The Beauty of Simple Games
Humanity’s best games are defined by simple rules that elegantly unfold into infinite complexity. Chess requires only that you checkmate the king. Go's objective is to surround more territory than your opponent, and Poker asks that you build the strongest hand, or convince others you have it. Their rules could fit on an index card, yet they give rise to billions of possibilities and have sparked centuries of strategy and evolution.
These games captivate us with their deceptive simplicity. Anyone can learn the basics in an hour, but mastery can take a lifetime of single-minded pursuit.
Crypto's Infrastructure Games
Bitcoin introduced a similarly elegant game and placed its contestants within the world's most ruthlessly competitive arena: capitalism. The protocol's rules are straightforward; participants, called miners, compete to provide the computational power that secures a decentralized, peer-to-peer network. Miners win by converting electricity into hashes more efficiently than their competitors.
Like all great games, its outward simplicity disguised its eventual complexity, as Bitcoin's simple ruleset ignited a competition that built the largest computational network in history, drew billions of investment into specialized hardware, and pushed chip design to its limits. An entire industry emerged from a fierce global competition.
This was not an isolated occurrence. Mining networks repeatedly demonstrate that competitive token incentives can mobilize capital and orchestrate massive infrastructure deployment at unprecedented scale. This recurring pattern sparked Glow’s founding insight: apply the same formula to the world's energy grids. Create a game where the objective is maximal solar infrastructure deployment, fuel it with token emissions, and let competition drive the world towards a more sustainable future.
From Mining Rigs to Solar Farms
In pure mining networks, the protocol serves as miners’ sole revenue source. For example, in Bitcoin, miners earn income exclusively from the protocol's rewards pool; removing a Bitcoin miner from the network effectively renders it an expensive space heater. Block after block, miners engage in a merciless competition to earn a fixed pile of rewards. Each miner's survival hinges on its efficiency relative to its peers. Since there are no external revenues to fall back on, the network quickly weeds out any Bitcoin miner that lags behind, creating the network’s relentless pressure for innovation and optimization.
Solar farms are different. They sell electricity to the grid and earn substantial revenue independent of token incentives. This difference creates a challenge for Glow’s incentive design. The naive approach to incentivize solar would be to distribute tokens to solar farms based on their energy production. However, this approach fails to create a competitive environment because many solar farms are already comfortably viable from their electricity revenue alone. These already viable farms will gladly accept tokens on top of their existing profits, but they face no existential threat pushing them to outperform their peers.
This leads Glow to its core design challenge: how do you create the competitive intensity of crypto mining when participants already earn substantial revenue outside the protocol? Without existential threats, solar farms face little pressure to force continuous improvement. Glow’s task is to build an incentive system that forces solar farms to compete with the same intensity as crypto miners, rewarding only the most impactful solar operations.
Removing the Safety Net
Glow solves this problem by removing the safety net. Instead of allowing solar farms to keep their electricity revenue, Glow requires them to stake it in the protocol, and they earn that revenue back if they are competitive with other Glow farms. This mechanism pushes Glow’s farms into the same ruthless competition that drives Bitcoin miners to constantly improve.
Here’s how the model conceptually works:
Consider a solar farm on Glow that generates $10,000 in electricity sales per week. Instead of simply pocketing that revenue, the farm commits this revenue to the Glow protocol. Every other participating Glow solar farm does the same, contributing their own earnings. The protocol then measures each farm’s performance, defined as carbon emissions reduced per dollar of revenue, and redistributes revenue based on those results.
Let's say that, on a given week, on average, Glow solar farms displaced 80 tons of carbon per 10,000 dollars of revenue they generated:
- Average farms displace exactly this much carbon per dollar of revenue, and will earn back the entirety of their deposited revenue.
- Underperforming farms displace less carbon per dollar of revenue than the average, and recover only part of their deposited revenue.
- Outperforming farms displace more carbon per dollar of revenue than the average, and earn back the entirety of their deposited revenue, as well as forfeitures from the underperformers.
Each week repeats this cycle. Farms deposit revenue and receive GLW tokens, Glow measures impact, and redistributes revenue to the farms driving the most carbon displacement. This incentive structure mirrors Bitcoin’s competitive dynamics while ensuring that the overall game increases the expected profits of highly competitive solar farms.
Evolutionary Pressure and Recursive Competition
Glow's contest creates clear hierarchies that evolve over time; each reward loop cycle continuously shifts the competitive landscape as:
- Winners grow and reinvest, increasing their scale and raising the average production level.
- Underperformers drop out, which removes the weakest projects and further raises the average production.
- Average farms become underperformers, as the average production level rises relentlessly.
This constant reshaping compels each participant to improve simply to keep pace; high-impact farms reinvest profits to expand and strengthen their competitive edge, while weaker farms either adapt or exit.
These economic pressures mirror crypto mining’s survival-of-the-fittest dynamic, and the bar for carbon displacement rises with every competitive cycle. With each turn of the loop, competition intensifies and solar deployment accelerates wherever it has the greatest impact.
The GLW Incentive
Glow's mechanisms are excellent at creating competitive mining dynamics, but solar farms are unlikely to opt in without an additional incentive. A solar farm that is barely breaking even has little reason to risk its revenue simply for the chance to recoup it.
Glow provides this incentive via token emissions. Each week, the protocol mints a steady stream of GLW and distributes it to participating farms in proportion to their revenues. This shifts the contest from zero-sum revenue distribution to a positive-sum game. An average-performing farm not only recovers its revenue but also earns a steady stream of GLW on top, and even a slightly underperforming farm can increase its overall revenue if it is close enough to the average. For farms on the margin, those token rewards can be the boost that transforms a non-viable project into a viable one.
This incentive draws farms in, and once they join, Glow’s competitive mechanics take over, driving them to reduce costs, enhance operations, and target higher-impact sites to outperform their peers and recover their revenues. Token emissions attract participation, while the competition ensures that each token spent produces as much verified carbon displacement as possible.
Over time, as more farms join and the network benchmark rises, GLW emissions continue to serve as the fuel that sustains this cycle. Token incentives draw in new projects, keep marginal builders engaged, and provide upside that compounds for the farms most effective at displacing fossil-fuel emissions.
Expanding Solar's Global Impact
Glow’s competitive mechanisms hyperoptimize for squeezing the maximum carbon impact out of every dollar of token subsidy. Higher returns come not from building ever larger projects in markets where solar is already profitable, but from targeting overlooked regions where carbon displacement is greatest and revenues are thin. Already profitable solar continues to thrive outside the protocol, while Glow directs its incentives towards the margins, expanding solar into regions with more limited deployments.
Solar farms that bring clean energy to these lower revenue, fossil-heavy grids immediately rise in the rankings, reclaim revenues, and capture surplus from weaker competitors. As this cycle repeats, the average efficiency of the network improves, the benchmark for competitiveness rises, and solar development flows into regions once deemed too unattractive to pursue.
Glow creates a direct profit motive for solar installers to pursue markets they would otherwise avoid, turning “hard to finance” into “worth developing”, ultimately driving the solar industry towards precisely the zones where new clean-energy capacity displaces the most fossil-fuel emissions. The protocol’s recursive competition pushes solar development not where returns are already strong, but where impact is most needed.
The Protocol Deposit
Glow's competition introduces powerful incentives to expand solar's viability and impact, but to work as intended, it needs a way to collect every farm's revenue every week, as outlined in the conceptual model. In practice, collecting revenue from thousands of farms each week would be unworkable. The mix of currencies, jurisdictions, and payment systems would create overwhelming complexity, and the administrative burden would quickly outweigh the benefit of the competition itself.
Glow solves this by turning each farm’s lifetime electricity revenues into a single upfront payment. Instead of putting revenue into the competitive pool every week, farms commit the net present value (NPV) of their expected lifetime electricity sales upfront to Glow as a "Protocol Deposit."
Because farms pledge Protocol Deposits upfront, Glow no longer needs to collect their weekly revenues. Farms continue to sell power to their grids and earn revenue as usual, but their deposits inside Glow now serve as substitutes for that revenue in the competition. By depositing the NPV of all future revenue, a farm effectively places all of its weekly contributions into the system at once. From there, Glow gradually distributes it back out in proportion to performance, just as it would if farms contributed their revenues on a weekly basis. Farms that perform well recover their deposits more quickly and collect surpluses from weaker peers. Underperforming farms experience slower deposit recovery and forfeit part of their deposits to more efficient operators.
This adds a second financial layer on top of ordinary operations. Farms still earn their real-world revenue while simultaneously competing inside Glow to recover their deposit faster, capture surplus from underperformers, and earn GLW token rewards. The effect is that farms are, in a sense, realizing the value of their revenue twice: once in the market, and once inside Glow’s competitive game.
The Protocol Deposit still requires participants to risk their revenue and compete on carbon displacement per dollar, creating the same market pressure in which outperformers grow and underperformers shrink. The deposit model simply shifts all of that commitment to the beginning, eliminating the friction of continuous payments while keeping the competitive dynamics intact.
Simple Games, Compounding Impact
Like Chess, Go, and Bitcoin, Glow begins with a simple objective that leads to emergent complexities and optimizations. Developers study grids to identify markets heavily dependent on fossil fuels, refine their operations to capture every ounce of efficiency, and adopt more advanced technologies to increase output. What begins as a competition over carbon displacement evolves into a rich ecosystem of strategies that push the system forward in ways that no single plan could orchestrate, all driven by the goal of reducing humanity's carbon footprint.
Crypto has repeatedly shown that mining networks can mobilize substantial amounts of capital to construct global infrastructure at blistering speeds. Glow applies these incentives to solar development, creating a competitive loop that attracts new entrants and fierce competition, perpetually raising the standard for climate impact. Over time, a contest over deposits and tokens grows into a self-reinforcing loop that channels every turn of competition into measurable progress, harnessing capitalism to build humanity’s sustainable energy future.