Grass Network Launch: Airdrop One

Article October 21, 2024

The internet belongs to everyone. Grass is a decentralized movement uniting millions worldwide to take back collective control of the web. The first airdrop will be one of the most widely distributed airdrops in history and represents a crucial step toward building the first user-owned map of the Internet.

What the Token Enables

The Grass token (GRASS) is a foundational element of a decentralized network that empowers users to take back control of their Internet bandwidth and to access and contribute to the functionality of the Grass network.

GRASS will enable holders to engage with the Grass network as follows

• Network Governance: Participate in the development of the Grass network, including proposing and voting on network improvements, aligning on which organizations to work with, and determining incentive mechanisms for all stakeholders.

• Staking and Rewards: Stake GRASS to Routers to facilitate web traffic flowing through the network and earn rewards for contributing to the security of the network.

• Access to Bandwidth: After decentralization, GRASS will be used to pay for transactions on the network, enabling decentralized scraping of public web data.

Why a Distributed System is Necessary

There are three equally important reasons for which Grass needs to operate on a blockchain.

1. Transactional Efficiency: Global settlement in over 190 countries is both easier and better on-chain than it is off-chain.

2. Transparency: Proofs of each transaction being posted on-chain provides empirical evidence that rewards are being equitably distributed. It also provides transparency with respect to the verification of data provenance.

3. User Ownership: Users can and should own their contributions, otherwise they'll continue to be at the mercy of large tech companies who do not have their best interests in mind.

Airdrop One Distribution

Airdrop One allocates 100,000,000 GRASS (10% of total supply) to early node runners and community members as follows:

• 9% to users who earned Grass Points during Stage 1 (the Network Snapshot),

• 0.5% to GigaBuds NFT holders, and

• 0.5% to users who installed the Desktop Node or the Saga Application.

The Network Snapshot includes all users who earned more than 500 Grass Points in a given epoch.

You can check your eligibility and see your final allocation here: grassfoundation.io

Allocations for each epoch are divided into nine tiers. Tiers are determined based on Grass Points earned from network uptime and referrals, with higher Grass Points placing participants in higher tiers.

Every eligible user will be rewarded for their Grass Points, however, the method and timing will differ based on your jurisdiction.

A total of 4,996,015 tokens are distributed equally among all GigaBuds NFTs as of the snapshot block, excluding any NFTs that were listed at the time of the snapshot. Eligible wallets will receive 515 GRASS per GigaBud NFT.

In order to reward the adoption of new Grass distribution channels, 5,000,000 GRASS are distributed equally among all accounts that have installed the Desktop Node or Saga Application and earned 500 or more Grass Points in a given epoch prior to October 11, 2024 at 05:00 UTC.

Live Context Retrieval (LCR)

Motivated by the opportunity to create better search, LCR will help LLMs retrieve accurate and up-to-date knowledge from the web to provide Internet users with a better search experience.

The issue with the current web indices, which serve as the backbone for AI search, is that they're heavily influenced by Search Engine Optimization. This reliance on advertising-driven monetization benefits intermediaries at the cost of search result quality.

Live Context Retrieval will be the only neutral way to connect any model to the internet, from which all the value will accrue directly to the Grass Network, and by extension, users.

Router Infrastructure & Staking

Routers are geographical hubs that connect all nodes within a certain region to validators on the network. Routers reduce the latency of web requests and add infrastructure redundancy to ensure the network is always operational. GRASS can be delegated to routers on the network to support in securing web traffic. At network launch, a minimum of 1,250,000 GRASS must be staked for routers to become operational.

Network Integrity

To ensure fairness and prevent network abuse, Grass has implemented a robust system to identify network abusers. Users were filtered based on multiple techniques, including Graph ML to identify suspicious referral trees, device fingerprints, similar IP subnetworks, and more.

These measures ensure that only legitimate participants are included in the airdrop, safeguarding the integrity of the GRASS airdrop.

Grass exists in order to return control of the internet back to where it belongs: with users.

Thank you to the many community members who have been supporting one another, spreading the word, and most importantly, touching Grass.

It's never too late to join the AI revolution by touching Grass!

Join the Grass Army!