What is Grass?

Grass is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) built as a sovereign Layer 2 data rollup settling on Solana. Founded in 2023, it pays everyday users to route requests to public websites through an app or extension, converting spare household bandwidth into ethically sourced training material for artificial intelligence models.

The consumer app acts as a lightweight gateway for unused connection capacity. Beneath it, the network verifies, structures, and settles every web scrape. Requests are limited to publicly available pages, which means contributors do not expose browsing history, personal files, or other private activity on their devices.

Grass has expanded rapidly since raising a $3.5 million seed round led by Polychain Capital. From 2 million users at its 2024 mainnet debut, it grew into one of the largest DePIN deployments, reaching 8.5 million monthly active nodes across roughly 190 countries as of 2026.

Commercial growth has kept pace. Revenue totaled $17 million in 2025, then reached roughly the same amount in the first half of 2026 alone. Full-year guidance stands at $65 to $75 million, while a Coinbase spot listing in August 2026 broadened access to the GRASS token.

How Does Grass Work?

Grass functions as a sovereign data rollup. Millions of residential nodes retrieve public web pages, routers meter and relay the traffic, and validators checkpoint proofs onchain. The architecture below outlines how each component works and how participants are incentivized.

1. Validator

Grass validators take web requests from buyers and distribute them across the node network before checking the returned responses. Every session is checkpointed to the blockchain with zero-knowledge proofs. This creates a permanent provenance record that AI developers can audit to trace the origin of a dataset.

A single operator currently handles verification. The roadmap calls for replacing that operator with a decentralized committee that finalizes sessions through consensus. Distributing authority would remove the network's most centralized control point and prevent one actor from censoring requests or falsifying records used to establish data lineage.

2. Router

Grass routers are geographically distributed relays positioned between validators and nodes. They forward encrypted traffic while measuring how much verified bandwidth passes through. Compensation is tied to validated throughput, encouraging operators to maintain reliable, fast infrastructure and report activity honestly.

Routers report several metrics that keep the wider network healthy and accountable:

• Throughput Accounting: Tracks the byte volume relayed by each node during a session, allowing validators to compare delivered bandwidth with the rewards ultimately paid to operators and delegators.
• Latency Tracking: Measures response times across connections so scraping requests can be directed toward the fastest available circuits in each geographic region.
• Node Status: Checks whether individual nodes remain responsive and online, identifying unstable connections before they affect active customer data collection jobs.
• Stake Distribution: Determines how staking rewards are divided among delegators according to the amount of GRASS committed to a particular router's performance.
• Reward Settlement: Reconciles compensation for nodes, routers, and delegators after each epoch so payouts reflect traffic validators actually confirmed onchain.
• Network Compliance: Confirms that node pools maintain at least 75 percent connectivity. Dropping below that threshold can put a router's staked assets at risk of slashing.

3. Grass Node

Grass nodes are free, lightweight clients that can run on a phone, desktop, or browser. A node forwards encrypted requests to public websites and returns the responses to routers. It does not read the traffic being carried or access personal activity elsewhere on the device.

Running a node remains simple and delivers the following practical benefits:

• Passive Earnings: Contributors earn rewards for each byte of verified data routed through their connection, turning otherwise idle bandwidth into ongoing income.
• Wide Compatibility: Native apps are available for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. Historically, mobile and desktop clients have earned more than the lighter browser extension.
• Encrypted Transit: End-to-end encryption and digital signatures protect relayed requests from tampering as payloads move between validators, routers, and destination websites.
• Zero Hardware Cost: Participation does not require specialized equipment, unlike GPU or mining-based networks. Any household with a stable residential internet connection can contribute.
• Minimal Footprint: The client uses spare capacity and modest system resources, leaving normal browsing, work traffic, and streaming with their usual priority.
• Privacy Preservation: Nodes request only publicly accessible web pages, allowing contributors to share connection capacity without revealing browsing history or personally identifiable information.

4. Traffic Types

The network offers two encryption schemes, documented as traffic types, to balance validator oversight with contributor privacy. The chosen type determines how much of a session validators can inspect. That choice also affects reliability scoring, gas consumption, and the strength of the provenance trail associated with the resulting data.

• PET Traffic: Partially encrypted sessions expose enough metadata for validators to assess node quality and confirm results. This is the default option for provenance-critical scraping work.
• FET Traffic: Fully encrypted sessions conceal everything from validators for maximum privacy, but use more gas and give up the reliability guarantees available through partial visibility.

5. Fee Market

Prices in the Grass fee market move with real-time supply and demand instead of following a fixed schedule. Request costs depend on node geography and reputation, the selected traffic type, bandwidth use, and network congestion at the time the job runs.

Each factor has its own weighting coefficient, allowing the protocol to adjust resource prices as conditions change. When residential connections are scarce in a high-demand region, buyers pay more to access them. Contributors in those locations receive a larger share of rewards, helping the network allocate capacity efficiently.

6. Grass Reputation Scoring

Every node receives a reputation score derived from four measured characteristics. Nodes with stronger scores receive more traffic and, as a result, more rewards. The system encourages operators to maintain stable connections, keep software current, and deliver dependable data over long periods of participation.

Four dimensions combine to define each node's standing on the network:

• Data Completeness: Measures whether a response contains every field required by a job. Partial scrapes create costly retries and reduce the quality of datasets sold to AI customers.
• Quality Consistency: Assesses output uniformity across jobs and timeframes, favoring nodes that produce dependable results rather than alternating between strong and weak sessions.
• Response Timeliness: Evaluates how quickly current information is returned, an especially important factor for live retrieval products where stale data rapidly loses value.
• Node Availability: Tracks a node's reliability in answering requests over time because sustained uptime signals the stability routers favor when allocating traffic.

How To Use Grass

Getting started with Grass does not require technical expertise, dedicated hardware, or upfront capital. Setup can be completed in a few minutes on any supported phone or computer.

Work through these six steps to begin earning from your idle connection:

1. Account Creation: Register on the Grass dashboard using an email address or Google login, then confirm the verification message before proceeding to the download page.
2. App Installation: Install the desktop application, mobile app, or browser extension only from official Grass channels because fake clients impersonating the project circulate through unofficial stores.
3. Node Activation: Open the client and press connect to start relaying encrypted requests. A stable residential network is preferable to a VPN or datacenter connection.
4. Dashboard Monitoring: Review your profile regularly to make sure the connection remains live, points continue accumulating, and device software stays fully updated for traffic priority.
5. Wallet Setup: Activate the in-app non-custodial wallet introduced in July 2026, or connect an external Solana wallet, to become eligible for reward claims.
6. Reward Claims: Claim USDC payouts or token allocations during official distribution windows. Stage 2 claims remain open until January 22, 2027.

Grass Points

Grass Points quantify each contributor's value to the network and underpin reward calculations. Two categories separate simple availability from actual usage, while recent stages also incorporate hardware performance metrics.

1. Uptime Points

Uptime Points accumulate for every hour a device remains connected. They reward the standing availability Grass relies on to offer continuous global coverage to data buyers. These points form the foundation of the incentive system and are the only input used for tier progression across epochs.

Several mechanisms let contributors multiply their uptime earnings over time:

• Direct Referrals: Referrers receive a 20 percent commission on invited users' uptime, with the benefit compounding as new participants build longer connection histories.
• Extended Network: Secondary and tertiary bonuses move upward through the referral tree, allowing early community builders to benefit as their invitees recruit more contributors.
• Milestone Rewards: The first 100 hours of connected time unlock a one-time 5,000 point bonus, accelerating early movement through lower tiers.
• Consistency Boosts: Platform-specific uptime multipliers reward sustained daily connections, favoring users who keep devices online over those who connect only in short, irregular bursts.

2. Network Points

Network Points measure bandwidth actually consumed by paying jobs rather than simple availability. A fixed daily pool of 1,000,000 points is divided among contributors according to each node's share of validated traffic, directly linking this category to commercial demand.

Your daily allocation depends on several factors the network weighs continuously:

• Regional Demand: Buyers need access from particular countries at particular times, so nodes in high-demand geographies receive disproportionately larger shares of routed traffic.
• Connection Stability: Scheduling favors nodes that rarely disconnect because dropped sessions create retries, waste buyer budgets, and delay dataset delivery.
• Residential Access: Genuine home connections receive priority, while VPNs and datacenter addresses are increasingly deprioritized by the network's filtering systems.
• Software Currency: Updated clients are prioritized because older versions lack the latest security patches and performance improvements expected by the network.
• Device Type: Android nodes have historically generated the highest earnings, followed by desktop applications. Browser extensions have trailed both in average returns.
• Usage History: Allocation algorithms distribute requests across proven connections to preserve reliability while continuing to favor nodes with strong prior performance.

Tiers and Epochs

Grass tracks progress through epochs, which are discrete windows used to reset leaderboards and organize reward calculations. Tier placement within an epoch depends only on Uptime Points. Referral commissions and Network Points can affect payouts, but they do not move a contributor up the ranking ladder faster.

The July 2026 holder call showed how concentrated real network usage had become. Roughly 150,000 nodes handled about 90 percent of Stage 2 traffic because the scheduler favors stable connections, updated software, and locations with strong demand. Improving those variables matters much more than simply maximizing connected hours.

Grass Network Statistics and Trends

Three years after launch, Grass combines accelerating business fundamentals with a token that remains far below its former highs. The figures below come from CoinGecko, Tokenomist, and official Grass Foundation disclosures.

Key metrics as of mid-September 2026:

• Token price: GRASS trades near $0.33, with a market capitalization of around $222 million and a ranking of roughly #164 among cryptocurrencies. Approximately 680 million tokens are circulating.
• Drawdown: Despite roughly doubling from its February 2026 bottom, the token remains about 92 percent below its November 2024 all-time high of $3.89.
• Cycle low: GRASS reached an all-time low near $0.167 on February 6, 2026. An 83 percent seven-day rally then began its recovery into March.
• Exchange access: Coinbase launched GRASS-USD spot trading on August 26, 2026, five days after adding the asset to its roadmap. Confirmation lifted the price by around 11 percent.
• Revenue growth: Network revenue totaled $17 million in 2025 and matched that full-year amount during H1 2026 alone. Full-year guidance is $65-75 million.
• Profitability: Grass says it operates profitably with $2-3 million in monthly costs, after compute and storage purchases in 2025 reduced expenses by more than $1 million per month.
• Network scale: Roughly 8.5 million monthly active nodes provide bandwidth across around 190 countries, placing Grass among the largest consumer DePIN deployments.
• Supply overhang: Early investors hold 25.2 percent of supply and fully vest by late October 2026. About 65 percent of the 1 billion total supply is already circulating.

GRASS Tokenomics

The GRASS token is the network's native utility and governance asset. It is deployed on Solana under the contract address Grass7B4RdKfBCjTKgSqnXkqjwiGvQyFbuSCUJr3XXjs and has a fixed maximum supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens that will never inflate.

Its role now extends beyond payments and voting into direct cash flow. On July 7, 2026, a governance vote approved directing a share of the network's USDC revenue to GRASS stakers.

Token Utility and Governance

GRASS serves as the settlement and coordination layer for the network's commercial activity and community decisions. Holders participate through several primary channels:

• Transaction Payments: GRASS settles web scraping jobs, structured dataset purchases, and Live Context Retrieval queries. High-frequency LCR usage is particularly well suited to onchain micropayments.
• Revenue Sharing: Under the July 2026 governance vote, stakers gain claims on part of the USDC revenue produced by bandwidth and data sales.
• Protocol Governance: Holders can propose and vote on upgrades, partnerships, and incentive structures while influencing the foundation treasury and the network's decentralization roadmap.
• Staking Security: Tokens delegated to routers reinforce infrastructure accountability and earn continuous rewards linked to the traffic those routers successfully relay.

Supply Allocation

The distribution divides the fixed 1 billion token supply among four groups, balancing early backers with the community operating the physical network. The allocation is:

• Community (30%): Includes 170,000,000 tokens for future incentive seasons, 100,000,000 distributed through Airdrop One, and 30,000,000 set aside for router operator rewards.
• Early Investors (25.2%): These tokens follow a one-year cliff and one-year linear vesting schedule, with full vesting concluding around late October 2026.
• Foundation & Ecosystem (22.8%): Supports operations, research, partnerships, and DAO-directed grants, funding development without a separate equity structure competing for value.
• Core Contributors (22%): Reserved for current and future team members under a one-year cliff followed by three-year vesting, maintaining team alignment well into 2028.

Airdrop One

Airdrop One distributed 100,000,000 tokens, equal to 10 percent of total supply, to early adopters who helped bootstrap the network map before commercialization. Eligibility was divided among three contribution tiers:

• Network Snapshot (9%): Covered users who accumulated more than 500 Grass Points during the early growth period included in the eligibility snapshot.
• GigaBuds Holders (0.5%): Assigned 515 tokens per qualifying NFT to holders whose assets were unlisted at the time of the snapshot.
• Bonus Channels (0.5%): Rewarded Desktop Node and Saga application users who exceeded the same 500 point threshold through those specific clients.

Claims closed in early 2025. Even so, the event established a model for compensating individual operators, ranked among the widest distributions in Solana history, and directly influenced the design of later reward stages.

Stage 2 Rewards and Season 2 Outlook

Stage 2 changed the reward structure substantially. Participant allocations were paid entirely in USDC funded by network revenue rather than through token emissions, so circulating GRASS supply was unaffected. Claims opened through the new in-app wallet on July 22, 2026 and remain available until January 22, 2027.

Community analysts also expect a larger Season 2 token distribution later in 2026, potentially drawing from the 170 million community reserve, although eligibility rules have not been confirmed. Follow verified announcements before taking action. Unofficial claim sites regularly imitate major crypto airdrops in attempts to drain wallets.

Staking and Network Security

Staking allows token holders to delegate GRASS to specific routers. Delegators share in rewards generated by those relays while collectively helping police infrastructure quality. The main mechanics are:

• Delegation Weighting: Routers with more stake receive additional traffic requests, increasing earnings for both the operator and the delegators supporting that relay.
• Continuous Payouts: Rewards stream every second instead of arriving in periodic batches, giving delegators immediate visibility into router performance.
• Unstaking Window: There is no minimum lockup, although withdrawals require a seven-day unstaking period before delegated tokens return to a wallet.
• Slashing Exposure: Malicious behavior or misreported traffic can destroy part of a router's stake, with enforcement gradually shifting from manual review toward autonomous triggers.

Network Economy and Fees

The token economy ultimately compensates every stakeholder. Enterprise buyers can pay in USD or USDC, while the network converts that revenue internally and distributes it pro-rata among participants who supplied the bandwidth, routing, and verification behind each completed job.

Blockchain settlement remains essential to this model for three reasons:

1. Global Efficiency: Onchain payments settle instantly across more than 190 countries without banking intermediaries that would otherwise exclude most contributors.
2. Verifiable Transparency: Public proofs show that rewards correspond to contributed resources and allow AI buyers to verify the provenance of purchased datasets independently.
3. Genuine Ownership: Participants retain transferable claims on the value they create rather than providing bandwidth to applications that resell it without transparency.

Security and Slashing

Staked GRASS serves as collateral to keep router operators accountable. Relays must handle bandwidth traffic correctly and report consumed resources accurately on every transaction. Delegators can compare performance data with validator records and move their stake away when an operator's reporting no longer matches.

At present, malicious behavior must be slashed manually by the foundation, a pragmatic compromise during the network's early decentralization phase. The roadmap calls for autonomous enforcement instead. Under that model, protocol rules would automatically destroy offending stake once the validator committee is sufficiently distributed to resolve disputes without trusted intervention.

Grass and the AI Data Economy

Grass has moved beyond selling raw bandwidth and now operates across the AI data supply chain, including training corpora, multimodal datasets, and live retrieval. That development reflects the broader convergence of AI crypto projects with enterprise machine learning demand.

Live Context Retrieval (LCR)

Live Context Retrieval expands Grass beyond one-time training datasets into inference by fetching current web pages when an AI application requests them. Models constrained by a knowledge cutoff can use the network to verify prices, track breaking events, or compare recently updated products in real time.

The product started as a search results API trialed with three SEO firms and an AI lab, and the first public LCR launches were confirmed for summer 2026. Because each query corresponds to a small payment, LCR is better suited to onchain micropayments than bulk dataset contracts.

Multimodal Data and Open Models

The May 2025 Sion upgrade expanded network processing across text, images, and video, positioning Grass for the multimodal race shaping frontier AI budgets. Its repository reportedly includes more than a billion publicly available videos, making it one of the largest real-world collections assembled outside major technology platforms.

Products have already been built from that catalog. ClipTagger-12b, a video annotation model developed with Inference.net, was trained on curated frames sourced from Grass data. It outperforms leading closed models on captioning benchmarks while costing roughly 17 times less per generation, and its open weights are available to researchers.

Grass Founders

Grass was founded in 2023 by Andrej Radonjic, Connor White, and Chris Gordon. Radonjic serves as CEO of core developer Wynd Labs. He brought a background in applied mathematics and physics to the network's architecture and remains its most visible public representative.

Wynd Labs now works solely as a contracted service provider responsible for engineering and business development. Intellectual property, customer contracts, and revenue accrue directly to the network instead. The founders also extended their token lockup through February 2026, signaling long-term alignment with the ecosystem they built.

Risks and Considerations

Points and payouts can accumulate steadily, but contributing bandwidth and uptime or committing capital to a young protocol still involves technical, financial, and regulatory tradeoffs that deserve careful consideration.

Keep the following considerations in mind before and during your participation:

• Market Volatility: GRASS is still highly volatile and trades about 92 percent below its 2024 peak. Reward value can therefore change substantially between the time it is earned and sold.
• Unlock Pressure: The early investor allocation completes vesting in late October 2026, while a possible Season 2 distribution could introduce additional supply into relatively thin liquidity.
• Reward Concentration: About 150,000 nodes received roughly 90 percent of Stage 2 traffic, so casual contributors in regions with low demand may earn very little.
• Token Demand Tension: Paying rewards in USDC makes participant compensation more stable but removes a source of direct buy pressure that had previously supported the native token.
• Centralization Concerns: One entity still operates validation and the core code remains closed-source, making decentralization commitments dependent on future roadmap execution.
• IP Reputation: External requests routed through a home address may occasionally trigger captchas or security flags on websites monitoring unusual traffic.
• Regulatory Shifts: Changing rules governing web scraping, data collection, and bandwidth resale may limit protocol operations in certain jurisdictions over time.
• Hardware Demands: Maximizing uptime requires devices to remain continuously powered and connected. Added energy costs and gradual hardware wear may outweigh modest rewards.
• Smart Contract Bugs: As with any young protocol, vulnerabilities in smart contracts or application code could disrupt staking, claims, or point accrual.
• Lockup Friction: A seven-day unstaking period blocks immediate exits and leaves delegated capital exposed during sharp market declines or negative news cycles.

Final Thoughts

Grass enters late 2026 with something uncommon in DePIN: a profitable business with repeat enterprise customers and revenue guidance beyond what most competitors can approach. Live Context Retrieval could move the network beyond its role as a dataset vendor and turn it into standing infrastructure queried continuously by live AI systems.

The remaining questions center more on distribution than commercial demand. Validator decentralization still has to ship, stakers need to receive the revenue governance promised, and rewards must prove they can reach beyond the most optimized nodes. See how Grass compares with the broader sector in our best DePIN projects roundup.