In almost everything in life, we receive something for being loyal. Fly frequently with an airlines and you will receive miles. Buy groceries from your local stores and you will receive points that can be used to offset your next grocery bills. However, in cryptocurrency, we have not seen anything similar. Sure, there are blockchain projects that give you dividends based on how many coins you own, such as KuCoin. However, such a scheme can hardly be a use case of loyalty in our context. True loyalty means that users should be rewarded for their actions, not their inaction.That is the crux of the problem that we plan to address with the introduction of the PLAT tokens and the Cranberry program.

What is PLAT?

PLAT is one of the first ATS tokens on the Aion Network and was developed by August with the specific aim of rewarding loyal members of the Aion community. When deciding which group to reward first within the Aion ecosystem, August felt that miners were crucial stakeholders and thus one of the most important members of the community to focus on first.

What is Cranberry?

Cranberry is to the Aion Network, what the Air Miles program is to airlines. With Air Miles, the more you fly, the more miles you accumulate. As you accumulate enough Air Miles, you can then exchange them for cheaper flights and other things from a rewards catalog. Cranberry is a loyalty program for participants of the Aion Network. Instead of Air Miles however, Cranberry uses PLAT to rewards certain actions from participants. As mentioned above, Cranberry will first focus on Aion miners, who have committed their time and resources to secure the network. Our hope is to incentivize more miners to participate in securing the Aion network.

How do we Incentivize Miners?

Every week, Cranberry will run a weekly draw called the Aion 4/40 game, with a total weekly prize of 4000 AION, including a guaranteed prize of 1000 AION. As miners mine and earn AION, they also earn PLAT for being part of the Cranberry platform. Each PLAT they earn can be used to purchase a ticket to participate in the weekly draw (1 PLAT = 1 Ticket). With each ticket, miners choose 4 numbers from a choice of 40 which enters them into the draw with the chance to win either the grand prize or one of the smaller prizes including the weekly guaranteed prize. If no one wins the grand prize, it will roll over to the next draw.

Similar to any other loyalty program, Cranberry will distribute PLAT only to registered miners. If you are a miner, register for FREE here.

How Exactly is PLAT Distributed

After a miner is registered, PLAT tokens are distributed daily to the registered miner according to the size of his/her mining operation. The number of PLAT distributed to a registered (for free here) miner depends on how many AION that miner mines each day.

As we can see, the more AION mined, the bigger the total PLAT reward. However, the marginal reward shrinks as the total number of AION mined grows. When a miner mines less than 10 AION per day, that miner will receive 1 PLAT for each AION mined. However, when a miner has mined 100 AIONs per day, that miner will only receive 0.5 PLAT for each AION mined. The desired effect here is to better decentralize PLAT ownership, by giving a bit more reward for hobbyist miners relative to their mining operation, compared to big-operation miners.

What’s next?

In short, when building Cranberry and developing PLAT, our goal was to reward engaged community members and encourage others to join. We will continue to roll out other ways to incentivize miners but plan on also engaging other stakeholders, such as dApp developers, node operators, etc. You can also expect us to expand the utility of PLAT tokens to offer more perks to its owners.

Stay tuned.

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