On August 15th, Grass announced on the X platform that its closed beta phase has concluded and that a snapshot is being taken to determine eligibility for the upcoming airdrop. The network participation of users, weighted by epoch, will serve as the benchmark for receiving rewards.
In the coming weeks, the team will provide a detailed guide to check airdrop eligibility and share more information about the tokenomics. The future phases of Grass will shift from building core infrastructure to supporting large-scale development, with applications that align user interests with the network. This snapshot will determine the airdrop eligibility, and users' network participation, weighted by epoch, will be the basis for rewards.
It has been reported that the number of Grass users has reached 2 million. As a decentralized network, Grass aims to provide data needed for AI model training through access to the public internet. This makes Grass a critical component of the AI data layer as it scales up to clean and prepare structured datasets, laying the foundation for its role in the AI field.
01
Funding and Technical Background
The team behind Grass, Wynd Network, successfully completed a $3.5 million seed round led by Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital. Combined with a pre-seed round led by No Limit Holdings, Wynd's total funding has reached $4.5 million.
This round of funding was supported by companies including Bitscale, Big Brain, Advisors Anonymous, Typhon V, and Mozaik. The funds will be strategically used to enhance Grass's technical infrastructure, expand the node network, and improve data verification processes.
Grass is a decentralized bandwidth marketplace where users can sell their idle internet connections, helping AI labs acquire network data for training models. Grass uses users' IP addresses to sell surplus bandwidth, bypassing many websites' restrictions on data center IP addresses. The entire process is anonymous and 100% private, ensuring user privacy and data security.
The collected bandwidth is used to extract raw data from the web and convert it into AI datasets. These datasets are invaluable to AI developers and researchers who need vast amounts of training data. Grass's core technology, developed by Wynd Labs, is Socrates, an AI development tool that excels at collecting unstructured data from the web and structuring it for readability. As a result, Grass becomes an AI data warehouse, providing the data needed for model training to other AI systems.
Grass is the first project deployed on Solana that combines AI, Depin, and Solana technology, positioning itself as the data layer for AI.
The AI data layer is a critical initial stage in the AI development process, primarily responsible for data collection and preparation, providing the foundation for model training. In the AI field, data quality is crucial, as a model's capabilities entirely depend on the relevance and patterns in the training data. Even the most advanced AI models will produce inaccurate predictions if their training data is biased or of low quality.
Moreover, in the convergence of AI and Web3, data, along with computational resources, forms the key resources in AI competition. Although most industry attention is focused on the computational aspect, the raw data in the data acquisition process offers many intriguing value directions, mainly including access to public internet data and protected data.
Access to Public Internet Data: This direction aims to build a distributed crawling network that can crawl the entire internet in a few days to obtain massive datasets or access very specific internet data in real-time. However, to crawl vast datasets across the internet, network demand is extremely high, requiring at least a few hundred nodes to start meaningful work. Fortunately, Grass has established a distributed crawling network with over 2 million nodes, actively sharing internet bandwidth with the goal of crawling the entire internet. This demonstrates the enormous potential of economic incentives in attracting valuable resources.
Access to Protected Data: While Grass provides a level playing field for public data, the challenge of accessing proprietary datasets remains. Many startups are utilizing cryptographic tools that allow AI developers to build and fine-tune large language models using the underlying data structures of proprietary datasets while keeping sensitive information private.
In conclusion, as a representative of the AI data layer, Grass allows users to participate in the data preparation and collection process, benefiting from it. This process is not only crucial to the performance of AI models but also constitutes a significant portion of the overall workload involved in implementing AI systems.
02
Market Potential
Grass is built on Solana, allowing it to leverage Solana's high throughput capabilities.
However, storing the provenance of each scraping task on a Layer 1 (L1) blockchain is not feasible. To address this, Grass has developed a rollup that utilizes a ZK processor to batch-process provenance proofs before publishing them to Solana. This rollup is referred to as the "data layer for AI," serving as the data ledger for all scraped data.
Grass’s Web3-first approach offers several advantages over centralized residential proxy providers. Firstly, by using incentives to encourage users to share their bandwidth directly, it more equitably distributes the value generated by AI while also reducing the costs associated with paying developers to bundle their code with applications.
In terms of market potential, Grass already boasts 2.2 million unique users, and more are expected to join post-TGE (Token Generation Event) as they realize there are no negative implications. Additionally, the Grass network is owned and operated by its users. By running nodes and earning Grass tokens, users gain a stake in the network, as they help maintain its operation. Unlike other networks, Grass is designed to be a fair collective project that benefits all participants, not just a privileged few.
Other aspects of its market potential include:
- Wide Distribution: Grass nodes are located in over 190 countries, with 50% in the Asia-Pacific region, 40% in the US and EU, and 10% in other parts of the world.
- Robust Technical Foundation: The network handles 1 million requests per second and, in just one week, scraped public data from over 2.2 million global nodes, positioning it to compete with companies like Google and Microsoft.
- Long Project Lifecycle: Grass has a solid product roadmap and continues to expand.
- Strong and Reliable Investment Support: Backed by leading investors, including Polychain and Tribe, the project has a star-studded investment lineup.
- Ease of Participation: Running a Grass node is incredibly simple—users just need to register and install a Chrome extension, and the application takes care of the rest. This makes it almost effortless for anyone to participate in the growth of AI.
- Support for Decentralized and Open-Source AI: Grass not only aids in training traditional AI but also supports the creation of decentralized and open-source AI by providing alternative pathways to access network data. Traditionally, companies like Google and Microsoft have monopolized public web data indexing, but Grass is working to ensure that everyone has access to public web data, preventing the monopoly of AI development by a few corporations.
With just a 20-fold increase in user base, Grass could potentially train an AI from scratch that could rival ChatGPT, underscoring its potential to be a leader in the DEPIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) sector.
Summary
Grass’s mission is to correct the mistakes of the Web 2.0 era and advance the values of Web3.
By participating in Grass, users are not only rewarded for helping to build the network but are also contributing to the creation of a fairer and more just world. The development of AI starts with the data layer, and Grass is committed to building the infrastructure necessary for the world we want to live in.
In this process, Grass not only provides users with a way to participate in the AI revolution but also promotes the development of decentralized and open-source AI, ensuring that everyone has equal access to and can leverage public web data. Grass’s innovation and unique positioning have secured its importance in the AI and Web3 sectors, and it is poised to become a leader in these fields.
