Grass: Farming Points Directly from Your Laptop
Grass is a network that connects the laptops of around 2 million people from 190 countries. They earn rewards by sharing their unused internet traffic with AI developers.
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The project's mission is to prevent the concentration of artificial intelligence in the hands of a few, enabling ordinary people to participate in the development of AI technology and profit from it.
The project is backed by Wynd Labs, a company specializing in supporting AI through accessible training data. Besides Grass, Wynd Labs is also developing the financial information platform Richmond Circle Data and Socrates, a data repository for training LLMs.
How Does Grass Work?
Once a user installs the Grass web extension on their computer, the application starts sharing their unused internet bandwidth with partner AI companies. The demand for traffic and computing power from AI developers is consistently high, as these resources are essential for data collection and training large language models. This setup allows users to sell their excess internet traffic, with Grass acting as the intermediary.
The setup appears to be beneficial for all parties: the Grass network participant earns money from unused bandwidth (which has a lower market value than direct traffic from a provider), AI companies save costs, and Grass earns a margin.
When you install a Grass node, the network will occasionally route web requests using your internet connection. Think of it as your computer checking a random website every once in a while. None of this will be visible to you and it will not affect your internet experience at all
explains the project team.
The developers also emphasize that Grass is solely a bandwidth-sharing network. According to Wynd Labs, their clients do not have access to users' confidential data. However, there are some discrepancies with this statement that we will explore later.
Grass Protocol Architecture
Grass is deployed on the Solana network but is not yet a full-fledged blockchain project. The web scraping process (a technology for extracting internet data from web pages) and the reward system are not decentralized and remain under the control of Wynd Labs. However, there are plans to deploy Grass on its own L2 network in the future.
As of June 2024, the Grass mechanism operates as follows: A client requests data from Grass located on a specific internet resource. The protocol directs this request to a node. The node connects to the server and retrieves the necessary data. The protocol encrypts the data and sends it back to the client.
In addition to nodes, this functionality is supported by:
- Routers: They direct the request to a specific node and transmit the node's response to the validator.
- Validators: They verify the client's request, pass it to the router, and then check, encrypt, and sign the data received from it.
Grass Protocol Architecture Source: getgrass.io
The announced launch of the L2 network based on Solana will significantly enhance the protocol's design. Specifically, the developers plan to add:
- ZK Processor: his component will receive data from the validator, transfer it to the L2 storage, and generate a Zero-Knowledge Proof, which will be published on the main network.
- Data Ledger: This will store the received data within the L2 network.
EEM (Edge Embedding Models): A proprietary solution for processing large data sets, enabling Wynd Labs to market structured data as a separate product in the AI market.
The company expects that deploying the Grass protocol on its own network will allow it to process approximately 1 million requests per second.
When a dataset is scraped from the web, the network will keep track of which node it was routed through and reward them proportionately. This could dramatically increase user rewards, and no one has ever done it before
promise the developers.
How to Earn Grass Points
To earn Grass Points, visit the project's website and go to the appropriate online app store. Download Grass and add it to Chrome as an extension.
Note: The extension can read and modify all data on all websites. This fact does not fully align with the claim that Wynd Labs' clients do not have access to users' confidential data. Along with the centralized nature of the project, this is perhaps the most critical point of concern for Grass.
After adding Grass, it should appear in the extensions tab.
Register on Grass.io using your email address. You will need a referral code to register on Grass – you can search for one on X (formerly Twitter). There is no need to connect your cryptocurrency wallet to Grass.
After registering, you will land on the main Grass dashboard. Click “Connect.”
You are now officially a node operator and earn Grass Points as long as you have an internet connection.
You can earn additional Grass Points by using your personal referral code or link to register new users. This offers 20% of the points accumulated by the invited participants.
What is the Current Price of a Grass Point?
As reported by Whales Market, the average price of a Grass Point is currently $0.00099. Whales Market is a platform that facilitates over-the-counter transactions, allowing trading of points and tokens prior to their official release. Often, the market price at launch closely matches the pre-launch price set on Whales Market.
The official launch date for the Grass token has not yet been announced. However, it is expected that future rewards from Grass could be redeemed in various forms such as cryptocurrency, gift cards, or PayPal transfers.
Grass Investors
In late 2023, Grass successfully completed a seed funding round, raising $3.5 million led by Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital. Additional investors in the project include venture capitalists such as Bitscale, Big Brain, Advisors Anonymous, Typhon V, Mozaik, and others. Previously, during a pre-seed funding round conducted by No Limit Holdings, the project raised approximately $1 million. This brings the total investment in Grass to around $4.5 million.
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