Grass Network: A Decentralized Data Collection Platform Based on Solana

Grass is a decentralized network scraping platform deployed on the Solana chain, aiming to provide data support for AI training by utilizing idle internet bandwidth. The project combines AI, Depin, and Solana technology, positioning itself as the data layer for AI.

Grass achieves web scraping through a browser extension application, utilizing unused personal internet bandwidth and rewarding users with Grass Points. Currently, the network has over 2 million user nodes running, having scraped a large amount of data for AI models.

Technical Architecture

Grass has built a dedicated sovereign data Rollup network on Solana, used for handling all transactions from data sources to processing, verifying, and building datasets. The network mainly consists of the following components:

• Validator: Receives, verifies, and batches the router's Web transactions, generating ZK proofs to validate on-chain session data.

• Router: Connects Grass nodes and validators, maintains network traceability and relays bandwidth.

• Grass Node: Utilizes users' idle bandwidth to relay traffic for fetching public web data.

• ZK Processor: Validity proof of batch processing web request session data, submitted to the L1 blockchain.

• Grass data ledger: stores the fetched data and links it to the corresponding chain for proof.

• Edge embedding model: Converts unstructured Web data into structured data that meets AI model requirements.

Technical Features

The Grass network is situated between the client and the web server, with the client's web requests sent through validators and ultimately routed by Grass nodes. The data from the server response is cleaned and processed for training AI models.

Grass data ledger serves as permanent storage, recording the complete lineage of each dataset. The ZK processor helps to record the source of the dataset, including session keys, URLs, IP addresses, timestamps, and other metadata.

The use of ZK processors enables large-scale Web request data to be efficiently settled on-chain without exceeding the capacity of L1. At the same time, it can also record which nodes the data is routed through, thereby rewarding nodes based on their contribution ratio.

Node Operation and Security Mechanism

Running a Grass node is free, and node operators can earn network traffic rewards based on their reputation score and geographical demand. Nodes are mainly used to relay Web request traffic and return encrypted server responses to routers.

Node reputation scores include aspects such as integrity, consistency, timeliness, and availability. In terms of security, Grass only routes traffic through user IPs and does not access any personal data. The network also employs bandwidth encryption and collaborates with AppEsteem for 24-hour security monitoring.

Grass Token Features

Grass token holders can participate in the network in the following ways:

• Trading and Repurchase: Supports web scraping transactions, data set purchases, etc.
• Staking and Rewards: Stake to the router for rewards
• Network Governance: Participate in proposals and voting, etc.

Currently, the annualized yield for Grass staking is about 45%, with approximately 33% of the tokens participating in staking, totaling over 26 million.

Router Staking

Users can stake Grass on the Router to earn rewards, and the commission varies between different Routers. Currently, the staking amount on DBunker is approximately 1.43 million, with a minimum staking period of 7 days and a commission of 10%.

Summary

Grass is dedicated to building a fair and open Decentralization data layer, addressing ethical and quality issues in data extraction through an innovative technological architecture. It focuses on data in the intersection of cryptocurrency and AI, providing raw decentralized data sources for AI companies and protocols, with promising development prospects.