Grass Network: How to Earn Income by Sharing Internet Resources?

Written by Ebunker

The positioning and usage scenarios of Grass

Grass is a project deployed on Solana on-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, utilizing 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 users to directly benefit from the network and ensuring that the value of the internet is in the hands of the 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 protocols to handle all transactions from data sources to processing, verification, and building data sets. The network is built around validators (issuing data collection instructions), routers (managing web request distribution), and Grass Nodes (used by users to contribute their idle network resources). The specific architecture is as follows:

Validator: Receives, validates, and routes web transactions in batches through a router. Then, generates a ZK proof to verify the on-chain session data. On-chain proofs can be referenced in datasets to verify the data source and trace its lineage throughout the entire lifecycle. The validator set will transition from the initial centralization framework of a single validator to a decentralized validator committee.

Router: Connects the Grass Node to the validator. The Router ensures the traceability of the Node network and relays bandwidth. Grass is incentivized to operate based on the proportional total validation bandwidth provided through the Relay. The Router is responsible for reporting the following metrics to the validators in the network: size (in bytes) of each incoming and outgoing request; latency of each Node and validator; network status of each connected Node.

Grass Node Node: Using the unused bandwidth and Relay traffic of users, so that the network can fetch public web data (rather than personal data of users). Running a Node is free, and the person running the Node (Node operator) is rewarded for the data passed through their Relay.

ZK Processor: a validity proof that batch processes session data for all web requests and submits the proof to the L1 blockchain. This operation permanently records every fetching behavior performed 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 captured 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, serving as a data repository to ensure the source of the data.

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

Technical features

In the above architecture, the Grass network is located between the client and the web server. The client sends web requests, which are then sent through validators and ultimately 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 fetched and sent back to the line. It will then be cleaned, processed, and prepared for training the next generation of AI models.

This process requires an understanding of two main additional features: Grass data ledger and ZK processor.

The data ledger of Grass is the ultimate storage place for all data, it is the permanent ledger of each dataset captured by Grass, embedding Metadata to record its original lineage from the origin moment. The Metadata proof of each dataset will be stored on the Settlement layer of Solana, 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 (i.e., a user who has installed the Grass extension) on the network sends a web request to a given website, it returns an encryption response that includes all the data requested by the node. This is the moment when the data set is born, the moment when the origin to be recorded, and also the moment when the metadata is recorded. It contains many fields, such as session secret key, the URL of the captured website, the IP address of the target website, transaction timestamp, and of course the data itself. Thanks to this necessary information and the clear data set of website sources, the AI model can be trained correctly and faithfully.

ZK processors can prevent data that needs on-chain Settlement from being 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 a level where tens of millions of web requests are processed per minute, and the Metadata of each request will require on-chain Settlement. Without ZK processors providing proof and batching first, these transactions cannot be submitted to L1. Therefore, Rollup is the only possible way to achieve the planned goals.

In addition to recording 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 the network, it can be rewarded for its contributions without revealing any identity information. This allows Grass to reward Nodes in proportion, with Nodes that fetch more valuable and valuable data receiving more incentives. This mechanism will significantly increase rewards in the world’s most popular regions, ultimately encouraging people in these regions to register and increase network capacity. The larger the network scale, the larger the capacity Grass can fetch and the larger the stored network data repository. The more data means that Grass can provide more data to AI labs that need training data, thereby incentivizing the network to continue to rise.

Grass Node operation and security mechanism

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

Grass Node has two main purposes: to route the traffic (i.e. web requests) initiated by the clients and instructed by the validators; to return the encrypted web server responses to the specified routers.

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

After the 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 Grass Node 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 relevant parties. 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 prevents data tampering and ensures that validators can accurately measure the reputation of each Node.

Node reputation score 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 use cases.

Consistency: Check the consistency of different datasets or the data within the same dataset over time.

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

Availability: Assess the data availability of each Node.

In terms of security mechanism, the Grass network does not use user Node (i.e. computer) or view any operations performed by the user on the computer. It only routes internet traffic through the user’s IP Address, completely unrelated to the user’s activities. 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 the internet connection. Grass also collaborates with leading network security compliance audit company AppEsteem to monitor Grass products 24 hours a day for vulnerabilities, leaks, backdoors, and malware to ensure user security. AppEsteem certification enjoys a high reputation in the cybersecurity 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.

Function of Grass token

The holder of the 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 capture, data set purchase, and LCR (real-time contextual retrieval) usage.

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

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

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

Router stake and earnings

The Router acts as a decentralized hub, connecting all network Nodes and managing the incoming and outgoing web requests of validators. The Router operates on an incentive system, with rewards proportional to the staking amount delegated to each router. All traffic relayed through the Router is encrypted and metered to ensure security and performance.

Currently, the stake amounts of each Router are as shown in the figure above. Users can stake Grass to represent earnings on the Router, and each Router has a different commission.

Currently, the Grass stake amount of DBunker is about 1.43 million, with a minimum stake period of 7 days and a commission of 10%. (Data source STAKE can be connected to Wallet for staking Grass and obtaining Router stake income.

Summary

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

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