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.

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.

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).

If you're the only station covering an area (hex), you earn more due to how the PageRank is calculated.

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 (LA rewards?)

Low Altitude rewards are coming soon. Details will be published once they are enabled.

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.

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 both your Base Rewards and Early Participant Rewards.

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.