Grass: Crowdsourced Data for AI - Blockworks Research

Grass: Crowdsourced Data for AI - Blockworks Research

Research January 21, 2025

Grass is a decentralized web scraping and data provisioning protocol, currently processing hundreds of TB of data daily to power the next generation of AI models. Here's why this matters for the future of AI and web3.

The current web scraping landscape is dominated by centralized players who often exploit user devices without compensation. This creates a centralized market where smaller AI companies struggle to access the data needed to compete with tech giants.

Enter Grass

A decentralized network of 2.8M nodes across 190 countries that democratizes web data access. Node operators earn $GRASS tokens for contributing bandwidth, creating a transparent and fair data marketplace.

Grass: Crowdsourced Data for AI - Blockworks Research The network's recent Scion upgrade led to a 3x increase in daily data processing capacity, processing nearly 400TB at peak usage. Grass has already indexed over 3B videos - for context, NVIDIA trained their latest video model on just 200M videos.

Grass: Crowdsourced Data for AI - Blockworks Research AI training

The AI training data market is projected to reach $10B by 2029, growing at 27.7% annually per Yahoo Finance. Recent deals show the value: OpenAI/News Corp ($50M/yr), Reddit's data partnerships ($66M/yr), and Apple/Shutterstock ($25-50M/yr).

LCR

Live Context Retrieval (LCR) is crucial - even advanced AI models like GPT-4 can lag months behind current events. Grass's infrastructure enables real-time data access, helping AI models stay up-to-date without lengthy retraining.

Beyond data access, Grass solves the critical challenge of data provenance. Grass's settlement layer creates an auditable "data trail" - essential for preventing AI model poisoning and ensuring training data authenticity.

Grass: Crowdsourced Data for AI - Blockworks Research Key catalysts ahead

• Launching semantic multimodal search across their video index
• Scion upgrade
• Vertical integration of AI development tooling

Grass is positioning to be a cornerstone of decentralized AI infrastructure.

To learn more about Grass's tokenomics, valuation, and revenue please subscribe to read the full report by our analyst @_dshap.