GLW Mining
A Glow miner is a mining opportunity listed on the Glow Launchpad that earns a portion of a solar farm's GLW inflation. Most miners listed on the Launchpad earn rewards for 99 weeks. However, some miners, called "Flash Miners", list on the Launchpad with rewards periods less than the standard 99 weeks. Because miner rewards tend to decrease over time as more farms join the protocol, the weeks a Flash Miner is missing relative to the standard miner are the trailing weeks, meaning the gap in total expected rewards between a Flash Miner and a standard miner is significantly smaller than the difference in duration alone would suggest.
Each week, the protocol distributes GLW emissions to active farms based on their participation in regional Infrastructure Projects. Protocol emissions get split between Glow Miners and Glow Delegators, and these mining opportunities then get listed on the Glow Launchpad, where participants purchase miners with USDC to begin receiving a share of weekly GLW rewards.
Listing on the Launchpad
Once a solar farm has been audited, constructed, and funded with its required protocol deposit, it begins to earn GLW rewards for 100 weeks. This then enables miners, which represent a claim to a portion of that farm's emission rewards, to be listed on the Launchpad. For most farms, this happens within the first week of operation, and the resulting miners cover the following 99 weeks of rewards.
Sometimes, not all miners listed in a given week sell, and the Foundation may also hold miners in reserve when market conditions do not support their listing. This means that at any given point, the Foundation could hold inventory of miners tied to farms that are already live and earning rewards but whose miners have not yet been sold. Because a farm's rewards period continues to count down regardless of whether its miners have been sold, miners that the Foundation lists at a later date have fewer remaining weeks of rewards. A farm that has been live for 25 weeks, for example, has 75 weeks of rewards remaining, and a miner listed at that point covers those 75 weeks rather than the 99 weeks of a miner listed during the farm's first week. The Launchpad displays the remaining duration for each miner, so participants can see exactly where the underlying farm stands in its rewards period.
Variable Duration Mining
GLW rewards from any miner, regardless of duration, depend on the broader dynamics of protocol emissions. The number of farms competing for a fixed weekly GLW allocation changes over time as new farms join, existing farms complete their rewards periods, and new infrastructure projects launch. Because weekly emissions tend to be diluted as more farms enter the protocol, the later weeks in a farm's rewards period are generally the most heavily discounted in terms of expected value.
To illustrate, as of this writing, miners on the Launchpad typically sell with a payback period of around 25 weeks. This implies that the market applies a discount of roughly 4% per week to future rewards - each additional week of rewards is worth about 4% less than the one before it. Using this discount rate, a standard miner with 99 weeks of rewards has a discounted present value equivalent to about 25 weeks of current rewards. A Flash Miner with 75 weeks of rewards, priced using the same discount rate, has a present value equivalent to about 24.2 weeks. The Flash Miner has 24% fewer weeks, but only about 3% less expected rewards value, because the missing weeks are the ones at the tail end of the rewards period, where the cumulative discounting is steepest.
As Glow's deployment pipeline scales and more solar farms come online across new regions, the Launchpad will continue to list miners, with Flash Miners appearing when previously unsold mining inventory can be brought to market. For a deeper discussion of Glow mining mechanics, see A Guide to Glow Mining and The Three Pillars of Glow Solar Mining.