Grass

What it does

Grass is a bandwidth-sharing network on Solana where users install a browser extension, desktop app, Android app, or the Grasshopper hardware device to contribute unused internet bandwidth to scrape public web data for AI trainingTrainingThe one-time process of teaching a neural network to perform a task by showing it massive amounts of example data and adjusting its internal weights until the outputs are good. Training builds the model; inference uses it.Like the years an apprentice spends learning a trade. You don't see any of the actual work, just thousands of repeated mistakes gradually becoming competence. By the end, the apprentice can do the job. The training was invisible, but the skill is now permanent.Read more →. The pitch is simple: you have spare bandwidth, AI companies need web data, Grass connects the two and you earn tokens. Grass reports 8.5 million monthly active nodes across 190 countries doing this right now, retrieving 3 petabytes of data per day.

The architecture has five layers. Grass Nodes are lightweight clients that relay web traffic using residential IP addresses, available as browser extensions, desktop apps, mobile apps, and since Q4 2025 the Grasshopper hardware device, a palm-sized aluminium box that plugs into your router via Ethernet and runs 24/7 without touching your personal devices. Routers are intermediary infrastructure connecting nodes to validators and managing network accountability. Validators process and verify web transactions, generating zero-knowledge proofs to checkpoint session data on-chain. A ZKZKZero Knowledge. A class of cryptographic proofs that let you prove something is true without revealing any of the underlying information. ZK lets a network verify a transaction without seeing the transaction's contents.Like proving you know the password to a safe by demonstrating you can open it, without ever saying the password out loud. The verifier learns that you know the password and nothing more.Read more → Processor batches these proofs and submits them to Solana. Edge EmbeddingEmbeddingA numerical representation of a word, sentence, or image as a list of numbers (a vector) that captures its meaning. Similar things have similar embeddings, which makes them useful for search, clustering, and recommendation.Like a map where every word has GPS coordinates. Words with similar meanings end up close together on the map. "Cat" and "kitten" are nearby. "Cat" and "thunderstorm" are far apart. The map is the embedding space.Read more → Models convert the raw scraped data into structured formats suitable for AI training. A Sovereign Data RollupL2Layer 2. A blockchain that runs on top of an L1 to provide cheaper or faster transactions while inheriting the L1's security. L2s batch many transactions and post compressed proofs back to the L1.Like an express lane built on top of a busy motorway. The express lane handles its own traffic at high speed, but it still feeds back into the main motorway and uses the motorway's bridges and tolls for security.Read more → on Solana is planned to provide verified data with full provenance tracking, though its operational status remains unclear despite being described as “launching soon” throughout 2024 and 2025.

Live Context Retrieval (LCR) is the enterprise product. When an AI modelModelA trained neural network that takes inputs (text, images, audio) and produces outputs (more text, classifications, generated content). In DeAI the model is the thing that actually does the work.Like a very experienced apprentice who has spent years watching thousands of masters make furniture. They can't explain how they know when a joint is right, but they can make a chair that looks and functions like a Chippendale. The training is invisible. The output is what matters.Read more → receives a promptPromptThe text you give an AI model to tell it what to generate. A prompt can be a simple question, a long instruction, a chunk of context plus a task, or a conversation history the model uses to produce its response.Like a brief you give to a junior designer. A vague brief gets a vague result. A detailed brief with context, constraints, and examples gets something usable. The quality of the output depends heavily on the quality of the brief.Read more →, Grass retrieves relevant current information from the web to supplement the prompt before it reaches the model. Every LCR call requires GRASS tokens; fiat payments are converted to GRASS.

The project was founded by Andrej Radonjic (CEO) and Chris Nguyen (CTO). Radonjic holds a Master’s in Mathematics and Statistics from York University and a Bachelor’s in Engineering Physics from McMaster. He was pursuing a PhD in computational physics before founding Wynd Labs during the pandemic. Nguyen is identified through a Backblaze case study and Wellfound but maintains a limited public profile. Radonjic is the most publicly identified team member. The operating entities are Wynd Labs (headquartered in Toronto, Canada; incorporation jurisdiction not publicly disclosed) and the Grass Foundation (a separate entity managing tokenTokenA digital unit of value or access rights tracked on a blockchain. Tokens can represent ownership in a project, a right to use a service, a share of future revenue, or simply a tradable asset with no underlying claim.Like a physical poker chip a casino issues. The chip itself has no value. What makes it worth something is what it lets you do at the casino, what the casino has promised, and how much other people will pay you for it.Read more → contracts and revenue). Team size is undisclosed.

The GRASS token launched on 28 October 2024 via AirdropAirdropDistributing tokens for free to eligible wallets, usually to reward early users, bootstrap a community, or decentralise token ownership away from a small group of insiders at launch.Like a supermarket handing out free samples to people who already shop there. The samples cost the supermarket nothing to print. The goal is to convert casual shoppers into loyal customers by giving them something tangible to talk about.Read more → One, distributing 100 million tokens (10% of supply) to 2.8 million eligible wallets. No ICOICOInitial Coin Offering. A token sale where a project sells tokens directly to the public, usually before any product exists. ICOs dominated 2017-2018 funding and are now mostly replaced by airdrops, IDOs, or fair launches.Like a company selling shares to the public before going public, except with no SEC oversight, no audited financials, and often no product at all. The 2017 ICO boom showed why those guardrails exist in traditional finance.Read more → or IDOIDOInitial DEX Offering. A token launch mechanism where the initial sale happens directly on a decentralised exchange, with built-in liquidity pool funding. IDOs replaced ICOs as the standard launch model for many projects after 2018.Like opening a new shop directly inside an existing market hall instead of running a separate sale event. The shop is open, the market provides foot traffic, and customers can walk in and trade from day one.Read more → was held.

Value proposition

AI companies need vast quantities of web data, and millions of residential internet connections can provide it at scale, with better coverage and lower detection rates than data centre scraping. Residential IPs bypass bot detection and geo-restrictions that blockBlockA batch of transactions added to a blockchain at a set interval. Each block cryptographically links to the previous one, creating an append-only chain that can't be rewritten without redoing all the work since.Like a page in a ledger. Every page has a fixed number of entries, every page references the previous page, and once a page is filled and signed off it can't be edited without visibly invalidating every page that came after. The chain is just a very long series of these sealed pages.Read more → data centre connections, giving Grass a structural advantage in data collection. This is factually accurate.

Grass reports 8.5 million monthly active nodes with 1 million concurrent connections, retrieving 3 petabytes daily. Approximately 20 enterprise customers, described as including “the largest AI labs,” with “seven-figure revenue clients” (Grass’s own characterisation, not independently verified). The VALID dataset, a collaboration with LAION and Ontocord, produced 14 terabytes of multimodal data from 720,000 CC-BY YouTube videos (30 million audio snippets, 15 million images). ClipTagger-12b, a 12-billion parameter vision-language model built with InferenceInferenceRunning a trained AI model to produce an answer. Inference is what happens when you type a prompt into ChatGPT and get a response. The model takes your input, computes a best guess, and returns it.Like asking an expert for their opinion. The training was the decades they spent becoming an expert. The inference is the 30 seconds it takes them to answer your specific question.Read more →.net, reportedly benchmarks favourably against GPT-4.1 and Claude 4 Sonnet at 15x lower cost. These are tangible outputs.

The airdrop was exceptionally wide. 2.8 million recipients received 10% of supply with no lockup. 88.36% was claimed by 2.06 million wallets. For context, most Solana airdrops reach a few hundred thousand addresses. Grass reached 2.8 million. The minimum threshold of 500 points (roughly 100 hours of uptime) was accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Counter-narrative: “Decentralised data layer for AI” is the tagline, but the data layer is centralised. Wynd Labs and the Grass Foundation control all enterprise relationships, data storage (centralised on Backblaze B2, 2-3 petabytes uploaded daily), validation (transitioning from a single centralised validatorValidatorA computer that runs the full blockchain protocol, verifies transactions, and proposes new blocks. Validators are the workers that keep a Proof of Stake network running, and they earn rewards for doing the work correctly.Like a notary public who witnesses and stamps legal documents. Validators witness transactions, check they follow the rules, and stamp them into the permanent record. A notary who commits fraud loses their license. Validators work the same way, except the license is staked tokens that get slashed on misbehaviour.Read more →), and revenue (all flows to the Foundation with no public reporting). Users contribute bandwidth but have zero control over what is scraped, who buys the data, pricing, or protocol direction. Bandwidth rental, not data ownership.

Closed-source is the hardest problem. Wynd-Network’s GitHub organisation has zero public repositories. GrassFoundation has one repository (GrassDownload, an HTML page). Node software, router software, validator software, and the ZK processor are all proprietary. You can’t independently verify claims about zero-knowledge proofs, data handling, or network architecture.

Tokenomics

GRASS is an SPL token on Solana (contract: Grass7B4RdKfBCjTKgSqnXkqjwiGvQyFbuSCUJr3XXjs). Fixed supply: 1 billion. Circulating supplyCirculating SupplyThe number of tokens currently in circulation and tradeable on the open market. Differs from total supply (which includes locked or unvested tokens) and max supply (the upper limit, if there is one).Like the number of cars on the road today versus the number ever produced. Some are in showrooms, some in junkyards, some still at the factory. Only the ones on the road count toward what people are actually driving.Read more → has been growing through 2025-2026 as vestingVestingA schedule that locks up tokens allocated to insiders, investors, and team members, releasing them gradually over months or years. Vesting prevents insiders from dumping on public buyers immediately after launch.Like a new employee's stock options at a startup. You don't get all the shares on day one. They unlock over four years so you stick around and do the work rather than cashing out and leaving.Read more → unlocks occur, with a significant 55 million token unlock to contributors on 28 February 2026. See live data above for current circulating figures.

Distribution:

• Early Investors: 25.2% (252M GRASS; 1-year cliffCliffA waiting period at the start of a token vesting schedule during which no tokens unlock at all. After the cliff ends, tokens begin releasing according to the vesting schedule.Like a probationary period at a new job. You don't get your stock options on day one. You wait 12 months to prove you'll stick around, then everything starts unlocking normally.Read more → reached October 2025, then linear over 12 months; approximately 39% unlocked as of March 2026)
• Foundation and Ecosystem Growth: 22.8% (228M GRASS; cliff period then linear over 60 months; managed by Grass Foundation; approximately 37% unlocked)
• Contributors (Team): 22% (220M GRASS; 1-year cliff reached October 2025, then linear over 36 months; approximately 14% unlocked)
• Future Incentives: 17% (170M GRASS; linear over 36 months, no cliff; allocated for the Season 2 airdrop, a gradual distribution across H1 2026 via a new native Grass walletWalletSoftware that stores the private keys needed to control tokens on a blockchain. A wallet does not actually hold any tokens. The tokens live on the chain. The wallet holds the keys that prove you own them.Like the key to a safe deposit box. The key doesn't contain your valuables. The valuables sit in the bank's vault. The key is what proves you're allowed to open the box and take them.Read more →, nearly double the size of Airdrop One; approximately 68% unlocked)
• Airdrop One: 10% (100M GRASS; 100% unlocked at TGETGEToken Generation Event. The moment a project's token first becomes tradeable. TGE is when vesting clocks usually start, when liquidity hits exchanges, and when public price discovery begins.Like the IPO day for a startup. Everything that happened before TGE was private valuations and paper agreements. Everything after is the public market deciding what the thing is worth in real time.Read more →; distributed to 2.8M wallets; 88.36% claimed)
• Router Rewards: 3% (30M GRASS; linear over 30 months; approximately 55% unlocked)

The insider allocation is 47.2% (25.2% investors plus 22% team). The Foundation controls an additional 22.8%. Community allocation is 30% (10% Airdrop One plus 17% Future Incentives plus 3% Router Rewards). The October 2025 cliff released approximately 181 million investor tokens (50% of the investor allocation). A further 55 million tokens unlocked to contributors on 28 February 2026, representing approximately 13% of circulating supply at the time. Monthly linear unlocks continue across all categories through 2028-2029.

No burn mechanism exists. StakingStakingLocking up a cryptocurrency to help secure a blockchain network, usually in exchange for rewards. The locked tokens act as a security deposit that can be taken away if the staker misbehaves.Like putting down a large rental deposit for an apartment. You get the money back if you behave, you earn interest while it's locked, and the landlord takes it if you trash the place.Read more → yields approximately 7.49% APR via delegation to routers, with a 7-day unstaking period. Slashing is planned but not currently implemented; when it arrives, it will be manual and multisig-controlled.

Funding totals $14.5 million across four rounds: $1 million pre-seed (No Limit Holdings, July 2023), $3.5 million seed (Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital co-leads, December 2023), undisclosed Series A (HackVC lead, with Delphi, Brevan Howard Digital, Lattice, September 2024), and $10 million bridgeBridgeA protocol that lets you move assets from one blockchain to another. Bridges typically lock the asset on the source chain and mint a wrapped version on the destination chain. Bridges are notoriously the most-attacked component in crypto.Like a coat check at a club. You hand over your coat, get a numbered ticket, and the club promises to return the coat when you bring back the ticket. The trust assumption is that the coat check doesn't lose your coat or run away with it.Read more →/token purchase (Polychain and Tribe Capital, October 2025). Polychain Capital invested three times.

GRASS is spot-listed on Bybit, Gate.io, KuCoin, Kraken, Bitget, and Bithumb, with Binance Futures perpetual contracts (up to 75x leverage) adding derivatives liquidityLiquidityHow easily a token can be bought or sold without moving the price. High liquidity means you can enter or exit large positions quickly at the quoted price. Low liquidity means even small trades can swing the market.Like the difference between selling a house and selling a share of Apple stock. The house might be worth more on paper, but finding a buyer at that price takes weeks. The Apple share converts to cash in one click.Read more →. The ATHATHAll-Time High. The highest price a token has ever reached. ATH is usually quoted as a reference point for how far the current price has fallen (or risen) since the peak.Like the record lap time on a racetrack. It tells you what the car has been capable of at its absolute best, not what it will do today. Whether that record gets broken again depends on conditions that may or may not come back.Read more → of $3.89 was hit on 8 November 2024, just eleven days after launch. The token is down over 90% from that peak. See live data above for current pricing.

How to participate

Run a Grass node. The most accessible entry point. Install the browser extension, desktop app, or Android app. The node passively shares unused bandwidth to scrape public web data. No staking, no technical knowledge. Earn Grass Points based on bandwidth contribution, uptime, and location. Points convert to GRASS tokens during airdrop distributions (Season 2 is distributing 170 million tokens gradually across H1 2026). Requires a residential IP (data centre IPs are not eligible).

Buy a Grasshopper. For dedicated bandwidth sharing without tying up a computer or phone. Grasshopper is a palm-sized aluminium device that plugs into your router via Ethernet and runs 24/7 as a persistent node. FCC and ICES-003 certified, fully encrypted in transit, physically isolated from your home network. Handles only Grass traffic. No access to personal devices or data. Pricing not yet disclosed; announced with a waitlist in mid-2025, but shipping has been delayed by tariff-driven supply chain constraints and actual delivery status remains unclear.

Stake GRASS. Delegate tokens to router operators via grassfoundation.io/stake. Routers with more delegated stake receive more network traffic, generating higher rewards. Approximately 7.49% APR. No minimum stake. 7-day unstaking period.

Operate a router. Advanced participation. Routers relay bandwidth between nodes and validators. Earn rewards from the 30 million Router Rewards allocation plus commission on delegator rewards. Hardware requirements not publicly specified. Details limited.

Enterprise access. AI companies access Grass data through the Foundation. Approximately 20 current customers. Vetting process and service agreement required. Pricing not publicly disclosed.

Honest assessment

What works

The scale holds up. 8.5 million monthly active nodes across 190 countries makes Grass one of the largest DePINDePINDecentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks. Protocols that use token incentives to coordinate real-world physical infrastructure like GPU compute, wireless networks, storage, mapping sensors, or bandwidth.Like crowd-sourced ride-sharing but for physical hardware. Uber incentivises drivers with dollars. DePIN incentivises hardware operators with tokens. The network grows because individuals choose to contribute capacity in exchange for rewards.Read more → networks by participant count, full stop. CoinGecko, Nansen, and Grass’s own metrics align on this order of magnitude. The 3 petabytes per day of data retrieval is driven by actual customer demand, not testnet simulation.

Enterprise traction is real. Approximately 20 paying companies with “seven-figure revenue clients.” The VALID dataset collaboration with LAION and Ontocord produced a 14-terabyte open dataset (CC-BY) that demonstrates the data pipeline converts bandwidth into usable AI assets. ClipTagger-12b is a published model with Apache-2.0 licensing. These are verifiable outputs, not promises.

The airdrop model deserves credit. 2.8 million recipients receiving 10% of supply with no lockup is one of the widest distributions in Solana history. The 500-point minimum threshold meant anyone who ran the extension for roughly 100 hours could qualify. This created a credible base of millions of token holders, even if many were airdrop farmers.

Barrier to entry is near zero. Install an extension, earn tokens. No staking minimum, no technical skills. This is how you get 8.5 million participants. The Android app (launched July 2025) extended access, and Grasshopper (a dedicated hardware node announced mid-2025, though shipping has been delayed by tariff-driven supply chain issues) adds a plug-and-forget option for users who want 24/7 uptime without leaving a computer running.

AppEsteem cybersecurity certification with continuous monitoring by Avast, Microsoft Defender, and McAfee provides third-party validation that the software isn’t malware, addressing the most obvious concern about bandwidth-sharing applications.

What doesn’t work

The code is entirely closed-source. Wynd-Network’s GitHub has zero public repositories. You can’t read the node code, the router code, the validator code, or the ZK processor code. Every technical claim, the zero-knowledge proofs, the data provenance, the separation of personal browsing from network traffic, is unverifiable. For a project describing itself as a decentralised data layer, this is the most fundamental credibility gap possible.

Governance is non-functional. The documentation references DAODAODecentralised Autonomous Organisation. A way to coordinate decisions and manage a treasury using token-weighted voting instead of a traditional company structure. Token holders propose and vote on changes directly.Like a shareholder-run company where every shareholder can vote on every decision, the votes are public, and the company can't do anything the shareholders don't approve. The coordination is messier than a normal company but nobody has unilateral control.Read more → governance and 22.8% of supply allocated to Foundation and Ecosystem Growth “managed by DAO governance.” In practice, no proposals have been submitted, no votes have occurred, no forum exists. All decisions are made by Wynd Labs and the Grass Foundation. The 22.8% Foundation allocation is team-controlled spending dressed in DAO language.

Users have no data sovereignty. You contribute bandwidth; the Grass Foundation captures all value from the resulting data. You have no control over what is scraped through your connection, no visibility into who buys the data, no say in pricing, and no share of enterprise revenue beyond token rewards. Your residential IP address is used as an exit node for web scraping. If a client scrapes restricted or copyrighted content through your connection, the legal exposure sits with you, not the Foundation. Web scraping legality varies by jurisdiction and is actively contested under GDPR, CFAA, and the EU Digital Services Act.

Validation is centralised. The documentation describes transitioning from a single centralised validator to a decentralised validator committee, but the current state is unclear. If one entity validates all data provenance claims, those claims rest on trust, not cryptographic verification.

Revenue is opaque. “Seven-figure clients” and “the largest AI labs” are referenced but no revenue figures, client names, or financial reporting are published. All revenue flows to the Grass Foundation. There’s no on-chain transparency into how these funds are used.

The risk

Exit node liability is the defining risk for participants. Your IP address is being used to scrape the web on behalf of unknown third parties. Despite client vetting and activity monitoring, the legal landscape for web scraping is shifting rapidly. The EU Digital Services Act, GDPR enforcement, and US CFAA precedents are creating a more restrictive environment. If regulators decide that bandwidth contributors are facilitating unauthorised data collection, millions of users face potential exposure.

The insider token concentration creates sustained sell pressure. 47.2% to investors and team, with the October 2025 cliff having released approximately 181 million tokens. Monthly unlocks continue through 2028-2029. At 92% below ATH, the token has already absorbed significant selling, but hundreds of millions of tokens remain locked.

Single-team dependency is acute. Wynd Labs controls all development, infrastructure, and client relationships. One publicly doxxed team member. If the team disappears or pivots, the network has no fallback. There’s no open-source code to forkForkA point at which a blockchain or its software splits into two separate paths. Forks can be temporary (two valid blocks compete and one wins), planned (a software upgrade), or contentious (a community split into two chains).Like a road that splits in two. Sometimes the split is just a temporary detour and traffic merges back. Sometimes it's a permanent fork where different drivers go different ways and never meet again.Read more →, no community governance to redirect, and no decentralised infrastructure to persist independently.

The Sovereign Data Rollup has been “launching soon” for over a year. Without it, the ZK proof claims are marketing rather than verifiable technology. Shipping the rollup with open-source code would address the two largest credibility gaps simultaneously.

My position

I hold GRASS from the airdrop distribution. The scale checks out and the enterprise traction is real. I’m holding the airdrop position rather than adding to it: the code is entirely closed-source, governance does not exist in practice, users have no sovereignty over the data their bandwidth produces, and all revenue flows through an opaque Foundation. I would add meaningfully if the core code is open-sourced, if governance materialises with real proposals and votes, if the Sovereign Data Rollup ships with verifiable ZK proofs, and if revenue transparency improves. The business works; the decentralisation does not.

Freedom Score: 37/100

Grass scores 37/100 (F grade). Full methodology at Freedom Score Methodology.

Infrastructure decentralisation (10/20): 8.5 million monthly active nodes across 190 countries (per Grass’s reported metrics) is distributed infrastructure at the edge. Nodes are permissionless; anyone with a residential IP can participate. However, validation is currently transitioning from a single centralised validator with the end state unclear. Routers are operated by approved infrastructure providers, not permissionlessly. Data storage is centralised on Backblaze B2 (2-3 petabytes daily). The Sovereign Data Rollup is planned but not confirmed live. Core scraping coordination, client management, and data delivery are controlled by Wynd Labs and the Grass Foundation. Permissionless at the edge, centralised at the core.

Governance decentralisation (4/20): DAO governance is referenced in documentation with 22.8% of supply allocated to Foundation and Ecosystem Growth “managed by DAO governance.” In practice, no governance proposals have been submitted, no voting has occurred, and no governance forum exists. All decisions are made by Wynd Labs and the Grass Foundation. The 47.2% insider allocation (investors plus team) and Foundation-controlled 22.8% concentrate power. No evidence of meaningful community governance.

Token distribution fairness (7/15): Airdrop One (10% of supply to 2.8 million recipients with no lockup) was one of the widest distributions in crypto history. Future Incentives (17%) and Router Rewards (3%) provide ongoing community allocation totalling 30%. However, insider allocation is 47.2% (25.2% early investors plus 22% team). The 22.8% Foundation allocation is team-controlled. No public sale was held; funding came exclusively from VCVCVenture Capital. Private investors who fund projects at an early stage in exchange for equity or token allocations. VC rounds are typically pre-launch, at steep discounts to any future public price, with multi-year vesting.Like angel investors in a startup who buy shares before the company goes public. They take more risk because the company might fail, so they get a better price. Once the company IPOs they can sell, and the public market pays whatever price it thinks is fair.Read more → rounds. The wide airdrop partially offsets the heavy insider concentration.

Censorship resistance (6/15): Nodes are permissionless and can contribute bandwidth from any residential connection. However, enterprise clients must go through a vetting process with service agreements; the Foundation controls all data access. Clients can be “immediately banned for activity deemed sketchy.” Staking contracts include manual multisig-controlled slashing capability. Certain jurisdictions are excluded from token eligibility. The browser extension and apps can be removed from app stores. Permissionless contribution, controlled consumption.

Data sovereignty (5/15): Users contribute bandwidth but do not own or control the scraped data. The Grass Foundation captures all value from data and sells it to enterprise clients. Contributors have no control over what is scraped through their connection. Users act as exit nodes with their residential IP addresses used for third-party scraping. ZK proofs create data provenance records, but these are unverifiable with closed-source code. The Foundation has full visibility into all scraped data. Despite privacy safeguards and minimal personal data collection, the fundamental model is: users provide the resource, the Foundation captures the asset.

Open source and transparency (5/15): Wynd-Network GitHub has zero public repositories. GrassFoundation has one repository (GrassDownload, HTML). Node software, router software, validator software, and ZK processor are all proprietary. The Cantina security competition (June-July 2024, $15,000 prize pool, 116 findings) reviewed three Solana programmes but these are not publicly accessible. On the positive side, the VALID dataset is CC-BY, ClipTagger-12b is Apache-2.0, AppEsteem certification provides third-party security monitoring, and the token contract is on-chain and verifiable. Financial transparency is limited with no revenue disclosure.

Path to improvement

Three changes would materially increase Grass’s score:

1. Open-source the core code. Zero public repositories is the single biggest credibility gap. Open-sourcing the node software, router software, and ZK processor would allow independent verification of every technical claim: the zero-knowledge proofs, the traffic separation, the data provenance. It would also enable community contributions and reduce single-team dependency. This is the highest-impact change Grass could make.
2. Ship functional governance. Launch a governance forum, publish the first proposals, run the first votes. The documentation already describes DAO governance; deliver it. Even modest governance, letting token holders vote on Foundation spending priorities or router selection criteria, would demonstrate the project is serious about decentralisation. Currently it is pure narrative.
3. Publish revenue and data transparency. Disclose aggregate revenue figures, number of enterprise clients, and how Foundation funds are allocated. If GRASS is “the primary vehicle for value accrual” as stated, token holders deserve visibility into what value is being accrued and where it flows. Quarterly transparency reports would be table stakes for a project claiming to be community-owned.

Returns Score: 55/100

GRASS scores 55/100 (C grade). Full methodology at Returns Score Methodology.

Token utility (12/20): GRASS is required for Live Context Retrieval (LCR), the enterprise product where AI models pull real-time web data to supplement prompts. Fiat payments from enterprise clients convert to GRASS, creating buy pressure proportional to usage. Users earn GRASS through bandwidth sharing. Staking to routers yields approximately 7.49% APR. The utility exists but is narrow: the token is a settlement layer for data access and a reward mechanism for bandwidth contribution. There’s no governance utility in practice (despite documentation claiming it), and the staking mechanism lacks slashing enforcement, which reduces its economic credibility.

Value accrual (8/20): The thesis is that enterprise demand for AI training data drives GRASS purchases. Approximately 20 enterprise customers, including “the largest AI labs” and “seven-figure revenue clients,” theoretically create demand-side pressure. The fundamental problem is that all revenue flows through the Grass Foundation with zero transparency. No revenue figures are published. No client names disclosed. No on-chain verification of enterprise payments. Token holders are asked to trust that value accrues to the token, but the mechanism by which Foundation revenue translates to GRASS demand is entirely opaque. There is no burn mechanism, no fee distribution, and no verifiable buybackBuybackUsing protocol revenue to purchase tokens on the open market, usually to burn them or return them to a treasury. Buybacks convert business income into upward pressure on the token by reducing circulating supply.Like a public company using profits to repurchase and retire its own shares. The cash leaves the company's balance sheet, the share count drops, and every remaining shareholder owns a slightly bigger slice of the same business.Read more → programme.

Supply dynamics (8/20): GRASS has a 1 billion hard cap, which provides a ceiling, but the distribution beneath it is heavily insider-weighted. Investors hold 25.2% and team 22%, for a combined 47.2% insider allocation. The Foundation controls an additional 22.8%. The October 2025 cliff released approximately 181 million investor tokens, and a further 55 million tokens unlocked to contributors on 28 February 2026. Monthly linear unlocks continue through 2028-2029. Hundreds of millions of tokens remain locked. The wide airdrop to 2.8 million wallets was notable, and Season 2 will distribute 170 million tokens across H1 2026, but combined community allocation (30%) doesn’t offset 47.2% insider concentration. At 92% below ATH, much of the selling may be absorbed, but the overhang from ongoing unlocks creates sustained downward pressure.

Revenue sustainability (15/25): This is the strongest element of Grass’s returns case. AI companies paying for data derived from 3 petabytes of daily web scraping is a legitimate business with growing demand as foundation models scale. The VALID dataset (14 terabytes, CC-BY) and ClipTagger-12b (Apache-2.0) are verifiable outputs that demonstrate the data pipeline works. Revenue is described as growing with “seven-figure clients,” and the Grasshopper hardware programme expands node reliability beyond browser extensions, broadening the supply side. The enterprise traction appears more durable than most DePIN revenue claims. The concern is that sustainability depends entirely on Wynd Labs and the Grass Foundation maintaining enterprise relationships. If the team disappears, the revenue disappears, because there is no open-source code to fork and no decentralised infrastructure to persist independently.

Liquidity and access (12/15): GRASS is spot-listed on Bybit, Gate.io, KuCoin, Kraken, Bitget and Bithumb, with solid daily volume. Binance Futures perpetual contracts (up to 75x leverage) add derivatives liquidity, though a Binance spot listing has not materialised despite community expectations. The exchange coverage is strong and allows meaningful position sizes without excessive slippageSlippageThe difference between the expected price of a trade and the price you actually get when the trade executes. Slippage usually goes against the trader and gets worse with bigger trades or thinner markets.Like trying to buy 1000 bananas at the corner shop. The first few are at the marked price, but by the time you've bought them all you've moved the price up because there are no more bananas left at the original level. The shop has to restock at higher cost.Read more →. The 2.8 million airdrop recipients created one of the widest holder bases in DePIN, and Season 2’s gradual distribution of 170 million tokens across H1 2026 will widen it further. DEXDEXDecentralised Exchange. A trading venue where token swaps happen entirely through smart contracts, with no central operator holding user funds. The largest DEXes are Uniswap, Aerodrome, Raydium, PancakeSwap, and Curve.Like a self-service vending machine that lets you swap one type of coin for another. The machine sets the exchange rate based on its current stock, anyone can deposit coins to refill it, and there's no clerk behind the counter.Read more → liquidity on Solana supplements the centralised exchange coverage. For a project less than a year post-TGE, the exchange access is well ahead of most peers.

Path to improvement

Three changes would materially increase Grass’s returns score:

1. Publish revenue figures and Foundation financials. The complete opacity around revenue is the single biggest drag on the returns case. Enterprise customers exist, but without published revenue, token holders can’t assess whether GRASS is fairly valued, overvalued, or undervalued. Quarterly revenue disclosure and Foundation spending reports would transform the investment thesis from trust-based to evidence-based.
2. Implement a verifiable token burnBurnPermanently removing tokens from circulation by sending them to an address that no one controls. Burns reduce total supply, which (all else equal) makes each remaining token worth more of the network's value.Like a company buying back its own shares and shredding them. The company's total value stays the same, but each remaining share now represents a slightly bigger slice of that value.Read more → or buyback mechanism. There is currently no mechanism linking enterprise revenue to token value. A burn on LCR payments, an on-chain buyback programme, or a fee distribution to stakers would create a direct, verifiable connection between network usage and token economics. Without this, GRASS is a reward token with no reflexive demand loop.
3. Reduce insider unlock pressure. The 47.2% insider allocation with ongoing linear unlocks through 2028-2029 creates years of sustained sell pressure. Extending vesting schedules, implementing performance-based unlock milestones, or converting a portion to staking-locked tokens would signal long-term alignment and reduce the overhang that weighs on price discovery.

Score change log