Map Improvement Proposal 7 (MIP-7)

Published in

Hivemapper Foundation

11 min readNov 21, 2023

3/15 Update:

We have decided to end the First Time Mapped bonus created with MIP-7, because we have effectively addressed the reason for its creation — low rewards outside of defined regions. The final bonus will be paid the first week of April to cover submissions made during the week of March 25 to March 31, 2024. All other elements of MIP-7 are unaffected.

As discussed in the original post below, we created the First Time Mapped bonus to replace the “top up” program from 2023. Like the top-up program, the First Time Mapped bonus was intended to stabilize rewards for contributors who were not yet mapping in a defined region.

We’re pleased to say this is no longer a meaningful concern. We have almost completed the regionization of our most active countries around the world, and are quickly creating a region once a contributor starts mapping outside of those defined regions.

The week of Jan. 1, there were 380,000 km driven outside of defined regions, or about 10% of the total amount of driving across the network. By the week of March 4, this number had fallen to 18,000 km — a 95% reduction. Contributions from outside of defined regions now account for just 0.3% of total contributions, with the vast majority of it coming from contributors who earn larger rewards while mapping in defined regions.

The week of Jan. 1, there were almost 300 contributors who only mapped outside of defined regions. For the week of March 4, this number was just four contributors, a 99% reduction. As outlined in MIP-8, regions are now created for these contributors within two weeks of activity. Newly created regions typically receive above-average rewards because of high freshness, making this special bonus unnecessary in these areas.

We will continue to use our treasury resources to create satisfying incentives for contributors who help drive the network toward its mission of building the world’s freshest map.

12/12/2023 Update

We are officially finalizing the MIP-7 changes with one change: the first-time mapped bonus will be 1 HONEY/km rather than 2 HONEY/km. All of the changes below will take effect on Jan. 1, 2024. During the comment period, the predominant concern about the proposal was that new contributors may receive poor rewards until their region is defined. We are committed to defining regions as soon as possible; contributors can fill out this form to help ensure their activity is noticed.

11/30/2023 Update

Thank you to everyone who participated in the comment period, which ended yesterday. We are continuing to evaluate the proposal based on community feedback and plan to release a final version in December that will take effect on Jan. 1, 2024.

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SUMMARY — This proposal, called MIP-7, would make two changes, both of which would take effect with the rewards cycle starting Jan. 1, 2024.

1. We propose adding a “multiplier” as a dynamic factor for region weights that would boost rewards by up to 3x for high-progress regions. This would replace the bounties from MIP-2, which expire Dec. 31.

With this change, the global rewards pool would grow by an estimated 15% to 20%. This would result in larger rewards for higher-progress regions, while rewards would be roughly unaffected in lower-progress regions.

Unlike the MIP-2 bounties, the multiplier would apply to any region with high Region Progress, including regions that did not receive a bounty under the MIP-2 program. It would be recalculated weekly.

2. We plan to issue a Foundation Reward of 1 HONEY per kilometer of roads mapped for the first time. This would help stabilize rewards in places without a defined region, and also provide an incentive to improve coverage in mature regions. This would replace the “top up” program, which we plan to discontinue with the rewards cycle ending Dec. 31.

On balance, we estimate these changes would reduce the amount of HONEY minted or transferred to contributors by 100,000 HONEY per week.

Multipliers should grow the weekly mint by an estimated 900,000 HONEY and the Hivemapper Foundation’s first-time mapped bonus should require roughly 100,000 HONEY per week, for a total of 1,000,000 HONEY issued to contributors. Meanwhile, the expiration of the Hivemapper Foundation’s regional bounties and top-up program should reduce weekly transfers to contributors by roughly 1,000,000 HONEY and 100,000 HONEY respectively, for a total of 1,100,000 HONEY not issued to contributors.

Blockchain rewards are essential to Hivemapper Network because they create powerful incentives to align the interests of contributors and customers. As a result, everyone is on the same team building a product that will reach scale and generate value.

In the first year of the Hivemapper Network, we made several changes to rewards formulas to improve the alignment of incentives.

First, we created the temporary “top up” program to solve the problem of lower-than-intended rewards for people mapping outside of defined regions. Next, we implemented MIP-2, a package of changes that improved how region “weights” were calculated, for greater fairness regardless of how region boundaries were drawn. At this time, the Hivemapper Foundation also issued bounties to accelerate coverage in three countries and four metropolitan areas around the world. Later in the year, we implemented MIP-6, which revised how Region Progress is calculated.

With the MIP-2 bounties set to expire at the end of 2023, we needed to decide how to continue incentivizing the regions that are making the strongest progress toward a commercially ready map. We also needed to decide whether to extend, deprecate or replace the top up program.

Map Improvement Proposal 7, or MIP-7, lays out two proposed changes that would resolve these open questions.

Active members of the Hivemapper community are encouraged to participate by sharing questions, suggestions, and comments in the #mip-7 channel of Hivemapper’s Discord server.

The comment period will be 7 days, running from Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023 until Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023. We intend to finalize a plan in December to take effect with the rewards cycle that begins Jan. 1, 2024.

Analysis of the MIP-2 bounties

Since the implementation of MIP-2 in March, the Hivemapper Foundation has issued tens of millions of HONEY as special bounties for four cities and three countries around the world: London, Madrid, The Netherlands, Paris, Portugal, South Korea and Tokyo.

First, let’s discuss the most important question: did it work?

We have certainly seen positive results. The bounties were highly effective in incentivizing early adopters in urban centers. Among the ten regions with the highest Region Progress last week, seven were bounty regions: Amsterdam, Madrid, Lisbon and four separate regions of South Korea. The bounties also helped to cushion a decline in per-km rewards as these regions became more saturated.

However, the bounties also had issues:

Nationwide bounties rewarded some regions that didn’t make much progress toward a commercially viable product
Foundation bounties are less sustainable because they are funded from the Hivemapper Foundation’s treasury and not the weekly mint
Limited-time bounties inherently have a “cliff,” after which rewards fall dramatically — this creates uncertainty and anxiety for contributors who have come to expect them

The ideal solution would address all of these issues.

It would be permissionless, meaning that any defined region can receive boosted rewards for making genuine progress on map coverage. This boost should be consistent over time, rather than falling off a cliff on an arbitrary date. This boost should be funded sustainably until Map Consumption supersedes minting as the main source of contributor rewards.

We think there is a better way. Here’s our proposal.

Make progress, get boosted rewards

In MIP-7, we are proposing adding a “multiplier” to each region that is based on its Region Progress score. This means that higher-progress regions will get a larger rewards pool, while lower-progress regions would get roughly the same amount of rewards as before.

This multiplier would be applied to the “weight” that is assigned to every defined region. (You can see these weights on Explorer.)

As background, weight is used to calculate Global Map Progress and distribute rewards. A region with a higher weight has a bigger influence on the calculation on Global Map Progress, and also gets a larger share of the global rewards pool.

The “base” weight for a region mostly depends on the number of road kilometers in theregion, with a small factor for road density. This allows for a fair, apples-to-apples comparison between larger regions and smaller ones. A bigger region has a higher base weight, but a harder time driving up Region Progress because so many more kilometers of road need to be covered. A smaller region has a lower base weight, but an easier time driving up Region Progress. On balance, per-kilometer rewards come out roughly the same, no matter how boundaries are drawn.

Region weights are normalized every time rewards are distributed. This means that every time regions are added, removed or modified, we have to recalculate the final weights to ensure that each region gets the correct share of the rewards being distributed.

Under this proposal, we would now add a “multiplier” that is multiplied by the weights when recalculating them weekly. It would be based on the “region progress” of the region. This is our proposed multiplier table:

0–70% region progress: 1x multiplier
70–80% region progress: 1.5x multiplier
80–90% region progress: 2x multiplier
90%+ region progress: 3x multiplier

Here is a simplified example, with only 2 regions

Before (no multiplier)

Region A has a base weight of 0.1
Region B has a base weight of 0.4
Region A has a final weight of [0.1 / (0.1 + 0.4)] = 0.2
Region B has a final weight of [0.4 / (0.1 + 0.4)] = 0.8

After, if Region A has a 2x multiplier

Region A has a base weight of 0.1 and a multiplier of 2x = 0.2
Region B has a base weight of 0.4
Region A has a final weight of [0.2 / (0.2 + 0.4)] = 0.33
Region B has a final weight of [0.4 / (0.2 + 0.4)] = 0.67

This change would have a couple of impacts.

The rewards pool should increase. This is because Global Map Progress is a weighted average and a larger share of the weighted average would now be coming from high-progress regions. Based on recent weeks, we estimate that the rewards pool would grow by 15 to 20%. If the global rewards pool is a pie that is being shared by all of the contributors around the world, you can think of this as “growing the pie.”
Regions with a multiplier greater than 1x would receive a larger share of the global rewards pool than they receive today. You can think of this as a “larger slice of a bigger pie.” This would track closely with the size of the multiplier; it would be roughly equivalent to a 3x increase in rewards for regions with a 3x multiplier, a 2x increase for regions with a 2x multiplier, a 1.5x increase for regions with a 1.5x multiplier, and no change for regions with a 1x multiplier.

To reiterate, our modeling suggest that rewards would increase for high progress regions and would be effectively unchanged for low progress regions. (To be a bit more precise: Modeling suggests that due to expansion of the rewards pool, rewards would initially go up by 1-5% for regions with a 1x multiplier. You can visualize this as “a smaller slice of a larger pie,” resulting in the same amount of pie.)

There is one notable exception. Regions that are currently receiving a MIP-2 bounty, but receive less than a 3x multiplier under this proposal, should see rewards fall relative to current levels when the MIP-2 bounty expires on Dec. 31. This is due to the expiration of the bounty; the same thing would occur in the absence of this MIP-7 proposal.

It’s important to note that contributors would have significantly more control here. Multipliers would be recalculated every week as part of the reward cycle. By making greater progress on Coverage, Activity and Resilience, a region can move to a higher multiplier tier. The reverse is also true. If mapping activity declines in a region and its Region Progress score falls, then the region will move to a lower multiplier tier.

It is also important to remember that Region Progress is graded on a curve. In other words, it’s easier to get a 100% score at this early stage of the network than it will be later in the evolution of the network.

In the future, as more regions climb into the multiplier tiers, we expect to raise the thresholds for Coverage, Activity and Resilience metrics to ensure that the highest progress regions continue to get the biggest share of the rewards pool. Some people have suggested that a fixed schedule for tightening would be most transparent. Other people have suggested dynamically tightening the metrics once a certain proportion of regions achieve a certain level of Region Progress, such as 90%. We welcome suggestions about the fairest and most transparent way to reward high-progress regions in the future.

Goodbye, top ups. Hello, first time mapped bonuses.

We are also announcing that the temporary “top-up” program, which ensures that all map contributors receive a base amount of HONEY tokens for their contributions, will be phased out on Dec. 31, 2023.

When we created the top-up program, there were large swaths of the world that were not covered by defined regions, even though contributors were mapping there. Fast forward a year, and we’ve defined regions for nearly all of the population centers where people are actively mapping. In fact, only about one-third of top-up rewards are going to contributors who are mapping outside of defined regions.

So where are the other two-thirds going?

Top-up rewards have helped to stabilize rewards in high-progress regions when rewards rates have dipped below 1 HONEY/km as a result of coverage saturation. However, the multipliers described above would also address this, by delivering up to a 3x boost in rewards for high-progress regions where coverage is getting more saturated.

In addition, a significant share of top-up rewards have gone to contributors mapping roads with low freshness — for example, by driving the same route daily in a commercial vehicle. This was never the intended purpose of the top-up program, and is not the best use of the Hivemapper Foundation’s limited resources for promoting the development of the network.

We want to continue to stabilize rewards for contributors who are not yet mapping in a defined region, and to achieve this, we plan to launch a new program effective Jan. 1, 2024: a 1HONEY foundation reward per kilometer of unmapped hexes, similar to the bonus issued through the Open Road campaign to commemorate the milestone of 6 million km. In a location without a region, most of the roads are unmapped, so contributors will receive added rewards as they map those roads for the first time.

However, the first-time-mapped bonus will apply worldwide, including in defined regions. This means that contributors will receive added rewards for going off the beaten path and mapping never-before-mapped roads.

You might be asking — what if I am mapping in a place that doesn’t have a region yet? We will continue to add regions, and will be focused on being more responsive than ever to requests. You can fill out this form to request a region be added in a place where you’re mapping.

Share your input on the proposal