What is Grass? The Data Layer of AI

What is Grass?

Developed as the first product from Wynd Labs, Grass aims to democratize and decentralize the internet’s resources, and ensure fair compensation for all.

Through their Chrome Extension and mobile app, Grass offers a decentralized residential proxy market, allowing users to leverage their unused bandwidth to earn a stake in the web scraping necessary for building AI, creating a more equitable internet ecosystem.

Grass are also developing proprietary datasets and AI models to contribute towards the decentralization of AI as a whole, with the aim to make the vast knowledge of the internet both open source and accessible.

On top of this, Grass is aiming to play a direct role in parsing unstructured web data into a format that large language models (LLMs) can train from, making that data accessible via APIs, and transforming the internet into an openly accessible and structured knowledge base.

The ultimate goal for Grass is to become the foundational layer for AI decentralization, contributing to the creation of a global, open-source repository of human knowledge.

How does Grass work?

Available via a Chrome Extension or mobile app, Grass collects your unused bandwidth and uses it to help power the web scraping necessary for AI to develop, train and improve.

Crucially, it does this by only leveraging bandwidth that you are not using, meaning that not only are you rewarded for being a part of the AI ecosystem, but you won’t experience any slowdowns with the apps and services you use.

By using Grass, users earn Grass Points. These can be converted into network ownership, which can then be sold to verified companies for uses such as web scraping and market research using cryptocurrency as a medium. Additional payout methods are being explored, such as fiat options via PayPal, gift cards, and the ability to take part in network governance.

Grass takes a firm stance on security. The app collects basic information, such as uptime, IP address connections, sign-up emails and passwords, but does not access any personal information on users devices.

As an example of their scraping prowess, and the sheer power of the bandwidth shared so far, the Grass team scraped the entirety of blog hosting website Medium in the span of two days, totalling tens of millions of articles and a word count that’s likely to be in the tens of billions.

What has Grass accomplished so far?

Grass entered Beta in June 2023 as a Chrome Extension, and launched a Referral Program to reward early adopters with additional Grass Points.

The Grass Mobile app followed in August 2023, allowing users to earn Grass Points 24/7 – so long as they’re connected to WiFi or 4G/5G services.

Rapid growth ensued, reaching tens of thousands of sign-ups per day by December 2023. This led to a $3.5M seed round, led by Polychain and Tribe Capital, and including angel investors such as Sami Kassab from OSS Capital, and Kunal Goel from crypto research firm Messari.

That same month, Grass partnered with the Solana Saga mobile phone, launching their Grass Mobile app on the Saga dApp store, and exposing Grass to both the Solana ecosystem, and the eyes of the crypto world at large.

Fast-forward to yesterday (June 19), and Grass announced that not only do they expect an influx of new users soon due to “certain reasons“, but that they’re also debuting the Grass App Store, a variety of free apps – the first being the Grass Community Node – that allow users to help test new features whilst receiving a multiplier to their Grass score.

Right now, the Grass team are striking partnerships with AI labs and other projects that believe in their cause, and are looking develop applications beyond AI training, such as market analysis tools, advertising optimization tools, financial insight tools, and a variety of other applications for industries where data-driven decision-making can be enhanced by the access to public data that AI provides.

What is GigaBuds?

Last week, according to industry sources, Grass announced plans for an NFT collection to a small cohort of their most loyal and longstanding supporters as a token of their appreciation – ahead of their proposed token launch, anticipated to arrive in mid-August.

This echos a tweet published by the cryptic GigaBuds account on X, an as-yet unrevealed project that, according to the account’s bio, is “Powered by @getgrass_io”. The account has been posting multiple character-based teasers across the past week, inferring that some kind of character-based, narrative-driven NFT collection is coming to Grass.

Our sources indicate that GigaBuds is the name of this NFT collection, and that these NFTs will perform a key role in the future growth of Grass, with a host of benefits and utility available to holders.

A select group of Grass users were invited to take part in a pre-sale held this past week, which sold out in minutes.

Additional information regarding GigaBuds is yet to be known – although with Grass teasing a big update that will result in a “huge influx of new users soon”, we believe it won’t be long before all is revealed.