What’s Grass?
Developed as the primary product from Wynd Labs, Grass goals to democratize and decentralize the web’s assets, and guarantee truthful compensation for all.
By way of their Chrome Extension and cellular app, Grass affords a decentralized residential proxy market, permitting customers to leverage their unused bandwidth to earn a stake within the internet scraping crucial for constructing AI, making a extra equitable web ecosystem.
Grass are additionally creating proprietary datasets and AI fashions to contribute in the direction of the decentralization of AI as a complete, with the intention to make the huge information of the web each open supply and accessible.
On high of this, Grass is aiming to play a direct function in parsing unstructured internet information right into a format that enormous language fashions (LLMs) can practice from, making that information accessible through APIs, and reworking the web into an overtly accessible and structured information base.
The last word objective for Grass is to develop into the foundational layer for AI decentralization, contributing to the creation of a worldwide, open-source repository of human information.
How does Grass work?
Accessible through a Chrome Extension or cellular app, Grass collects your unused bandwidth and makes use of it to assist energy the net scraping crucial for AI to develop, practice and enhance.
Crucially, it does this by solely leveraging bandwidth that you’re not utilizing, that means that not solely are you rewarded for being part of the AI ecosystem, however you gained’t expertise any slowdowns with the apps and providers you utilize.
By utilizing Grass, customers earn Grass Factors. These will be transformed into community possession, which might then be offered to verified corporations for makes use of comparable to internet scraping and market analysis utilizing cryptocurrency as a medium. Further payout strategies are being explored, comparable to fiat choices through PayPal, present playing cards, and the flexibility to participate in community governance.
Grass takes a agency stance on safety. The app collects fundamental info, comparable to uptime, IP deal with connections, sign-up emails and passwords, however doesn’t entry any private info on customers units.
For instance of their scraping prowess, and the sheer energy of the bandwidth shared to date, the Grass crew scraped everything of weblog internet hosting web site Medium within the span of two days, totalling tens of tens of millions of articles and a phrase depend that’s prone to be within the tens of billions.
What has Grass completed to date?
Grass entered Beta in June 2023 as a Chrome Extension, and launched a Referral Program to reward early adopters with extra Grass Factors.
The Grass Cellular app adopted in August 2023, permitting customers to earn Grass Factors 24/7 – as long as they’re related to WiFi or 4G/5G providers.
Fast development ensued, reaching tens of hundreds of sign-ups per day by December 2023. This led to a $3.5M seed spherical, led by Polychain and Tribe Capital, and together with angel traders comparable to Sami Kassab from OSS Capital, and Kunal Goel from crypto analysis agency Messari.
That very same month, Grass partnered with the Solana Saga cell phone, launching their Grass Cellular app on the Saga dApp retailer, and exposing Grass to each the Solana ecosystem, and the eyes of the crypto world at giant.
Quick-forward to yesterday (June 19), and Grass introduced that not solely do they anticipate an inflow of latest customers quickly as a consequence of “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 a number of character-based teasers throughout the previous week, inferring that some form of character-based, narrative-driven NFT assortment is coming to Grass.
Our sources point out that GigaBuds is the identify of this NFT assortment, and that these NFTs will carry out a key function sooner or later development of Grass, with a number of advantages and utility out there to holders.
A choose group of Grass customers had been invited to participate in a pre-sale held this previous week, which offered out in minutes.
Further info concerning GigaBuds is but to be identified – though with Grass teasing an enormous replace that may lead to a “huge influx of new users soon”, we imagine it gained’t be lengthy earlier than all is revealed.