What is Grass (GRASS)?

By CMC AI
10 February 2026 08:52PM (UTC+0)
TLDR

Grass is a decentralized network that lets users earn crypto rewards by sharing their unused internet bandwidth to power a global web-scraping service for AI companies.

  1. DePIN for AI Data – It's a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) that collects public web data to train AI models.

  2. Built on Solana – It operates as a Sovereign Data Rollup on Solana, using zero-knowledge proofs to verify data provenance.

  3. Earn-to-Share Model – Users run a lightweight app to contribute bandwidth and earn GRASS tokens based on their network contributions.

Deep Dive

1. Purpose & Value Proposition

Grass tackles a core bottleneck in artificial intelligence: access to massive, high-quality training data. AI labs traditionally rely on centralized web crawlers, which face blocks and scalability limits. Grass creates a decentralized alternative by pooling the unused bandwidth of millions of residential internet connections worldwide. This allows for internet-scale data collection while returning value and control to users, aiming to build a more equitable data economy (Grass Docs).

2. Technology & Architecture

The network is a Sovereign Data Rollup built on Solana. Users run Grass Nodes (a simple app) that relay web traffic. Routers manage these nodes, and Validators batch and verify the scraped data. A key innovation is the use of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs; validators generate cryptographic proofs for each data-gathering session and post them on-chain. This creates an immutable, verifiable record of data provenance, which is crucial for AI companies that need trusted datasets (Grass Docs).

3. Tokenomics & Participation

The GRASS token incentivizes and governs the network. Users earn Grass Points for uptime and for the bandwidth actively used by the network. These points are a key factor in determining token rewards distributed via airdrops. The token also facilitates governance, giving holders a say in the network's future development. This model aligns participation with ownership, rewarding users for providing the foundational resource—bandwidth (General Grass FAQ).

Conclusion

Grass fundamentally is a user-owned data layer that harnesses collective bandwidth to fuel the AI revolution, challenging centralized data gatekeepers. As AI's hunger for data grows, can Grass's decentralized model become the standard for ethical and scalable web data collection?

CMC AI can make mistakes. Not financial advice.