Glow V1 was an exclusive protocol. To participate meaningfully, you had to be in the right location, have the right connections, and have a large amount of money. People from all over the world got inspired by Glow, but when they asked how they could participate, the answer was all too often that they weren't a good fit for Glow. Glow's biggest fans often had to sit on the sidelines as cheerleaders rather than help the effort directly.
It just didn't seem right. V2 needed to transform Glow from a protocol populated exclusively by elite actors to a protocol where anyone could meaningfully contribute.
It is with great pleasure that we are announcing that Glow is ready to take the first steps in that direction. Starting today, Glow is migrating from V1 to V2, with a focus on humanizing Glow and opening the doors of participation to everyone.
As part of the first step, we are launching an initiative that gives every solar farm that pays an audit fee between now and September 15th, 2025 a grant of 4,000 GLW tokens. To see how to list a solar farm on Glow V2, check out this article.
Connecting Token Holders and Solar Farms
The incredible efficiency of Glow comes from a mechanism called the protocol deposit. When a solar farm joins Glow, it has to make a deposit that is equal in value to all of the electricity that will be produced by the solar farm over its entire lifetime. The solar farm gets its deposit back if it generates as much impact as other solar farms, otherwise it forfeits some of its deposit. Though critical for keeping farms competitive, the large up-front capital requirement of the protocol deposit often prevented competitive solar farms from joining the protocol.
In Glow V1, that deposit had to be made in stablecoins and it had to be made by someone who was working directly with the solar farm. In Glow V2, the protocol deposit can be made by anyone, and it can be made using GLW tokens. Furthermore, Glow V2 features a marketplace where solar farms can be listed, offering to split a portion of their GLW rewards with anyone who is willing to make the protocol deposit on their behalf.
This both removes the biggest barrier to entry for most solar farms, and also gives GLW token holders a way to earn more GLW by participating in the mining ecosystem. The most critical feature of the protocol is now able to reward anyone who holds GLW tokens, even if they aren't able to directly build solar farms themselves.
Expanding Participation with Regional Programs
Glow V1 demonstrated an enormous ability to construct new solar farms, blessing highly carbon efficient regions with mountains of net-new solar. And while this was great for the carbon efficient regions of the world, there are many places that would benefit from more solar even if they aren't strictly the most carbon efficient.
Glow V2 adds flexibility to the rewards program, allowing GLW tokens to be steered to any region or project that benefits from having more solar. Regions can essentially buy access to the Glow incentive system by minting GCTL tokens and staking them to an infrastructure project that targets the region.
Glow V2 even features campaigns, which allows a large number of people to each contribute a small amount of GCTL until there is enough combined stake to fully activate a region. This gives everyday users a way to participate in the protocol - they can start campaigns and help raise funds or awareness to put solar in a region that needs it.
Unprecedented Climate Transparency
The traditional climate space struggles with transparency. When an individual or corporation makes a contribution such as buying carbon credits, it's often difficult or even impossible to know just how big that contribution was, or how the carbon credits were produced. Even large entities like Microsoft lack basic infrastructure to show what their climate contributions are and how those contributions have changed the world.
Glow V2 changes this by introducing a new impact marketplace with impact transparency pages for climate buyers. Each time that a climate buyer retires an impact credit, they have to retire it directly against a specific solar farm. They also have to retire enough impact credits to cover the entire solar farm, which then binds the solar farm to their account, and therefore their impact page.
This means that at any point in time, someone can see the impact pages for every individual and company that has participated in the program, and see exactly how many impact credits have been retired, which solar farms contributed to the original creation of the impact credits, the aggregate impact of those solar farms, and the audits that demonstrate the authenticity of each of the solar farms.
This amount of transparency and impact visibility is unprecedented within the climate space, and gives consumers a much greater confidence that the climate contributions of their friends and the world's corporations have quality and authenticity, and aren't merely a product of greenwashing.
Rollout Plan
Starting immediately, no more solar farms will be able to join Glow V1. Instead, solar farms will have to enroll in Glow V2. They can enroll in any of the currently supported regions for Glow V2. To help kick V2 off, every solar farm that joins Glow and pays their audit fee before September 15th, 2025 will be eligible to receive 4,000 GLW tokens from the Glow grants pool.
The currently supported regions include the global region, Utah, Colorado, and Missouri, with more regions being added as we speak. This initial transition period will last roughly one month, and the full Phase I will launch after that. Rewards for Glow V2 will start alongside the full Phase I launch.
The Phase I launch will also enable GCTL purchases, GCTL staking, campaigns for Glow community members to spin up new supported regions, and several other features as well. You read through the full list of upgrades in the Phase I whitepaper.
One of the big changes being made in Phase I is that "impact power" from V1 is being deprecated. Anyone who purchased impact power before August 1st, 2025 will be compensated with $3 of GCTL per $1 that they spent acquiring impact power. Similarly, the GCC token is being deprecated. Anyone who owned a GCC token on August 1st, 2025 will receive $500 of GCTL tokens per GCC token that they owned.
The work for Glow V2 is almost done, and the time has come to begin the transition away from V1. We hope that you are as excited as we are, and we are looking forward to all of the ecosystem developments over the next month.