Rewards

How $MESHR rewards are worked out

Two hexagons decide everything on this page: the small one the map draws, and the larger one the ledger counts in. This is the whole reward model, with the real numbers in it, so nobody has to guess what an afternoon of driving is worth.

Two resolutions, one map

The map you look at is drawn in fine cells: H3 resolution 10, about 66 metres from the centre of a cell to a corner. That is the resolution coverage is worth looking at, because one street can be covered and the street behind it not.

Rewards are not counted there. They are booked in a reward cell: H3 resolution 8, about 460 metres to a corner, roughly 0.74 square kilometres of ground. One reward cell holds 49 fine cells, and it is the unit the tokenomics is written in.

So one drive lights up many fine cells on the map and lands in far fewer reward cells in the ledger. Both numbers are true at the same time, and the page you are reading decides which of them you see.

One reward cell (H3 res 8, about 460 m edge) and the 49 fine cells inside it (H3 res 10, about 66 m edge). The lit ones are roughly what a single pass measures.

First discovery: one token, once, for good

The first collector to measure a reward cell validly is credited with 1 MESHR, multiplied by the terrain factor of that cell. It happens once per cell, for all time. Nobody can discover it a second time, and it cannot be taken away from whoever did.

A cell is not the same thing on two frequency bands. The reward key is the band plus the cell: the same ground on 868 MHz and on 915 MHz is two reward cells, with two first discoveries, because they are two different radio conditions and a map that folded them together would be wrong about both.

Three reward cells nobody had measured, and the same three after one valid pass. Each opens exactly once, for 1 MESHR times its terrain factor.

After discovery, the cell emits

Once a cell has been discovered it emits 1 MESHR per year for as long as somebody keeps it fresh. That is 1/365 of a token a day, about 0.00274 MESHR.

Each UTC day belongs to whoever measures that cell validly on that day. One day, one taker. If nobody comes, the day is not lost and it is not burned: it waits. The next collector to measure the cell validly takes every day that has accumulated since the last valid measurement, days x 1/365.

The emission is deliberately small. It is a wage for keeping the map fresh, not a yield to farm: thirty passes down the same street in one day are worth one day, and the second pass of that day is worth nothing.

One cell over time: the discovery, three ordinary days, then a hundred days nobody took, collected by a single later pass. Bar heights are not to scale.

What counts as a valid measurement

A measurement has to be a real reception, by a real radio, moving through real ground. The exact thresholds stay unpublished on purpose, because a published threshold is an instruction manual for faking one. The principles are not secret:

At least three packets from the cell on that day. One packet is an accident; three is a presence.
A minimum spacing between packets, in the ten second class, so a burst from a node standing still cannot stand in for a pass.
Signal to noise above the threshold of the radio preset in use. A packet that barely arrived is still news about coverage, but it is not a sample the ledger will pay for.
Plausible speed. The distance and the time between two receptions have to describe something a vehicle or a person could actually do.
Radio physics. Duty cycle and airtime limits mean a node cannot have legally sent what some uploads claim it sent, and those are refused.

A measurement that fails these checks still counts for the map. It is stored, it is drawn, it colours its fine cell, and it simply does not move the token ledger. Coverage is worth having even where it cannot be paid for.

A worked example, with real numbers

A mapper drives one afternoon and comes back with 27 fine cells. On the map that is 27 lit hexagons. In the ledger those 27 fine cells fall into 6 reward cells, and in all six nobody had ever been. Along the same route there were 7 cell-days of emission left to take.

First discoveries	6 cells x 1 MESHR x 1.0	6.000
Emission taken	7 cell-days x 0.00274	0.019
Total		6.019

The afternoon in the ledger: 27 fine cells spread across 6 reward cells, and the tally that follows from them.

The second mapper matters just as much. Somebody who drives the same route the next week finds no cell left to discover and takes the emission instead: their afternoon is worth cell-days rather than tokens. That is the model working, not failing. The map is current because that second pass happened.

The terrain factor is versioned, and never retroactive

Every discovery is credited as 1 MESHR times the terrain factor of the cell. In version 1 the factor is 1.0 everywhere: plain, mountain, city, coast, all the same. That is deliberate. Nobody should be paid more for hard ground before there is a defensible way to say which ground was hard.

Later versions will value cells that are hard to reach higher, and each version carries a number and a date. A new version applies to what is discovered after it and to nothing before it. What was credited stays credited at the factor that was in force. The ledger is never rewritten backwards.

Why resolution 8, honestly

Three reasons, and none of them is elegance. Driving through a cell about 900 metres across takes long enough to collect three packets, while a finer reward cell would pay only for walking and standing still. A pool of 700 million MESHR handed out one token per cell lasts decades at any plausible mapping rate. And one token per cell is a sentence a person can hold in their head.

Qualified, paid, pending

Qualified. The measurement passed the checks and the reward has been worked out. It is provisional: computed by the service, not yet on the chain.
Paid. The amount went into an approved batch and was transferred to your wallet on the test network. This is the only status that means something actually moved.
Pending. A batch exists and has not been approved, or has not settled yet. Nothing is lost while it waits.

Read this part first

$MESHR exists only on mapminter-testnet-1, a Cosmos test network. A test network is a disposable practice environment.
It has no monetary value, and it is not intended to acquire one.
It is not for sale. There is no sale, no presale, no allocation, no fundraising round, no waiting list and no price. MapMinter will never ask you for money or for a wallet you fund.

The $MESHR page says all of it at full length.

How amounts are shown

Reward amounts are shown rounded. A single day of emission is 0.00274 MESHR, and a screen printing every digit of every tally would be unreadable, so the display shortens and the ledger does not. What is on the chain is the exact amount; what is on a screen is that amount, cut to fit. How far each surface rounds is a property of that surface, not of the reward model.

Questions about rewards

Questions about rewards belong in the community: the MapMinter group on Telegram is where a tally that looks wrong, a cell that stayed dark and a batch that is still pending get looked at by people who have seen the same thing.