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 location and uptime 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
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.
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).
Read more about PageRank algorithm use in our network.
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)
Low Altitude Rewards (LAR) are bonus rewards for stations that contribute low-altitude aircraft data (≤ 6,000 feet) in eligible areas around select airports (currently ~500 airports).
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 WINGS84,000 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
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 Devnet wallet and rewards.
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.
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