Touching Grass

As of November 2023, Grass has seen 103K individual downloads and nearly 1.5M unique residential IPs during their closed beta stage. Their adoption numbers are relatively strong, given that thus far, they've mostly appealed to and attracted crypto-native participants through referral codes and by teasing a future airdrop. 

As a consumer-facing application, Grass has an easy-to-use implementation and potential for a very strong narrative. Despite their main focus being crypto-native users at the moment, Grass has started to attract non-crypto-native retail users by offering passive income for a resource that users were not aware they had access to. In addition to offering passive income, Grass also allows users to potentially access revenue from open-source AI development. The necessity for data and bandwidth for LLM development is likely to continue to grow over the next few years, and depending on the adoption of open-source AI, it could potentially lead to Grass users generating meaningful income. Abstracting away the signup process and offering mobile access (both of which are on Grass' roadmap) will be key to growing their adoption across non-crypto native participants.

In addition to the potential for a strong narrative, Grass also has well-developed tokenomics relative to other consumer apps we've seen in the past. Other popular consumer-facing applications, such as Sweatcoin and STEPN, had inflationary tokens with limited utility and constant sell pressure. This eventually led to a lack of usage and adoption. There was little demand for these tokens in the long run, as they had little utility, while the supply of tokens increased drastically due to emissions, meaning that tokens were worth less and it was no longer profitable or worth it for users to use the applications.

Grass' approach to compensation will be in the form of a buyback and redistribute mechanism instead of hyper-inflationary emissions. Only tokens from the circulating supply will be redistributed amongst nodes, as opposed to emitting new tokens. In addition, the Grass token will have significantly more utility than token models used by other consumer applications, as routers will have to stake the token to earn revenue off consistent and correct routing and responses.

Despite a strong narrative and good tokenomics, Grass has some potential issues. One major issue is who has access to users' bandwidth. According to Grass, Wynd Network monitors buyer activity and can ban activity deemed illegal (such as copyright infringement and logging). Additionally, per the stipulations of the contracts with buyers, buyers assume full liability for what they do on accessed bandwidth. Despite Wynd's monitoring and buyer liability, it would be beneficial for users to see firms that access their bandwidth, ideally on a consistent basis, or at least be able to see a list of vetted buyers. It's important to note that it's likely that the names of vetted buyers and firms are not provided due to NDA clauses.