# How rewards work

## TL;DR

You earn WINGS tokens by running a station that sees aircraft and sends useful positional data to the Wingbits network. Your rewards depend on:

* The **data contributions** of your station
* Whether you’re early to the network (EPR)
* How strategically important your data is (PageRank)
* Whether you're covering **new areas** or competing in busy ones

Your station's location (hex) has no direct impact on rewards earned.

## Data Contributed

The key component to participation is data, so to clarify:

* The source of your rewards are only **positional messages** contributed by your stations (using the Wingbits client) to the network.
* All other message types are not sent to the network, as they do not currently contain desirable data for the network.  

{% hint style="info" %}
A discrepancy is visible when comparing tar1090 message rates vs input/server message rates on the station's Statistics tab. Instead you should compare positional message rates from graphs1090 to the input/server message rates.
{% endhint %}

## Rewards

Your station earns daily rewards from multiple sources:

* Base Network Rewards
* Early Participant Rewards (EPR)
* Additional Rewards (e.g., Low Altitude Rewards)

Each of these is explained in detail below in the various rewards sections.

### Base Rewards

These come from a global pool of tokens allocated daily based on **hex coverage**.

* Each coverage hex (area of the map) gets **24 WINGS** added to the reward pool **if at least one station contributed 100+ positional messages** that day.
* The total pool grows with new areas covered, but adding more stations to already-covered areas just **dilutes rewards**, it doesn’t increase them.

Your station’s share depends on a **PageRank** calculation involving:

* The importance of the hexes you contribute to (i.e. how strategically important they are in the network).
* The performance of your station (i.e. percentage of your contributions across monitored hexes).

{% hint style="info" %}
If you're the only station covering an area (hex), you earn more due to how the PageRank is calculated.
{% endhint %}

Read more about [PageRank algorithm use in our network](https://wingbits.com/blog/pagerank-reimagined).

Example daily Base Rewards:\
If 10,000 hexes are covered that day, that’s **240,000 WINGS** in the reward pool. If there were 2,400 equally ranked stations (hypothetically), each would get **100 WINGS**.

### Early Participant Rewards (EPR)

This is a **time-limited bonus** for contributing early to the network.

* You earn **2 WINGS per covered hex per day**.
* This lasts:
  * All of the pre-mainnet period
  * The **first year** after mainnet
  * Then it **drops 10% per year** until it ends **5 years after mainnet**.

But to qualify:

* You must contribute **100+ positional messages** to the hex.
* You must beat the **bottom 10th percentile** of message counts per hex (across all stations globally), so low effort doesn’t qualify.

### Low Altitude Rewards (LAR)

{% hint style="info" %}
**Start Date:** Rewards began on Dec 23rd, 2025 for data contributed on Dec 22nd, 2025.\
\
Prior contributed low altitude data will not be rewarded.
{% endhint %}

Low Altitude Rewards (LAR) are bonus rewards for stations that receive and contribute **low-altitude aircraft data (≤ 6,000 feet)**, transmitted from eligible areas around **select airports** (currently \~500 airports).  Airport selection is based on requests from data customers.

LAR are designed to incentivize coverage where low-altitude data is most valuable, using a reward mechanism similar to Base Rewards but applied to a smaller, airport-focused geographic area.

**How LAR Are Funded**

* Each eligible airport is represented by a **7-hex area using resolution-6 hexes**:
  * One hex centered on the airport’s official latitude/longitude
  * Six surrounding hexes
* Each eligible hex gets **24 WINGS** added to the daily LAR pool **if at least one station contributed 100+ positional messages** that day.
* The daily LAR pool grows with new areas covered, but adding more stations to already-covered areas just **dilutes rewards**, it doesn’t increase them.
* The total daily LAR pool is the product of: `eligible_airports × 7 hexes × 24 WINGS`

**How LAR Are Distributed**

* Reward shares are calculated using a **PageRank-based algorithm**, applied specifically to low-altitude data contributions.
* This algorithm evaluates both **data quality and relative contribution**, similar to Base Rewards.
* To be rewarded with LAR, the station must contribute **100+ positional messages** to the hex.
* LAR runs almost identically to Base Rewards, but:
  * Coverage is geographically limited to airport areas
  * Hexes are smaller
  * The contributor pool is more localized

**Example: One Day of LAR Distribution**

* If **500 airports** each have contributions across all **7 eligible hexes**:
  * `500 airports × 7 hexes × 24 WINGS = 84,000 WINGS`
  * **84,000 WINGS** are distributed from the daily LAR pool.
* If **2,000 stations** contributed equally to those airport hexes (purely hypothetical for easy math):
  * `84,000 WINGS ÷ 2,000 stations = 42 WINGS per station`

{% hint style="info" %}
Note: In practice, rewards are **not equal**, as PageRank weighting favors higher contribution counts and higher-value contributions.
{% endhint %}

**Summary**

* You earn LAR by contributing **≤ 6,000 ft altitude data** within **eligible airport hexes**.
* The **maximum daily LAR pool** is reached as all eligible airport hexes receive contributions:
  * `eligible_airports × 7 hexes × 24 WINGS`
* LAR complements Base Rewards by incentivizing **high-value, low-altitude coverage** where it matters most.

### Bonus for Pre-Mainnet Contributors

Those stations contributing prior to mainnet launch can also earn a bonus on their retroactive rewards, which you can read about on [#beta-phase-retroactive-rewards-and-potential-bonus](https://docs.wingbits.com/tge-mainnet/devnet-wallet-and-rewards#beta-phase-retroactive-rewards-and-potential-bonus "mention").

## Final Comments

Having a station located near a major airport, especially with line of sight to runways, is the ideal placement to generate earnings from Low Altitude Rewards.

Clear line of sight to the horizon, for 360 degrees and above all nearby obstacles, will increase all reward types.

Finally, keeping your system online 24/7 will maximize your contributions and reflect in increased Base Rewards daily versus a competing station, in your area, that does not stay online 24/7.