Onocoy

Onocoy is a decentralized, community-powered network that provides high-precision GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) correction data to anyone who needs centimeter-level positioning accuracy. Built on Solana, it operates as a marketplace for Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) correction data, turning a historically expensive and centralized utility into open infrastructure that anyone can contribute to or consume.

The Problem: Precision Positioning Is Too Expensive and Too Fragile

GNSS signals from satellites travel more than 20,000 kilometers before reaching a receiver, arriving too weak and imprecise for demanding applications. Achieving centimeter-level accuracy requires RTK corrections — additional data streams from ground-based reference stations that compensate for atmospheric interference and other error sources.

Historically, these correction networks have been operated by a small number of large commercial providers or government agencies. Coverage follows profitability: dense in wealthy urban centers, sparse or absent in rural, remote, or developing regions. Users pay high subscription fees — often hundreds to thousands of dollars per year — for access to commercial correction services. These networks also represent single points of failure. When a provider's servers go offline, every dependent application loses precision simultaneously.

How Onocoy Works

Onocoy separates reference station operation from correction service delivery, distributing both roles across a global community.

Anyone can install a GNSS reference station and connect it to the Onocoy network. These stations stream raw satellite observation data in RTCM3 format — the standard protocol used across the professional positioning industry. Onocoy aggregates this data, validates its quality through a decentralized validator system, and distributes RTK corrections to end users via NTRIP, another widely supported open standard. The result is a globally accessible correction service with no single operator controlling access or pricing.

Station operators, called miners, earn ONO tokens in exchange for providing validated correction data. Rewards are calculated based on four factors: data quality, uptime, geographic location (with multiplier bonuses for underserved regions), and actual demand for data from that station's coverage zone. This incentive design encourages operators to install stations where coverage is most needed rather than simply where hardware is easiest to deploy.

To further steer infrastructure growth, Onocoy introduced High Value Areas (HVAs) — designated geographic regions where higher token rewards are offered to drive targeted deployments. This mechanism lets the network's DAO directly coordinate physical buildout toward areas with demonstrated demand.

A decentralized validator layer monitors incoming data for anomalies, low-quality signals, and fabricated contributions. This quality enforcement prevents miners from gaming the reward system with bad data and protects the integrity of the corrections that downstream users depend on.

Network Scale and Applications

As of December 2025, the Onocoy network operated more than 6,700 reference stations across 168 countries. The network serves a broad range of precision-positioning use cases: autonomous drones, commercial agricultural robots, robotic lawnmowers, precision-guidance machinery, micro-mobility vehicles, and consumer robotics applications.

The open-protocol approach — NTRIP for delivery, RTCM3 for data format — means Onocoy corrections are compatible with existing professional-grade receivers without proprietary hardware or custom integrations.

ONO Token and Dual-Token Economics

The ONO token is the network's native Solana-based asset with a fixed supply of 810 million. New tokens are released on a schedule with an approximately 16% annual reduction in new supply, analogous to Bitcoin's halving model. This design slows inflation over time as the network matures.

Token allocation: 40% to the community and miners, 32% to an ecosystem fund, 14% to investors, 10% to the team, and 4% to market making. Investor and team allocations are subject to lock periods and linear vesting schedules.

Because Onocoy operates as a Swiss non-profit association, it cannot distribute profits to shareholders. Revenue from data sales instead funds operations, token buybacks, and burns — the only legally available mechanism to return value to the network. The project has executed more than $3.5 million in ONO buybacks from data revenue.

Alongside ONO, the protocol uses Data Credits (DC), a non-transferable token pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. Data Credits are the exclusive means of paying for GNSS correction data streams and are permanently burned upon consumption. This design stabilizes pricing for enterprise users — who can plan costs in USD terms — while creating deflationary pressure on the broader token economy as usage grows.

ONO governance operates through Realms on Solana, initially with one-token-one-vote mechanics, with a planned transition to square-root voting intended to limit concentration of influence. ONO trades on Jupiter DEX and has been listed on several centralized exchanges including MEXC and LBank.

Team and Backing

Onocoy was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. Co-founders Daniel Ammann and Thomas Nigg are veterans of u-blox, one of the world's leading GNSS chipset and positioning technology companies — Ammann is a co-founder of u-blox, while Nigg served as a senior executive there. Thomas Seiler, former CEO of u-blox, serves as an advisor.

The project secured more than $4.2 million in total funding, including a strategic round of over $940,000 from investors including Smart Island Capital and a network of blockchain and IoT industry angels.

Fit Within the Solana Ecosystem

Onocoy is a prominent example of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) on Solana — projects that use blockchain-based token incentives to crowdsource real-world hardware networks. Solana's low transaction fees and high throughput make it well suited to the micropayment economics of per-station streaming data rewards.

The ONO token launched in late July 2025. By the autumn of 2025, the network was distributing more than one million ONO tokens monthly to active miners. The protocol was featured in Syndica's ongoing Solana DePIN deep-dive series tracking on-chain incentives in physical infrastructure buildout.

For developers, the roadmap includes public APIs, expanded decentralized validator infrastructure, CEX integrations, and on-chain governance upgrades — positioning Onocoy's correction network as a programmable positioning layer accessible to applications far beyond the operators of individual hardware stations.