Grass Network: How to Profit from Sharing Internet Resources?

The positioning and usage scenarios of Grass

Grass is a project deployed on the Solana chain, combining AI, Depin, and Solana technologies, positioning itself as the Data Layer for AI. It is a Decentralization network crawling platform designed to help companies and non-profit organizations train artificial intelligence (AI) by utilizing unused internet bandwidth. It achieves web crawling through a browser extension application, leveraging individuals’ unused internet bandwidth, and rewarding users with Grass Points. Grass aims to redefine the internet incentive structure by allowing users to share unused internet bandwidth resources, enabling them to directly benefit from the network and ensuring that the value of the internet is in the hands of users. Currently, the network has over 2 million users running Nodes, capturing a large amount of data for AI models.

Technical Architecture

Grass sovereign data Rollup is a network built by Grass specifically on Solana, which enables protocol to handle all transactions from data sourcing to processing, validation, and building data sets. The network is built around validators (issuing data collection instructions), routers (managing web request distribution), and GrassNodeNode (used by users to contribute their idle network resources). The specific architecture is as follows:

Validator: Receive, validate, and route web transactions in batches. Then, generate ZK proofs to verify on-chain session data. On-chain proofs can be referenced in the dataset to verify the data source and track its lineage throughout the entire lifecycle. The validator set will transition from the initial centralized framework of a single validator to a Decentralization validator committee.

Router: Connects GrassNode to the validator. The router keeps the Node network traceable and relays bandwidth. Grass incentivizes its operation based on the total verification bandwidth provided through the relay. The router is responsible for reporting the following metrics to the validators in the network: the size of each incoming and outgoing request (in bytes); the latency of each Node and the latency of the validator; the network status of each connected Node.

GrassNodeNode: Utilizing users’ unused bandwidth and Relay traffic so that the network can crawl public Web data (not users’ personal data). Running a Node is free, and the person running the Node (Node operator) is rewarded through the data passed through their Relay.

ZK Processor ZK Processor: validity proof for batch processing session data for all web requests, and submitting the proof to the L1 blockchain. This operation will permanently record every fetch behavior executed on the network. It also lays the foundation for a comprehensive understanding of the source of AI training data.

Grass Data Ledger: This is the link between the fetched data and the L1 settlement layer. The ledger is an immutable data structure that hosts the complete dataset and links the data to its corresponding on-chain proof, ensuring the data source’s data repository.

Edge Embedding Models: This is the process of converting unstructured web data into structured models. This includes all necessary preprocessing steps to ensure that the collected raw data is cleaned, standardized, and structured, conforming to the requirements of AI models.

Technical Features

In the above architecture, the Grass network is between the client and the web server. The client sends web requests, which are sent through validators and finally routed through the Grass Node. Regardless of which website the client requests, its server will respond to the web request, allowing its data to be crawled and sent back to the route. Then, it will be cleaned, processed, and prepared for training the next generation AI model.

This process requires understanding two main additional features: Grass Data Ledger and ZK Processor.

The Grass data ledger is where all data is ultimately stored. It is a permanent ledger of each dataset captured by Grass, embedded with metadata, recording its earliest lineage from the moment of origin. The metadata proof for each dataset will be stored on Solana’s Settlement layer, and the Settlement data itself is also provided through the ledger.

The purpose of the ZK processor is to help record the source of the data set captured on the Grass network. The process is as follows: when a Node on the network (i.e., a user with the Grass extension installed) sends a web request to a given website, it returns an encryption response, including all the data requested by the Node. This is the moment when the data set is born, the moment of origin that needs to be recorded, and also the moment to record the Metadata. It contains many fields, such as the session Secret Key, the URL of the captured website, the IPAddress of the target website, the transaction Timestamp, and of course the data itself. Thanks to these necessary information and the clear data set from the website source, the AI model can receive correct and faithful training.

The ZK processor allows data that needs to be settled on-chain not to be seen by Solana validators. In addition, a large number of web requests to be executed on Grass in the future will exceed the throughput that L1 can handle. Grass will soon scale to the level of executing tens of millions of web requests per minute, and the metadata for each request needs to be settled on-chain. Without the ZK processor providing proof and batching, it would not be possible to submit these transactions to L1. Therefore, Rollup is the only possible way to achieve the planned goals.

In addition to indicating the source website of the dataset, Metadata also indicates through which Node on the network it is routed. This means that whenever a Node fetches from the network, it can receive rewards for its contributions without revealing any identity information. This enables Grass to proportionally reward Nodes, where Nodes that fetch more and more valuable data will receive more incentives. This mechanism will significantly increase rewards in the world’s most popular regions, ultimately encouraging people in these areas to register and increase network capacity. The larger the network size, the larger the capacity Grass can fetch, and the larger the network data repository stored. More data means Grass can provide more data to AI labs in need of training data, thereby incentivizing the network to continue to rise.

GrassNode operation and security mechanisms

GrassNode operation is free and acts as a gateway to the Internet. Node operators (i.e., application users) will be rewarded for the traffic through their NodeRelay and will receive network traffic based on their reputation score and geographic demand.

GrassNode has two main uses: passing traffic initiated by the client and indicated by the validator (i.e., web requests); returning encrypted web server responses to the specified router.

The supported systems of Node are shown in the figure above, and the process of running Node is also very simple: create an account, download the Grass desktop application, and connect to the network.

After connection, the Node will automatically register on the network. The operator is responsible for maintaining the normal operation time of the network, so that the Node can forward network requests to public network servers. Every request sent to the GrassNode is an encryption data packet. The data packet only provides direction to the Node at the destination of each data packet. Network requests are authenticated by Digital Signatures from all parties involved. These signatures will verify the legitimacy of the request and determine whether it should be forwarded to the target network server (i.e., public website). This encryption process can prevent data tampering and ensure that validators can accurately measure the reputation of each Node.

The reputation score of the Node mainly includes the following points:

Integrity: Assess whether the data is complete and whether the data set contains all necessary data points required for the expected test cases.

Consistency: Check the consistency of different data sets or data within the same data set that changes over time.

Timeliness: measure whether the data is up-to-date when needed.

Availability: Assess the data availability of each Node.

In terms of security mechanisms, the Grass network does not use user Node (i.e. computer) or view any operations performed by the user on the computer. It simply routes internet traffic via the user’s IPAddress, completely unrelated to the user’s activity. This means that Grass has zero access to user’s personal data, and the captured data is 100% from public network data.

In addition, Grass uses bandwidth encryption to ensure that all users are protected when sharing an internet connection. Grass also collaborates with leading network security compliance audit company AppEsteem to monitor Grass products for vulnerabilities, leaks, backdoors, and malware 24/7 to ensure user security. AppEsteem certification is highly regarded in the network security industry, and obtaining this certification means that Grass products are also included in the allowlist of top anti-malware applications, including Avast, Microsoft Defender, McAfee, AVG, etc.

The function of Grass TOKEN

The holder of Grass token can participate in the Grass network in the following ways:

Trading and repurchase: After Decentralization, Grass will be used to support network transaction fetching, dataset purchase, and LCR (Live Context Retrieval) usage.

Stake and Rewards: Stake Grass to the router to promote network traffic and receive rewards for contributing to network security.

Network governance: participating in the development of the Grass network, including proposing and voting to support network improvements, coordinating which organizations to cooperate with, and determining incentive mechanisms for all stakeholders.

According to the Dune website, currently, the stakeAnnual Percentage Rate of Grass is around 45%, with approximately 33% of grass tokens participating in stake, and the stake amount exceeds 26 million.

Routerstake and income

The router serves as a decentralized hub, connecting all network Nodes and managing the incoming and outgoing web requests of validators. The Router operates on an incentive basis, with rewards proportional to the amount staked to each router. All traffic relayed through the Router undergoes encryption and measurement to ensure security and performance.

Currently, the stake amount of each Router is shown in the above figure. Users can stake Grass to represent obtaining profits on the Router, and the commission of each Router is different.

Currently, DBunker’s Grassstake amount is about 1.43 million, with a minimum stake period of 7 days and a commission of 10%. (Data source

Summary

Grass is committed to building a fair and open Decentralization Data Layer, aiming to address the ethical and data quality issues in current internet data extraction and oppose the data monopoly by a few large companies. In terms of technical architecture and features, Grass introduces a Metadata mechanism that records the sources of all data sets by building data Rollup. The ZK proofs of these data are stored on the L1 settlement layer, while the Metadata itself will eventually be bound to its underlying data sets as these data sets are stored on Grass’s data ledger. Therefore, ZK proofs lay the foundation for improving transparency and providing incentives for Node providers to receive rewards proportional to the workload they perform, which is also an important factor in incentivizing the expansion of the Grass network.

Grass focuses on the intersection of Crypto Assets and AI in the field of data. Unlike traditional participants in closed-source, centralized AI, it is the original source of Decentralization for AI data. As an important player in the web3 wave, Grass uses Decentralization technology to build a fair, open Data Layer for AI companies and protocols, with market demand as the entry point, promising prospects.