Grass is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) that pays users in GRASS tokens and USDC for sharing unused home internet bandwidth. The network uses that bandwidth to collect public web data, which it sells to AI developers. GRASS is an SPL token on Solana, where the network settles.
Core technology and architecture
Grass routes requests for publicly accessible web pages through user connections and converts the results into structured datasets. Its components are nodes, which run on user devices and relay outbound requests; routers, which are geographically distributed relays that track node status and throughput; validators, which receive client requests and verify session data; and a ZK Processor, which aggregates session-data proofs and submits them to Solana. Grass states that contributors' local devices stay outside the data path.
What is Grass crypto used for?
Grass says training data is its first product. Its CEO wrote on 28 September 2026 that the network supplies most of the world's leading AI labs, although the sources do not name them. On 8 October 2026, Grass launched the Contents API, which turns any public URL into HTML, Markdown or text. Grass reports 98% retrieval success on its hard-domain test set, compared with 71% for the next-best provider. That comparison is self-reported. A Search API is planned but has not launched. Business Wire reported more than 3 million nodes and over 1 petabyte of public web data scraped as of February 2025.
Who is behind Grass and where is it based?
Grass is built by Wynd Labs, which Solana Compass and Datawallet say was founded in 2023 by Andrej Radonjic (CEO), Connor White and Chris Gordon. Wynd Network raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital, reported on 19 December 2023. The sources conflict on where the company is headquartered, and none confirm the country where the core team operates, so no location is stated here.
Grass has a multi-entity structure. The Grass Foundation is an ownerless, memberless foundation that stewards the protocol and is reported as Cayman Islands-registered. Grass OpCo Ltd., a British Virgin Islands company and Foundation subsidiary, operates the protocol and rewards programs. Grass DataCo Ltd. sells public web data to AI labs. Half Space Labs Ltd., which trades as Wynd Labs, is a third-party service provider and not a Foundation subsidiary.
Tokenomics
GRASS has a fixed total supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens, of which 721,962,090 are circulating. At a price of $0.5792, the token has a market cap of $418.19M (rank #165) and 24h volume of $12.17M. It is down 2.24% over 24 hours and sits 85.11% below its all-time high of $3.89.
The initial allocation is as follows:
- Community, 30%: 300,000,000 tokens, including 100,000,000 for Airdrop One.
- Foundation and Ecosystem Growth, 22.8%: held for use as directed by DAO governance.
- Investors, 25.2%: a one-year cliff followed by one-year vesting. Solana Compass says vesting completes around late October 2026.
- Core contributors, 22%: a one-year cliff followed by three-year linear vesting.
Protocol inflation is limited to these defined allocations. Stage 2 rewards were paid entirely in USDC from network revenue, which Grass says created zero net new emissions. Bitget reported that about $100,000 in GRASS buybacks were completed in the week before November 2025, with about $250,000 more underway. The sources do not describe a burn mechanism. GRASS can be delegated to routers, with operators keeping a commission. Unstaking has a seven-day lock-up, and rewards are not guaranteed.
Consensus mechanism and network security
Grass does not run a separate consensus layer for its data path. It operates as a sovereign Layer 2 data rollup that settles on Solana, and its ZK proofs are published to the main network. Datawallet reports that verification is currently handled by a single operator, with a planned transition to a decentralized committee that finalizes sessions through consensus. Node quality is also measured, since Stage 2 rewards depended on uptime and bandwidth quality.
Key partnerships and ecosystem integrations
- Solana: the settlement layer for the protocol and token.
- Backblaze: storage provider for Grass datasets. Its case study reports $0 in egress fees.
- Multicoin Capital: investor, announced 29 September 2026, with undisclosed terms.
- Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital: led the 2023 seed round.
- Regen Financial: issued an independent revenue attestation for Grass DataCo Ltd.
Competitive advantages and unique value proposition
Grass states that most of the internet is inaccessible to modern AI crawlers and that its millions of residential connections can reach it. Regen Financial's attestation, which reviewed 100% of work orders, reported cash-substantiated revenue of $16,239,474.06 for 14 March to 31 December 2025 and $11,351,405.66 for 1 January to 30 June 2026. Grass also states that every dollar it has raised has flowed through the token ecosystem, with no equity financing.
Development activity and roadmap
- Contents API: launched 8 October 2026.
- Search API: planned, pending indexing of enough of the public web.
- Stage 2 claims: open from 22 July 2026 until 22 January 2027.
- Decentralized verification: on the roadmap but not yet complete.