At long last, Glow V2 is here. And while the core premise - using token rewards to incentivize the construction of solar - remains the same, the mechanics have evolved, and Glow has become much more accessible to the average person.
Mining Center
Starting with Glow V2, the core of the Glow ecosystem is now the Glow miner. Similar to Bitcoin miners, a Glow miner has a cash price tag and produces GLW tokens every week for about 100 weeks. Unlike Bitcoin, however, a Glow miner pays incentives to people who construct solar farms. Every Glow miner that gets sold turns into cash incentives that can be used to fund future solar farms.
Glow Launchpad
Those familiar with Glow know that this is not the end of the story. Glow V2 uses the same competitive filtering mechanism to identify high-impact solar farms that Glow V1 used, which means that each solar farm needs to be paired with a protocol deposit. Where Glow V1 left this large financial lock-up to the solar farm owner, Glow V2 has a Launchpad where the protocol deposit can be outsourced to GLW token holders.
The GLW token holders, of course, get rewarded for participating. In exchange for agreeing to delegate their tokens to a solar farm, they receive a portion of the GLW inflation that gets distributed to that solar farm. This gives GLW token holders an active way to participate in the Glow economy, while earning rewards for doing so.
Installer Bounties
Glow has also evolved its relationship with installers. Instead of requiring solar installers to understand tokens and incentives and competitions, Glow V2 provides a simple bounty interface that offers a cash incentive to any installer that puts a solar farm on Glow. The size of the cash incentive depends on the competitiveness of the solar farm, and otherwise the installer has no overheads - all of the other protocol complexity is outsourced to the Launchpad and the Mining Center.
You can read more about the three pillars of Glow solar mining in this article, including more in-depth discussions of the risks and rewards associated with each activity.
Beyond Carbon Credits
Throughout the evangelism of Glow V1, one recurring theme stood out more than all the others. People didn't want to just build solar somewhere in the world, they wanted to build solar in their home country and territory. And almost all of these people found themselves faced with the same refrain: "the best place in the world for Glow is India; solar that gets built anywhere else isn't likely to make money". Glow V1's unforgiving focus on maximal carbon impact tragically excluded the majority of the world from participating.
As of Glow V2, this refrain is no longer an axiom of the Glow ecosystem. The most powerful innovation of Glow V2 is that it doesn't just build solar, it gives people the power to control where that solar gets built. Anyone can start a campaign to bring Glow into their own country or territory.
Glow Control (GCTL)
Even better, control in the Glow ecosystem isn't donation based, it's staking based. A new token called Glow Control, or GCTL for short, drives the flow of GLW tokens within the Glow ecosystem. Anyone who owns GCTL has the power to deliver solar incentives to the region of their choice, and they retain that power for as long as they own the GCTL tokens.
The GCTL token is both the steering wheel and the engine of the Glow economy. Every time someone mints a new GCTL token, they gain the power to control how GLW is distributed between regions, and they also permanently reduce the functional circulating supply of the GLW token, while increasing its total liquidity. You can read more about GCTL and how to make use of it in this article.
Restarting the Heartbeat
The heartbeat of Glow is the continuous construction of solar. As Glow transitioned from V1 to V2, it was in stasis. With the launch of Glow V2, the heartbeat has been restored and a steady cadence of solar construction will be returning.
Glow V1 demonstrated the power of DePIN, scaling from less than $100,000 to more than $20,000,000 of solar constructed in under 12 months. Starting today, Glow is back and ready to show the world just how much can change when crypto is used to manage the incentives of society.