As we all know, Shixiong is one of the first Chinese KOLs to introduce Grass (Xiaocao) on the Internet. After more than a year of digging, Grass finally came out two days ago. Although the project party set strict witch rules and a single account token limit, many studios were reversed.
However, for retail investors, you can get a lot of tokens by hanging up the machine without any work. According to the current OTC price, it is also several hundred dollars, which is simply free money. If you work hard, you can get tens of thousands of coins like Brother Shi.
Moreover, the fact that a large number of studios have been reversed is actually a good thing for the secondary market of tokens, because it means that there will not be a large number of cheap chips being dumped by big players. The official even published an article specifically to mock the professional reversed teams:
So is Depin still worth it? When the market is falling and you have no choice but to wait, if you don’t need to spend extra money and can make money after waiting for a while, why not?
Today I’d like to tell you about another project called DAWN, which may appear stronger than GRASS on paper and has a very similar mining method. It uses network bandwidth to mine based on a Chrome plug-in on Solana.
DAWN Project Background and Team
Let's first look at the money in their pockets and who is the leader.
The project was previously called Andrena, but is now renamed DAWN
The total financing is 33 million. Dragonfly led the two rounds of investment, and the well-known market maker Wintermute also participated. The project team has a very impressive background, and the main body is the Andrena team. The company was founded in 2016 and has been providing Internet services in 10 states in the United States (including New York, New Jersey, Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Pennsylvania) since 2019 using wireless equipment installed on hundreds of rooftops.
Their vision for DAWN is to "have the same impact on the Internet broadband industry as solar panels did on electricity. Consumers own and produce their own bandwidth, and earn revenue by selling excess bandwidth back to the grid just as they would sell excess electricity." This is consistent with what they have been doing for many years, so it also convinced DragonFly to invest a lot of money in them early on.
To put it simply: if you buy unlimited wifi service, can you sell some of the unused data to your neighbors? This way, everyone’s costs are lower. They scaled up this business logic and added token incentives.
(Of course, even if the plug-in is turned on, it will not affect your Internet speed. I tested it myself for two days and there is no need to worry.)
Another highlight of the team is that Andrena worked with Princeton University professor Pramod Viswanath to implement "proof of return" for DAWN. Proof of return ensures that the node has a functional connection to the wider Internet. This professor is very famous and is a core contributor to the open source AI development platform Sentient. In short, it is a super popular AI project, which can be regarded as a platform for their project.
So it is not difficult to understand why Messari gave them a lot of publicity in its recent tweets. It can be simply understood as a depin project saved by white Ivy League elites.
Brother Lion traced back the project's Twitter and some materials and found that they did not start to promote the implementation of the project until 2024 (DAWN's name Twitter was registered in 2024), and did not start the current mining until August (could it be that they were under pressure after receiving the second round of financing?)
From a positive perspective, the project mining has just started, and the Chrome plug-in has only more than 300 comments. There is not even a Chinese channel in Discord. There are relatively few Chinese people who are starting to get involved, so it is definitely in the early stages now.
How to mine
The mining method is very simple, almost identical to GRASS:
Click the link below to go to the Chrome store and install the extension
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dawn-validator-chrome-ext/fpdkjdnhkakefebpekbdhillbhonfjjp?authuser=0&hl=en
Then register with your email address, and remember to fill in Brother Lion's referral code:
8wk3boio
There are benefits for both sides.
You need to click verify in your mailbox later, even if it is successful
In addition, you must take advantage of the newbie benefits. Click "Boost rewards" and go to the next page to follow Twitter, Discord and TG to get 15,000 points directly. Then just open the webpage and you're done. Don't worry about it. It won't affect your daily work and will start counting points automatically.
When you see the scores start to appear in this place, you can ignore it. The scores will run automatically when you turn on the computer. Simple?
A few reminders about mining rules:
1. Currently, the Chinese Internet cannot mine directly, and the connection quality will be displayed as 0. Therefore, a VPN is needed. After testing, the connection quality is mostly 40%. As long as it is not 0, there is no problem. This is very different from GRASS, because the score given per hour is the same, all 1440 points.
2. If you log in to the same account on multiple devices, your score will be dispersed. So if you have time, you can use multiple accounts.
3. There is no restriction on multiple devices per IP for the time being. I believe there will be restrictions in the future. Is this the start-up benefit period?
In short, it is not a big problem to make a little money by just hanging it up. Whether to invest more capital to expand the scale depends on the progress of the project.
I will keep you updated with more policy updates.
