the network. This will change to 7 PICs, once per week.
• Validation — N/A

Flowers

Flowers earn rewards when they are seen by Bees. To ensure that Flowers are available and providing reliable coverage for Bees and Birds throughout a given week, the network will require an uptime of at least 85% every day for the entire week for rewards to be received.

Similarly, while GPS drift can happen, we want to mitigate unnecessary movement of Flowers. Accordingly, Flowers must stay within 3 adjacent hexes each day to receive rewards for the week.

With the transition to a week, Flower rewards earnings will change as follows:

• Earns 7 PICs for every week it meets the uptime requirement
• Earn 70 PICs for every unique hex validation per week, subject to a maximum number of hexes based on the Flower type
• Earn 7 PICs per week for every Bee attachment to the Flower (see our discussion of Attach Rewards to understand this change)

Next Steps

It’s important to us that our community understands these changes and is on board with them in our joint effort to building a usable network. Join us this weekend in Discord in the #AMA channel to submit your questions, concerns, and opinions. On Monday December 12th at 11:30am PST, we’ll be answering questions in the channel, and providing a more fulsome summary of our findings and next steps during our final Community Meeting of 2022 on Monday, December 12th at 5pm PST.

FAQ

I’m a Bumblebee. If I validate Flower A on Monday and then again on Wednesday, will I receive rewards for both days or just one? Will Flower A get rewards too?

Flower A will receive one set of hex validation rewards and one set of attach rewards regardless of how many times the same Bumblebee sees that Flower in a week. BBs can add hexes to their weekly totals over the course of the week but each new hex will only count once per week.

I’m a Honeybee. If I attach to Flower B on Wednesday and again on Friday, will I get attachment rewards for both days? Will Flower B get rewards for both of those days I attached?

You will receive one attach reward for the entire week for Flower B.

I’m a Bumblebee. If I validate the same Flower every day for all 7 days, does that count?

Yes, but it will only count for one set of validations.

Why are you making changes to the Attach rewards?

Check out our previous post on the subject.

Do Pollen Drops need to be in unique hexes?

Yes.

How will I know if my Flower is meeting the uptime requirement?

We’re working on a change to Botanist to tell you if you’re meeting this time. Any outages due to the hardware or network will not serve as a penalty.