What is Grass (GRASS)?

By CMC AI
01 February 2026 11:29PM (UTC+0)

TLDR

Grass (GRASS) is a decentralized network, or DePIN project, that enables users to monetize their unused internet bandwidth by contributing to a global data-scraping infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI).

  1. It solves an AI data bottleneck by creating a decentralized source of publicly available web data needed to train AI models.

  2. It uses a novel "Sovereign Data Rollup" architecture to verify and record data provenance on-chain using zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.

  3. Users earn GRASS tokens as rewards for sharing bandwidth, tracked through a points system that converts to tokens in periodic airdrops.

Deep Dive

1. Purpose & Value Proposition

Grass addresses a critical shortage in the AI industry: access to large-scale, high-quality training data. Centralized web crawlers face blocks and rate limits. Grass creates a decentralized alternative by pooling the unused bandwidth of its global user base (Grass Docs). This provides AI companies with unprecedented scale for data access while letting everyday internet users earn from an otherwise idle resource.

2. Technology & Architecture

The network is built as a Sovereign Data Rollup on Solana. Its architecture has several key components (Grass Docs): *Grass Nodes: User devices that relay traffic to scrape public web data. *Routers & Validators: These components manage node connections, batch data, and generate ZK proofs. These proofs are checkpoints submitted to a base blockchain (like Solana), creating a permanent, verifiable record of all data collected. *Data Ledger: An immutable repository that stores the scraped datasets, linked to their on-chain proofs to ensure full data provenance and lineage.

3. Tokenomics & User Rewards

Participation is incentivized through Grass Points, which track a user's contribution based on bandwidth shared and connection stability (General Grass FAQ). These points are a key factor in determining eligibility for GRASS token airdrops, which are distributed periodically by the Grass Foundation. The GRASS token itself serves as the reward mechanism and is intended to be the primary value accrual method for the network.

Conclusion

Grass is fundamentally a decentralized physical infrastructure network that transforms idle bandwidth into a verifiable data pipeline for AI, rewarding contributors with its native token. Can its novel rollup architecture scale to meet the insatiable data demands of the AI industry while maintaining robust decentralization?

CMC AI can make mistakes. Not financial advice.