On August 15, Grass announced the end of its closed beta phase on the X platform and said it was taking a snapshot to determine the upcoming airdrop qualifications. Users’ network participation (weighted by epoch) will serve as the benchmark for receiving rewards.

In the coming weeks, the team will provide a detailed guide to airdrop eligibility checks and share more information about token economics. The future phase of Grass will shift from building core infrastructure to supporting large-scale development of applications that combine user interests with the network. This snapshot will be used to determine the upcoming airdrop eligibility, and the user's network participation (weighted by epoch) will be used as the reward benchmark.

It is reported that the number of Grass users has reached 2 million. As a decentralized network, Grass aims to provide the data needed for AI model training by accessing the public network. This makes Grass an important part of the AI ​​data layer in the process of expanding to clean and prepare structured data sets, laying the foundation for its foundation in the field of AI.

01

Financing and technical background

Wynd Network, the team behind Grass, has successfully completed a $3.5 million seed round led by Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital. Together with the pre-seed round led by No Limit Holdings, Wynd's total financing has reached $4.5 million.

This round of financing was provided by Bitscale, Big Brain, Advisors Anonymous, Typhon V, Mozaik and other companies. The funds will be strategically used to enhance Grass's technical infrastructure, expand the node network and improve the data verification process.

Grass is a decentralized bandwidth market where users can help AI labs obtain network data for training models by selling their idle Internet connections. Grass uses users' IP addresses to sell excess bandwidth, thereby bypassing the restrictions on data center IP addresses imposed by many websites. The entire process is anonymous and 100% private, ensuring user privacy and data security.

This collected bandwidth is used to extract raw data from the network and convert it into AI datasets. These datasets are very useful for AI developers and researchers who need a lot of training data. The core technology of Grass is Socrates, developed by Wynd Labs, an AI development tool that excels at collecting unstructured data from the network and structuring it for easy reading. As a result, Grass becomes an AI data warehouse that provides other AI systems with the data needed for model training.

Grass is the first project deployed on Solana that combines AI, Depin, and Solana technologies, positioning itself as the data layer for AI.

The AI ​​data layer is a critical starting point in the AI ​​development process, responsible for the collection and preparation of data to provide a foundation for model training. In the field of AI, the quality of data is critical because the ability of the model depends entirely on the correlations and patterns in the training data. Even the most advanced AI model will lead to inaccurate predictions if its training data is biased or of poor quality.

In addition, in the integration of AI and Web3, data, as a core component, together with computing resources, constitutes a key resource in AI competition. Although most of the industry's attention is focused on the computing level, the raw data in the data acquisition process provides many interesting value directions, mainly including access to public Internet data and data protection.

Accessing public Internet data: This direction aims to build a distributed crawler network that can crawl the entire Internet in a few days, obtain massive data sets, or access very specific Internet data in real time. However, to crawl large data sets on the Internet, the network requirements are very high, and at least a few hundred nodes are required to start some meaningful work. Fortunately, Grass has built a distributed crawler network with more than 2 million nodes, actively sharing Internet bandwidth with the goal of crawling the entire Internet. This shows the great potential of economic incentives in attracting valuable resources.

Access to protected data: While Grass provides a level playing field when it comes to public data, there is still a challenge in leveraging the underlying data: access to proprietary datasets. Many startups are leveraging cryptographic tools to enable AI developers to build and fine-tune large language models using the underlying data structures of proprietary datasets while keeping sensitive information private.

In summary, Grass, as a representative of the AI ​​data layer, allows users to participate in and benefit from the data preparation and collection process, which is not only critical to the performance of AI models, but also accounts for a large part of the total workload of implementing AI systems.

02

Market Potential

Grass is built on Solana, which allows it to take advantage of Solana’s high throughput.

However, it is not feasible to store the traceability of each crawling task on L1, so Grass built a rollup, used the ZK processor to batch process the traceability proof, and then published it to Solana. This rollup is called the "data layer of AI" and becomes the data ledger of all crawled data.

Grass’s Web 3-first approach gives it several advantages over centralized residential proxy providers. First, by using rewards to encourage users to share bandwidth directly, it more fairly distributes the value generated by AI, while also saving the cost of paying application developers to bundle their code.

In terms of market potential, Grass currently has 2.2 million independent users, and after TGE, more users will flock in because they realize that there is no negative impact. In addition, the Grass network is owned and operated by its users. Users gain a stake in the network by running nodes and earning Grass points because they help operate the network. Unlike other networks, Grass aims to be a fair collective project that benefits all participants, not just a privilege for a few.

Other market potentials include:

GRASS is widely distributed: nodes come from more than 190 countries, 50% in Asia Pacific, 40% in the US and EU, and 10% in the rest of the world.

Strong technical foundation: It processes 1 million network requests per second and crawls public data through more than 2.2 million nodes around the world in just one week, which makes it capable of competing with companies such as Google and Microsoft.

Long project lifecycle: Grass has a robust product roadmap that is always expanding.

Strong and reliable investment support: Led by Polychain and Tribe, it has a luxurious investment lineup.

Easy to participate: Running a Grass node is very simple, users only need to register and install the Chrome extension, and the application will do the rest. This makes it possible for anyone to participate in AI development with almost no effort.

Support for decentralized and open source AI: Grass not only helps train traditional artificial intelligence, but also supports the creation of decentralized and open source AI by creating alternative paths to access network data. Traditionally, companies such as Google and Microsoft have monopolized the data indexing rights of the public network, and by providing this service, Grass strives to make public network data accessible to everyone and prevent a few companies from monopolizing the development of AI.

If Grass's user base expands 20 times, it will be able to train an AI from scratch that can replace ChatGPT, which is one of the reasons why it has the potential to become a leader in the DEPIN track.

summary

Grass' mission is to correct the mistakes of the Web 2.0 era and promote the values ​​of Web3.

By participating in GRASS, users are not only getting paid for building the network, but they are also helping to create a fairer, more just world. The development of AI begins at the data layer, and GRASS is committed to building the infrastructure needed for the world we want to live in.

In the 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, allowing everyone to fairly access and utilize public network data. Grass's innovation and unique positioning have enabled it to occupy an important position in the field of AI and Web3, and it is expected to become a leader in this field.